It was a cold and cloudy winter-day when we arrived in Sweden. At Stockholm Central, a student from Italy picked us up, showed us where we could buy the metro ticket and took us to our accommodation, where we slept the first two nights. After that, we could move to our student accommodation from KI-Housing. The way with our luggage in a bus filled with buggy chairs was not all too comfortable and the people weren’t really friendly, but finally we reached the housing complex which was to be our new home for the next three months.

In Vårberg, where I stayed, the rooms were big and there was also a huge kitchen and living room. The people there were very nice and I really enjoyed my time there. I will definitely not miss the dirty kitchen but all the wonderful people I met there.

At the weekends and some free days, I got during my stay in Stockholm, I used to explore Stockholm with some friends I had met there. We rent some city-bicycles, enjoyed just walking, made some shared dinners, visited many islands around Stockholm, made a trip by ferry to Helsinki and Riga and more.

During the last week, I had there after school was finished, I enjoyed to travel around Sweden. With my friend from the Czech Republic, I went to the Island “Grinda”, where we met another Swiss girl and two guys from Greece. After one night in her accommodation and a goodbye dinner for our Kenyan friends, we went to Goteborg, where we had a nice stay with Couchsurfing.

Later we got to the National park in Värnamo, where we walked 7 kilometers to our accommodation at night without electricity or any kind of light. It was so nice there.

Our next station was Kalmar where we could stay with a Chinese family and finally we made it to the Island Gotland by ferry, where we slept in a hostel before we returned to Stockholm.

Before the adventure could start, I had to apply for the exchange semester at my home University in Switzerland. After a longer time waiting for the answer and some discussions in between, because we were three people who applied for it and there were just two clinical placements, we could find a solution together and I finally got the permission to go.

Now I had to fill out some papers, apply for a KI-housing, book the flight and faster than I had expected the fourth of march came along and I was sitting in the airplane to Arlanda, together with another girl from my University.

The three months passed much too fast, it was a great time for me and I am so happy that I had the opportunity to go to Stockholm for one semester. I could make a lot of new experiences, gain new friends from different countries and got an insight into some new Cultures. I would recommend it to everyone and I already miss the time there.

The first two weeks we didn’t have classes.

We had time to work on an assignment and of course we used these “free” days to explore Stockholm and went on a ferry trip to Helsinki with some classmates. It was freezing cold there, but we had a very good time together and it was a great opportunity to get know each other. The deadline to finish our assignment wasn’t until the beginning of June, so there was no hurry. I planned and I finished it at the end of my internship. To make work on our assignment more fun than just duty, I used to meet with a friend who was living in another KI-Housing somewhere in the city and there in a restaurant we could work together in a really nice atmosphere.

After these two weeks, our internship for the next five weeks started. I had my internship in a hospital for brain injuries. To be honest, it was a bit boring for me because, compared to Switzerland, they had less clients a day, lots of coffee breaks and some meetings or group sessions in Swedish. But still, the clients were really interesting and most of them tried real hard to speak English, even if they suffered from aphasia and had to struggle no less with the Swedish language.

The time flew so fast and the international week at Karolinska had already started. For this week, there had arrived some other Swiss students and teachers from my home university and also from other countries like the Netherlands. The common language for the whole time at Karolinska was English. We had to prepare some presentations about our countries, had some lectures by teachers from the different cultures. For the closing session, we prepared a presentation about the health care system of one of our groups home country. In the evenings, we often did something together: Pizza evening with all Swiss people and some others in my accommodation, going out for a drink or, on our last evening, an international dinner, to which every country contributed some specialties. It really was a great week!

Then the “Community and Home-based rehabilitation course (CBR and HBR)” begun. Some lectures were very interesting and some a bit less, but in general, it was a good course. At the end of these four weeks, we had to write an assignment about a CBR or HBR project in our country and had to present during the last week.