Cereal in your hair?

Learning the Swedish language has been one of the most fulfilling and rewarding aspects of living in a foreign country for me. It was an incredible thing when the pieces, or should I say the words, started coming together and all of a sudden I understood the people around me. Slowly but surely I could answer simple questions with one word and then I could even ask some. I am now at a level where I read, watch television and listen in on the conversations of the people around me without translating everything in my head. I am fluent by definition, but it is definitely one of those cases when the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. I still search for words that don't come to me, mix up past and present tense and sometimes I say ridiculous sentences without meaning to. I am proud of how far I have come but I still deal with the daily frustrations of trying to take it to the next level.

I have good Swedish days and I have bad ones; days when I stumble over every word and say crazy things and days when I can fool some people into thinking I am actually Swedish (okay, maybe not but I like to pretend I am that good). Lately, the difficult days have been more frequent and there never seems to be an end to the "funny things Cami says wrong in Swedish" anecdotes. All of my friends have them. I thought I'd share a few:

Yesterday was a bad Swedish day. I woke up and started calling some hair salons to try and make an appointment to get highlights. Most places were closed so when someone picked up, I was caught a bit off gaurd. This is exactly what I said in Swedish to her over the phone: "Hi, my name is Camille and I would like to make an appointment to get cereal in my hair." See, the word for highlights is slingor and the word for cereal (or corn flakes more accurately) is flingor. In the heat of the moment, and probably because I use the word cereal more often, I told the poor girl at the salon that I wanted cereal in my hair. Needless to say she was silent on the other end for a few moments before I realized what I had said. I laughed and corrected myself and successfully booked an appointment in the end, but not without embarrassing myself first.

Later on that evening, I was letting one of Klas' students into our apartment building because he was staying in the guest apartment for a few nights. (He lives in another city but comes to Stockholm to take lessons from Klas and needed a place to stay for some school thing he was involved in). Anyways, Klas is out of town and there is no room for him in our place so we offered up the super cheap apartment in our building that you can have guests stay in. I took him up to the room, made some small talk and then wanted to make sure he had everything he needed. I realized there were no sheets on the bed so in Swedish, I said to him, "Do you have everything you need? Do you have your swim suit?" The word for bedding is sängkläder (which literally translated to bed clothes) and the word for swim suit is badkläder (which literally translates to bath clothes). So you can see how a girl might get the two mixed up, but he looked at me like I was a crazy person. This is probably because it was below freezing outside and he was pretty sure we weren't going swimming any time soon. Once again, I tried to laugh it off and corrected myself so that he understood but I'm pretty sure he had a good laugh at my expense when I left the room.

As you can see, I have a long way to go with the whole, mastering the language thing. For now, I guess I will just have to laugh it off, accept that I am going to make mistakes and continue to entertain those around me with my attempts.