Jun/093
This is… Me as a KID
This is me and Chrissyferrr … I must have been five-ish, which would have made Chris seven. Thankfully he doesn’t read my blog, and therefore will not be aware that I am sharing this picture with the world! Haha.
This is my Papa, me, and my baby brother Daniel 
.
I was seven or eight here? And really tan!
Barney! Wooo! This is me and my cousin Julia at one of my birthday parties.
Okay, I’m a little older here. This was my freshman year in high school. This is also me and my cousin Julia… but much older 
. If you couldn’t guess, I was Avril Lavigne! Lame, I know. But I was 14! That was a long, long time ago.
Jun/091
Disconnected
This whole week I have been disconnected from the present and have been living in the future. This is because on Monday, my contact person at Uppsala emailed me to let me know that I got into ALL of the courses I wanted at Uppsala.
And if you didn’t know this, I was relying on getting into all of these classes to graduate next June. If I hadn’t even gotten into just one class, I would have had to wait until the Fall 2010 semester to take it at CSU Stanislaus. And then I would be able to graduate.
So you can understand what a huge yet exciting relief it was to hear that awesome news! I officially will never, ever, ever step into a classroom at CSUS as a student again! When and if I go for my masters it will not be at CSUS, mostly because they don’t offer very many master degrees and the ones that they do don’t apply to me. So never going back is FOR REAL FOR REAL.
And THEN, on Tuesday, I recieved an email from the housing office at Uppsala, Akademihotellet, letting me know where I’ll be living next year.
I will be in building 9 on the first floor in Flogsta. From what I’ve been told, the first floor is actually the second floor. The ground floor is called zero. So whatever.
So basically what I want to know is if there is laundry in building 9, or will I have to commute to building 10. I don’t know why I care, honestly, but I have this desire to know everything about everything. And this desire spawns from the fact that I have nothing better to do with my time.
Since Monday-Tuesday-ish I have been living in future-Sweden la-la land. I’ve looked at building 9 multiple times on Google Earth. I’ve been obsessively talking to / connecting with other exchange students on Facebook; I’ve also been talking to my angel: Elaine. Elaine studied as an exchange student at Uppsala in 2007, and is now going back for her master’s at Uppsala. She is already there, actually, and has been answering all of my ridiculous questions. I love her, basically!
Some other things that I have done today alone include balancing my checkbook, which I haven’t done in a month. Then I sat down and calculated my monthly budget for while I’m abroad, and also calculated my limit for how much money I can spend while I’m still here in California.
I made a list of things (clothes, warm socks, cold medicine, etc.) that I need to buy before I leave. The clothes thing is pretty much just t-shirts – because I honestly own no shirts. I can’t even tell you when the last time I bought clothes was- and this is mostly because of my insane stingy-ness this whole year trying to save money. And I’ve always had a hard time spending money on clothes. It seems wasteful. But I’ve changed my mind on this because, well, I don’t want to wear the sames clothes ALL the time while I’m in Sweden. And I don’t want to have to do laundry every other day either. So yeah.
Yesterday I went to Kohl’s and got four shirts for way too much money. I almost died. I thought Kohl’s was supposed to be cheap?
I’m planning on buying clothes here and there before I leave. That way I’ll have some layering clothes and all I’ll have to buy in Sweden are like big, warm jackets and stuff like that, that you can’t buy here in hot California.
And my grandpa’s wife (not my grandma, and not the same grandpa that I house-sitted for several weeks ago) told me I could have my grandpa’s leather gloves. So I’m stoked about that. Leather? Leather gloves? Niiice.
And so yeah. That’s what I’ve been doing. All week. Is thinking about Sweden.
I also found out for sure for sure that I was approved for my residence permit. It’s all thanks to my mom, really, who called the Consulate in New York and flat out asked them when I would get it– because she is trying to plan a vacation to Mexico and I kind of need my passport to go there.
They couldn’t tell her exactly when I would get it, but they said that my info was in the computer and already approved, but that they hadn’t even gotten to the student visas, and wouldn’t for a while. But, if I need it, they can mail my passport back to me and then when I get back from my vacation I mail it back in to them. Haha, yeah, right. I would never do that.
Apparently why it is taking so long is because they do them in bunches. Permanent residence permits first, and then they move to student residence permits… etc. I don’t understand why if it is already approved they can’t just mail it to me… but I think it’s the process of getting the stamp in there with my picture I sent them and stuff. They approve them, and then they work on the stamping part. I think it may just be a sticker in my passport? I don’t know.
So that is what I have been up to this whole week.
Tomorrow we go pick up my cousin Carolyn, who lives in Arizona. She is visiting us for the next week, so hopefully I will get my mind off of Sweden and on to the present.
xoxo, Jessy
Jun/098
The Dentist
So I went to the dentist today… I know, very exciting, right?
No cavities, no nothing. My perfect teeth are still perfect (but maybe a little crooked, I don’t have teeth that are perfectly straight even though I did have braces… but I only did the first phase. Perfectly straight teeth are scary though! And slightly crooked teeth give character).
Now my dentist is interesting. One visit, several years ago, he spoke to me about how hot he finds Britney Spears. Most visits he’ll talk about something random. I think he became a dentist just so he could talk all day about himself.
When he walked into my room today, I casually asked him how his day was. And this led us to today’s interesting one-sided conversation. It’s one sided because I can’t talk when he’s cleaning my teeth.
He said his day was good, but that it was a very complex question. Before he starts scraping my teeth, I ask him how so?
He says right now work and home life are good, but if I would have asked him a month ago he would have said work life sucked.
Apparently dentists get hit hard by the economy too. I had no idea, but then I never thought about it either. Last month he only worked two out of five days a week!
He said that he wished he didn’t have to deal with money. If it weren’t for the factor of money, he would have a lot of business. People come in, he tells them what they need, they can’t afford it, and he doesn’t get to fill in their cavities, or give them a crown, or whatever.
This month, however, is doing better. Business is booming, he’s working five days a week. Things are good. But he wonders for how long?
This makes me wonder if other professions are getting hit hard by the economy. To be a dentist you have to go to school for a long time, and you would never think a dentist would be having money problems, but yet he is (he can’t even buy his 16-year-old daughter a car, business was so bad).
What about lawyers, or other kinds of doctors?
We all think about department stores and small businesses getting hit hard by the economy (like Circuit City, Gottschalks, Mervyn’s, and the awesome locally owned burrito place that used to be around the corner from my house), but we (or at least just myself) don’t even consider what the economy is doing to people who went to a lot of school, people who we assume are rich and are unaffected by the current state of things.
Jun/092
Residence Permit
Since I’ve arrived home, I’ve done two things:
1) Play the Sims 3
2) Stress over residence permit
While I’ve been playing a lot of the Sims 3, I’ve also been stressing over my residence permit. Let me explain to you what an idiot I am:
The Office of International Programs on my campus gave me a booklet (that they created) that has tons of information spanning from applying for a residence permit to housing to pretty much anything you can think of that pertains to Uppsala.
In the book, it says to mail your residence permit application to the LA consulate. But when I went on to the residence permit application online, it said to mail it to the NY consulate. I figured OIP had outdated information, but to be sure, my mom called the consulate. We couldn’t get through to to talk to anyone because it was all in Swedish. When we called the NY consulate, the automated service was in English. So we assumed, falsely, that the LA consulate was for Swedes who now lived in the US, and the NY consulate was more for American citizens wanting to go to Sweden.
So I mailed my residence permit application to NY. They received it last Monday.
On about Wednesday or so, some of my fellow IP students and I connected on Facebook. Several of them already turned in their applications to LA, and already got their residence permits! The turn around time was less than two weeks for them. And they turned their apps in to LA. LA!
I’m thinking my application will take a much longer time to process, because on the consulate’s website it SAYS to mail it to NY. So very few people probably mail theirs to LA, which is why the other IP students got their permits so quickly.
So basically I feel like an idiot.
I’m the type of person that always has to know everything about everything, and will do tons of research before actually doing something. This is the first time in my entire life when it backfired on me.
In any case, I called the consulate last Friday to make sure they actually received my application. UPS tracking said that they received it, but I wanted to be sure. When I called they couldn’t find my information in their computer system. The lady I spoke to told me that they enter information right away, so if they received it on Monday it should have definitely been inputted by Friday. She took down my information and said she would call me back.
Now seeing as she is Swedish, I figured she would get back to me promptly. Everyone seems to think that Swedes are very orderly and on time and stuff like that. Well she never got back to me. All weekend I stressed about this: I would have to apply for another passport, and possibly pay for it; I would have to wait for that to come in the mail; I would have to mail in another residence permit application… and who knows how long all of this would take?
So I called back today and the same lady answered. As soon as I started spelling my name she recognized me and told me that when they entered my information they put a space in my name. Traditionally, yes, there is a space in my last name (La Mantia). But the American way of spelling it omits the space (LaMantia).
Apparently one little space got in the way of her locating my information on Friday. They received my application and it is being processed.
After I got off the phone I could have killed myself because I had the perfect chance at asking her how long it will take to get the residence permit! And I didn’t.
I’m so mad at myself for mailing it to NY. An IP student on Facebook who lives in SoCal personally dropped her application at the LA consulate last Tuesday, and she got word on Friday that it was ready to be picked up!
I have a tracking number for the return mailing so I will be checking it obsessively. As soon as they mail it I will know. And we paid a fortune for overnight shipping, so when they mail it I’ll literally get it the next day.
Cross your fingers for me that I get the permit ASAP!
I’m not worried about getting it in time before I leave… because processing time is 6-8 weeks, and they received it with 9 weeks before I leave. But I just want to know that I’m all set to go to Sweden. It would be horrible to receive it several weeks before I’m scheduled to leave, and learn that I was rejected for a permit.
xoxo, Jessica