Today I tried
something very new. I went horse riding with my host family and a family friend.
I have never really been interested in going horse riding, but when they asked
if I would like to go and try it out, I said yes! So we took the drive to a
place about an hour and a half away from Stockholm to ride a special type of
horse from Iceland called Icelandic Horses. These horses are smaller than
normal horses and are meant to be easier to ride for beginners like me! This
however was not the case with me. I had, what I thought was a lovely horse, to
ride for the trip. So I jumped on my horse in a rather uncoordinated fashion, and the horse started
walking! Coming from a person how has never ever been horse riding before and
did not know how to control the horse, this was rather scary. The family friend
that came with us new how to ride horses and taught me how to stop and start my
horse and make it go where I wanted it to go, the only problem was that her
horse and mine were not the best of friends so my horse tried to kick hers with
her back legs. This freaked the living day lights out of me! I was in no mood
to fall off this horse or any other horse for that matter! We carried on
walking and headed to the forest. This is when my horse went crazy. We had to
go through a puddle of water. My horse didn’t like this puddle of water. She liked
the trees next to the puddle of water. She went for the trees taking me with
her right into the trees in a crazy run and she wouldn’t listen to me to not. I
freaked. It really scared me that it wouldn’t listen to me and that it kept
trying to go off on its own. In the end my host brother John switched horses
with me. His horse was nice and just plodded along which was a nice change and I
could relax. John, who had ridden before, found it a bit easier to control my horse
but she still wasn’t happy! Overall it was good to try horse riding but whether
I do it again is still very much up in the air!
My crazy horse!
On the first
weekend of November in Sweden there is a tradition that you will go to a
graveyard a light a candle for the love ones you have lost. Whether it is on
the person’s grave or in a spot to remember all you can light your candle and
remember. On Saturday night my host family and I went to Stockholm’s biggest
graveyard and lit our candles. I put one down for Grandma and Granda. It was
such a lovely way to remember. The whole graveyard glowed with candle light and
every so often you would see a lantern being let into the air. It is such a
simple thing to do. I loved the fact that it made a place that would be a scary
place to be in pitch black darkness into a place of such simple beauty.
The four candles my host family and I lit. the one at the front is mine for Grandma and Granda.
The candles in the graveyard from the hop of a hill.
Candles in a tree.
A place to leave candles if your loved ones are not in this graveyard covered in candles.
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