Surprise, surprise

Many years have passed since I last managed to publish a post on this blog. I am actually not sure anymore   why I stopped. I guess life was busy, exhausting, and I had to focus a lot on what was going on on a day-to-day basis. I continued falling in love with Sweden, making the country, the city we lived in, its language, its habits and traditions my own. This because I am a believer that it is easier to adapt to your surroundings, even culturally. No, not 100%, not in a way that you deny your roots completely. But I find it exciting to immerse myself into new cultures, learn about them, learn to understand them and - if it comes to day-to-day life - adapt to them to a certain level. Now, in a hyper-modern, multi-cultural city with a Middle-Eastern, muslim culture as a backdrop it will be interesting to see if this approach still works. I guess only with modification. 

So, now here we are, the year is 2021 and I am for the first time in a long time not on European soil anymore. I once again find myself in a place of which I never thought I would be at all. Namely Dubai.

How did we get here?
After years of struggling to make some decisive career steps my now husband got the chance to work in Dubai. Actually, he will have to travel a great deal and in this case Dubai is the better hub for him and for us. Staying in Stockholm would have meant that we would not have seen each other for sometimes months at a time and we therefore decided to relocate so that the separation would be shorter in time. So despite an ongoing pandemic (or maybe also because of it), we packed our bags, got onto an airplane and left Northern Europe behind us for an indefinite amount of time. 
 
And why is this blog in English all of a sudden? Because I want to give my friends from Sweden, Brazil, some family members in the US and everybody else in this crazy world the chance to read and follow this blog as well - if they are interested. ;) 

We have landed here in the middle of the night on the 4th of January and in the next post  Iwill try to give a short recap of "what happened so far....".