The past weeks I have been thinking a lot about friendship. Now, we only have about five weeks left here in Lund before we move north, to Knivsta. I have concluded that one and three quarters of a year really is a short time to make really good friends. At least under these conditions. During our two years in Switzerland it was much easier, being the "foreign" as well as meeting many others in the same situation as ourselves. Moving to Lund was different though, since we this time moved into already existing sets of acquaintances. Very different from moving to Switzerland as well as from moving to Uppsala ages ago to study.
This said, I feel privileged to have met and got to know so many wonderful persons here. It's surpassed my expectations. However, the closer we get to our move, the less meaningful it fells to further extend our circle of friends here since there simply isn't enough time left to spend socializing. Instead I want to concentrate on the friendships already existing.
When moving away (or having friends moving away for that matter) I think there are three ways to handle it. Firstly, we can let everything continue as normal, seeing each other just like before until the inevitable day of the move comes. Secondly, we can start to distance ourselves from each other since it's "no use" to spend time together with the move coming up. Lastly, we can try to make as much as possible of the time left, knowing that after the move it might be a long time until we meet again.
For me, the first and last approach are the natural ones, depending on how close the friends are. The second way really hasn't got anything with friendship to do according to me, but I can see that it might be some kind of self protection for people who doesn't want to get hurt.
I hope that these last five weeks here in Lund will be great and that when the day of our move comes I can look back at our time in Lund with a feeling of gratitude for all the friends I have.
After eight days in our new house, I'm in love. There's a lot to do to make this our dream home, but it really feels good with all the space and the fact that we are allowed to do almost whatever we want to here (compared to the rental apartments where we have lived before). We started out with the living room floor. It badly needed to be polished and varnished so before placing our furniture there we hired someone to do the job since we realized we would probably never do it 
ourselves. So now we have a terrific floor to go with our terrible walls (the wallpaper was once white but is now both dirty and at some places torn - it's our next project!). While the work was done on the floor, we kept all our living room furniture in the guest room together with a bunch of moving boxes. Kind of crowded I have to say. Now we have furnished the living room and in a couple of days we are allowed to roll out the carpets as well (the varnish needs a few days more to harden completely). More pictures are coming later on...
