My New Apartment

No more living at the stadium!

I moved into my new apartment today.  It’s very nice and I’m quite pleased with the living situation.  The apartment is a bit far from the town center, but it’s only a 10 minute bike ride so I can’t complain about that either.  I’ll put pictures up soon, but I haven’t taken any just yet.  I’ll wait until I’ve put my stamp on the place a bit!

I might be going on a bit about my new apartment, but I can’t stress how much having a place provided by the club helps the player.  If I had to search for my own place I’d be lost.  Now I can just relax and focus on playing my best.  Right or wrong, I went on for weeks about how much I didn’t like my place in Sweden, and that money came out of my contract!  I don’t think that it affected my play, but who knows?  Here I have one less distraction.

Speaking of distractions, now that I have a place I’m forced to sort some things out and they are not easy.  First, I need a bike because it takes 30 minutes to walk from the stadium to my place.  I have one now that’s being borrowed, but I’ll need to find one of my own very soon.  I went to a store today to look at bikes and the cheapest I found was over 200 euros.  I also need some pots and pans, light fixtures and an internet stick, since I can’t get broadband internet service anywhere without a two year contract.  For those reasons, I might still be effectively living at the stadium for a few more days while I sort things out.

I've been spending quite a bit of time walking around this past week, but I don't think I'll be doing too much walking anytime soon because it is incredibly cold outside.  Last night walking home it was 9 degrees celsius.  Today in the middle of the afternoon it was 14 degrees celsius.  I thought this was summer!  If this is what August feels like, then God help me when October comes around.  It won't be as bad as it was last February (-27), but at the same time the games won't be indoors!  There will probably be some miserable days in a few months.

In soccer news, I finally got my paperwork sorted.  For over a week, I waited for my previous club ESK to provide a release to the Swedish FA.  Essentially, all I needed for ESK to do was acknowledge that my contract had expired.  This process would take five minutes, but for some reason the club waited until today to do it.  As a result, Haka and I have been freaking out trying to get this done.  If you're wondering what the form was, it was an International Transfer Certificate (ITC).  This form needs to be filled out for any player movement between countries.  It's a simple form and just matches things up so that nothing can possibly get lost in translation, more or less.  It would be a bigger deal if I had been bought, but since I was a free agent it was nothing more than a formality.  The fears about the ITC turned out to be for nothing though, since ESK got it done.  I’m ready to play my part in Sunday’s game!

I had a bit of media attention a few days ago.  The local paper, VS, interviewed me and Kris about coming to Haka.  It wasn't much, but it's nice to be in a place where the club means a lot.  In Enkoping people cared, but it's hard to have the same passion for a 3rd tier team as you'd have for a 1st tier team.  There seems to be a bit of excitement about the arrival of us new players.  We're all strikers so I guess that adds to the excitement.  Nothing better for a fan than a new striker who they haven't seen miss yet!

I kind of hate to say it, but that’s about all for now.  I’ve spent the last two or three days almost entirely at the lounge area of the stadium watching terrible Olympic sports with Kris.  Now I can use my free time to liven up my place!

And of course, today’s meme: