For me traveling is all about experiencing things together with people and being able to feel that I develop myself as a person when I meet new cultures and fellow travelers that have other perspectives than me.
I’m a 21-year-old student from Sweden and I love to travel. However, as a student, I find it hard to make the time for traveling and the money is often short. This might be part of the reason why traveling is so special to me and why I desire it so much. For me though, I am as happy to travel in my own country as in a foreign country. This winter, me and my future wife went to Luleå for no more than a few days right after new years eve. I had given her the trip as a birthday gift a month earlier so we were both eager to get there and spend some alone time together. This is something we like to do, both of us like gifts where you do something with each other rather than giving an object. We find that the experiences and perspectives you get out of putting yourself in new situations both make our bond between each other stronger and that it gives you so much more in terms of self-esteem, skills, and experience than what a necklace could give for example.
Little did she know that I would propose to her in the cold winter of our northern parts of Sweden. I had already booked a table in a restaurant, hotel with a spa, and booked aurora hunt on snowmobiles. Why I choose to propose in Sweden, in minus 20 degrees on the ice of the Baltic Sea, is not a hard question for me because I find that traveling is all about trying new things and seeing new places, and with that meeting the people there to get to know their perspectives. This does not mean that Sweden is not a new location for me. Just because I live here does not make me all-knowing of the cultures and perspectives of every Swede. I find that everyone has their own story and with that their own take at everything. From those stories, we then make ourselves our own understanding of our surroundings and with that, we get a unique perspective of the world.
Once we got to the blistering cold of Luleå on the second of January we went with the transfer to the hotel and got a light snack. After a while, I told my girlfriend it was time to change and go down to the lobby of the hotel where the guide for the evening awaited us. He then drove us into the middle of nowhere, it felt like, together with another family that also was going on the guided aurora hunt. One of them was from Sweden but his wife and her parents were from Hungary. We started talking and exchanged stories of how it had happened that they met even though they did not live in the same country and about what her parents thought about studying at university. We had some very conflicting ideas about it but I didn’t matter to me. The only thing I could think about was how they got that perspective of education and how it affected them.
Later on, halfway through the hunt, we stopped our snowmobiles on an island in the Baltic Sea to eat some Swedish “fika” and marshmallows with hot chocolate which was more than welcome after sitting on the vehicle for more than an hour in minus 20 degrees. After a while, I told my girlfriend that I wanted some pictures of me and her on the ice of the sea and I brought her with me, away from the group. Once we had gotten out, onto the ice, I proposed. While she looked the other way, I got out the ring out and proposed to her in the darkness of the Swedish winter. She said yes!