I have been a very bad blogger lately. That’s mostly because the trips I have been to has been so packed with activities that I haven’t had a single moment to write about it. Now I will have to update the blog so my maps are correct, and doesn’t show that I’ve only been to Sweden and Norway.
So what have happened since I last wrote on the blog? I created a website together with a friend, to help people in the Volcano Ash Cloud Chaos. The website became extremely popular, retweeted and written about in newspapers all over the world. Since we met at an event organized by Rotary, we were invited to come to the convention of Rotary International in Montreal.
Montreal was great. Really a cultural city, bilingual mostly, but it was definitely good to know some french… The first three days we were at a pre-convention or conference called RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Award) where we together with 130 others from 32 different countries developed our abilities and global understanding. A great event, where I made SO many friends from all over the globe. There’s so many people I would like to visit that I could go on only doing that for years!
After the international RYLA it was the Rotary International Convention. A huge event with some 25000 rotarians gathering in the congress centres of montreal to get inspiration and energy for the coming year. There was so much going on in the city all the time, and the schedual was packed from 7 am to 9 pm. I would consider it one of the most interesting events I have ever attended. Some of the speakers of the convention were Greg Mortensen, author of Three Cups of Tea, Queen Noor of Jordan, Dolly Parton, off course RI president John Kenny. For the closing ceremony there were entertainment by one of my favourite singers Russel Watson, and the world famous Cirque de Solei, from Montreal.
Right now I am sitting on the train from Oslo back to Ullensvang and the Hardanger Fjord, and it turned out the girl besides me IS FROM Montreal, and lives in Sweden at the moment. She lived more or less at the same place as the preconvention was held (McGill Univesity) so I have shown pictures on my computer basicly from her block! It’s always a small world…
Stories of the small world we live in are always amusing. The last day at RYLA I was up very late and met the Caretaker of the university building we stayed in. When he got to know I was from Sweden he was happy because he had a very close friend from Sweden. They had been friends for over 30 years and always called each other for christmas every year. I asked where he was from and he was from Örebro – which is the place where I was born with around 100 000 inhabitants…