Lyla Sten's melancholy mood mingles with airy notes and a rapturous tone to create little vignettes of our collective experience in Sweden. It captures the ebb and flow of the classic Swedish dichotomy of dark and light, and it attempts to express the uncanny relationship of the Swedish landscape to its people, all through the novel eyes and the ethereal music of foreigners submerging themselves into the softly glowing depths of Swedish culture for the very first time. We all traveled to this place bearing an indubitable fork in the road of our lives. We were all children without a home, coming together under the faint Swedish sun to determine our next move in life. But an amazing turn of events occurred to transform this temporary feeling into a place we could all call home, not because of the physical location that we inhabited, but as a result of the people that we came to know and truly call our eternal companions. Indeed "press start my friend and play with me" was the mantra of our previously untapped but now flourishing, carefree disposition.

                                                        Emily Marie Francis VanderHarten