First Week in Jönköping

We spent most of the last week in Jönköping, the city we hope to soon call home for the next few years.

With a population pushing 100,000, it’s actually one of the 10 most populous cities in Sweden. Jönköping sits at the southern tip of Vättern, a finger-shaped lake whose surface area of nearly 2,000 square kilometers makes it the second-largest lake in the country and sixth-largest in all of Europe.



I spent the last five winters thinking Lake Tahoe was a pretty big body of water. For comparison, its surface area is a little less than 500 square kilometers. Vättern is massive.



Jönköping has tons of restaurants and coffee shops and dozens of independent and chain stores. Jönköping University, where Amanda was accepted to study communications, is located in the center of the city, overlooking the lake.



The campus is home to 10,000 students. The University Foundation includes Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping School of Education and Communication, Jönköping School of Engineering and Jönköping School of Health Sciences. Amanda’s building is labeled ‘H’ on this diagram.



Due mainly to its desirable location in southern Sweden, apartments larger than studios are very hard to find in Jönköping. We’re on a few waiting lists and will continue to search for a place as Amanda begins her second week of school Monday and I start submitting resumes and CVs for employment.

We bought one-month train passes for the 45-minute trip from her mom’s house outside Falköping because the 120-kilometer roundtrip commute we’ve been doing by car isn’t very feasible when gas costs the equivalent of $1.80 USD per liter — that’s $7.20 USD per gallon.