Tamanna: Örebro Welcomed me with a Rainbow

On my first Saturday in Örebro, I did something I had never really done before. I went out with no plan, no company and no one waiting for me to come home. In my country, exploring a city alone as a woman isn't exactly a hobby. It's something you think twice. Here, I simply put my headphones in, picked a direction and walked.

In the city centre, the first thing that stopped me was the architecture. Rows of old buildings, each slightly different from the next as if they had agreed on a mood but not a colour. I kept looking up and walking into puddles. On the way, it started to rain, the soft but undecided kind. I ducked into a doorway, slightly annoyed and when I stepped out again, there was a rainbow stretched across the rooftops and I felt like it was welcoming me in the city with its smiling colours. I stood there to took a very ordinary photo of it and it is still my favourite picture on my phone.

Then I saw the castle with its fairytale surroundings. I had seen photos before I came but photos don't tell you how it sits in the water, heavy and calm, as if it has been waiting a few hundred years for me to turn up. I stayed longer than I meant to. By the time I left, the street lamps had come on and I finally understood what every European film had been trying to tell me: this continent looks its best under yellow lights.  

Orebro campus, it turns out, is its own small version of that walk. It is designed with students in mind, green spaces between the buildings, a café in almost every building and a library that feels less like a place to study and more like a place to stay. Most afternoons, I take my coffee to a window and watch the trees changing colour from green to golden to red. It's hard to panic about deadlines when the view is doing that.

The people have been the other surprise. All my classmates come from different countries and continents and between us we found out our mothers worry the same way, argue about whose food is spicier and have discovered that "I don't understand the Swedish recycling system" is a universal language.

I won't pretend I have everything figured out here, not yet. There are forms I don't fully understand and some days home feels very far away. But this is a place that seems genuinely organised around helping students land. Someone always has an answer or knows who does and nobody makes you feel silly for asking.

As I'm studying how cities are planned for people, so I notice these things. A female international student wandering through an unknown city alone and enjoying it isn't a random event. It's a design, care and a lot of decisions someone made, long before I arrived.