Snowy Sweden

I'm back! Haven't written anything in a week now, so time for an update. Came back to Sweden late Thursday night. The flight went really well, hardly any turbulence, so I read about Ewan McGregor's adventures, tried to relax, and even managed to sleep a bit. As there were unforseen troubles with picking me up, and there aren't many connections from the small airport, I decided to take a bus to my sister in Stockholm instead of waiting 1,5 hour to get to Örebro. Left from a cold but clear city at noon the day after with a train. Fell asleep, and became shockingly surprised to look out and see cm of snow and more still falling. Not what I expected or wanted. It's great being home though with everything about it. Still a bit weird though, don't really know what to do, think it will take a day or two to really settle down. Can't talk about any jet-lag, but the one hour time difference made me stay up an extra hour late last night since I forgot to change the time zone on my laptop, so lost an hour there. The snow is said to go way ina few days, but can't say I made a change for the better going from a sunny 14°C Durham to an almost as good London to this.
Talking about London. I came there in the afternoon on Saturday and was met by Nicklas, with whom I was gonna stay at the upcoming days. He lives (temporarily) in a burough called Clapton, which looked like most other smaller areas outside the city central. As Nicklas was working during the days I spent the mornings either sleeping, reading or watching Scrubs, and then went downtown in the afternoon walking around by myself looking in shops, and then catched up with him for a bit of after work or so at some pub. Would of course had been better to have someone to spend the days with, but I kind of like to just walking around and try to feel like a Londoner, although I mostly walked around in the central tourist areas like Oxford Street and down to Covent Garden. The evenings and nights were cool though, and I met quite a lot new nice people. Also surprisingly bumped in to Marie from college outside British Museum the last full day so had well appreciated company, after have been alone all day, walking around there looking at statues of (the cool looking) Ganesha and Buddha among other things from South-East Asia. The last night I went out eating with Nicklas and some of his co-workers at Nando's, and after a beer at a pub next to it we went on to the pub where his friends worked for some fun partying although the place was closed. Have yet bought a new camera so got no pictures from London, although I saw some cool stuff I would had wanted to photoed. Hope to get one as soon as possible.
Tonight I will meet up with friends and watch Sweden probably get there asses kicked by Portugal. Will be much fun, no matter the result.

Easter break

Tonight has been the last night for this term here. For some of the Erasmus-students it's the last night for there time here. So we went out to eat a big group of us, which was very nice. This time when we I leave Durham and all the friends here for a bit more than a month it doesn't feel as weird as last time when you just kind of had really got to know everyone. Now you know more or less everyone is coming back after Easter. It also doesn't really feel like it's maybe the last time I've seen some friends here, or for a long long time, so haven't really thought about that I'm going back to Sweden soon. Well, first it's London, baby!

Exploring England

While being here in England, a bit on and off, for about nine months I want of course to do and see as much as possible. So far I've done a lot and crazy much fun, no talk about it, but I haven't travelled so much as I maybe wanted, although there is plenty of time for it after the exam. But in the last two weeks I've been much better at taking the opportunities to see other cities than Durham, and as they it's said; better late than never.
First I got to see a little of lovely Leeds the Saturday before the last one. Just a bit more than an hour away on the train it is one of the biggest cities in England, and more colourful than grey Newcastle. Had a great day in good company with Italian food and American ice cream, and looked in a lot of shops in really old elegant gallerias with really fashionable clothes but that were of course expensive, but still found some good looking clothes that more fitted my wallet.
Then this last Saturday I did something that is most of the times quite unlike me, and were very spontaneous. At the beginning of the that week Bibo asked around if anyone wanted to go to Manchester the upcoming weekend, and there were some interest but as often nothing really happened in the end. But after waking up from the Informal Ball Bibo rushed into my room saying "Let's go to Manchester, there's a train leaving in one and a half hour and the price is still the same!" So after first thinking in my normal way that it was not time enough and stuff, I thought why not and packed a small backpack, ate quick and took of towards the train station to Madchester where Enrica and Valentina already where on their way to. As I said, it was very spontaneous, so we hadn't booked a room but thought that would be no problem to find. But as we went to the tourist information we were told there was almost not a single bed left in the whole city due to Man Utd playing Liverpool, a boxing fight, and the Irish festival. So in the end we ended up sneaking in and sleeping on the floor in the girls' double room at a hostel in the Northern Quarter. The Northern Quarter is the area of Manchester where you can find a lot of cool small independent vintage stores, book and record shops, and small cafés, bars and clubs. I really liked to hang around there. The rest of the city centre is really nice as well, not as industrial as I thought, with parks and just a urban atmosphere. Even though we were only there 24 hours we saw a lot of the city. We partied a bit in the gay village, then in the entertainment centre, and then in a quite cool basement club near the hostel, passed through Chinatown the day after, went into an art museum where they had a small Da Vinci exhibition among other things, and saw the Irish parade, on our way to the canal side. I really liked the city, and will definitely go back in june after the exams and spend some more time looking in all the great shops, and then head further west to Liverpool. The only bad thing about the weekend was that I dropped my camera quite early during the night so have to buy a new one, but I still managed to take some photos and get the others too. Next stop: London, from Saturday to Thursday, and then back to good ol' Sweden.

Informal Ball

I've made the longest break in this blog's history, for no real reason, so now I will do a full update of the weekend in two separate posts.
The past Friday it was the Informal Ball, which is more or less like a normal formal (rhyme not intended) but bigger and better. So after my afternoon lecture I hooked up with Bibo, Phil, Felix and the captain of his water polo team at New Inn for an afterwork beer. After that we went back to college for some pizza (since we hadn't tickets for the dinner, only for the entertainment after) and drinks, and I drank my bingo prize. As always there was a theme for the formal, and for this it was "we're going on a gap year". Mind the singular form of the last word. Taking three gap years like me don't exist here. I dressed up as a surfer, since I spent almost half of one of my years off in Australia. The entertainment was really well planned with a live band and other fun stuff you could try, and you could also get a fake tattoo (which is, even though I want one, probably the closest I get to have one). It was a really fun night, that lasted until I passed out with my top and surf-shorts on in my bed really tired.

Look-a-like

The term is really going towards the end, and as I have handled in all my summative essays there is not much to do then to try to read all the literature that's left. However, this afternoon I had a tutorial in Geographies of Health and Health Care. As always the tutorial was lead by a PhD student or such that I never met before. He was a tall black guy, and he spoke with a quite slow, low and dark voice that was very calm, soft and relaxing to listen to. As I sat there, trying to keep up with the discussion going on, I couldn't stop thinking about who he reminded me of, and suddenly I realize who it was. A bit because of the looks but mostly because of the voice, and I was just waiting for him to stand up and start singing this song:

Bingo!

Yesterday evening Bibo, Phil and Tom arranged a bingo party to raise money for their charity challenge where they gonna climb the five highest peak in the UK in 48 hours (climb is maybe to exaggerate, more like walking up for, but still quite a challenge to do it in two days). Of course I was there to support them, and I bought 7 cards for £5 with hope of winning the top prize; a ticket for the Summer Ball in June. The first numbers really went my way, and the girl next to me noticed and told me "oh look, we both need the same number to complete a row, how exiting!". A few minutes later Tom said the lucky number, so I jump up from my seat and yell "line!!" while the poor girl next to me was just about to stand up. I felt a bit bad first on one hand, but hey, rules are rules and it's a game so somebody has to win. The prize was a bottle of wine, which is still in my room but I told her that she would get a glas or so of it when I'm gonna drink it on Friday in the bar.

The winning line was the second from above on the card at the bottom in the middle, and the lucky number was 69.

Swedish delicacies

As I told in my last blog post, I went to Ikea to buy some food to make a dinner for some of the friends here, to give something back since I have got to try so much nice food from them and also just to have a good time all together. So on Friday night we all went to one of the kitchens in the brand new buildings where Felix is lucky to live. As there was quite many things to do at the same time I was immidiately asked, mostly by the girls, if I needed some help, which I did. In the end they had taken over all of the cooking, and even though I tried to contribute with something they didn't let me, and I've learned here not to go against an Italian woman in the kitchen. So I arranged the plates and the small aperitifs that consisted of schnapps cheese, pickled cucumber and reindeer salami on a piece of crisp bread, and the main dish of Swedish meatballs and potato in cream sauce with lingonberry jam. I must say it was a big success, and all of the food was gone when we left to go out clubbing.

Felix also took on the deadly challenge of eating a knäckebröd in less than ten seconds. Something a Dutch man has never ever done before! How it went you can see in the video below:

Little Sweden

Yesterday I handled in my last summative essay for this year in the Social and Cultural Geography module. It was about 'race' and racism, which I have found very interesting. Sometimes you struggle with an essay to fill out the words you need, but this time I really had to limit myself as five pages is not that much. There were lots of things I could have expanded and written more about, but in the end I'm really satisfied about it, and that's what counts the most for me! So after that I gave myself a bit of reward and took the train to the Newcastle Metro Center to visit Little Sweden, Ikea!


It was the first time I visited an Ikea store abroad, and I must say it was a really weird experience in a way! I have heard, and seen big posters in Bukarest, that all the furnitures and stuff have the same Swedish names as at home, but once I started to walk around looking at everything I got a bit overwhelmed with all of a sudden all the Swedish around me! Kind of an linguistic overdose! Then when I checked the book shelfs I found that all of the books also were in Swedish (even Nick Hornby!), so shocking!!


I was there by myself, as it wasn't gonna be for a long time, so had really no one to share this crazy experience with. I felt like I was sneaking around and knew this secret that no one else knew. Almost wanted to jump up to people and yell like "I know what all the words mean!! You want me to tell you?! Or maybe read one of the books in the shelfs! I can read it, I'm Swedish!!". Of course I didn't, would had been a bit inappropriate, so I had to curb my enthusiasm a bit.
My main purpose with this trip was to visit the Swedish food store they have there, and I had hoped they had frozen reindeer or elk meat, but they only had small sausages so I bought a lot of meatballs instead. So tonight I'm gonna serve Swedish meatballs with potatoes in cream sauce with pickled cucumber and lingonberry jam, with a bit of reindeer sausage and knäckebröd with snaps cheese and of course ginger cookies!!

The Roots 'slow jam' the news

Last night it was the premiere of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, which he took over from my favourite late night show host Conan O'Brien. Jimmy Fallon has been really funny in Saturday Night Live for years now so I was happy to see that he was chosen to host the show. But I was even more excited, although with mixed feelings at first, when it was announced that my absolute favourite group and probably one of the world's greatest live act, The Roots, was gonna be the house band. This means though that they are not gonna tour as much as before (which was a lot), especially not Europe. They always did a stop in Stockholm, and fortunately I had the luck to see them once. I've seen a short clip from the first show, and I must say it passed the test. Especially the 'slow jam the news' bit, where Black Thought aka Tariq shows again that he not only can turn a mic on fire but also sing really great! I hope it starts to show really soon in Sweden so I get to see more of it.

The Kaiser-concert

Since a picture say more than a thousand words, here are some photos from the concert with Kaiser Cheifs Saturday Night in Newcastle.

Signs of spring

Since I came here I haven't really cared about the temperature at all. In the morning, or before I go out, I just look out and open up my window, and if it seems a bit chilly I put on an extra sweater or something. I have checked the weather forecast in Sweden and heard from friends that it is still cold and around 0°C. Here it is around 9°C and a bit gray and and cloudy, but it gets milder and milder everyday and you can really feel that the spring is on its way. I have found some nice signs of this as well, and in the footsteps of the great Swedish botanist and fellow Uppsala University student as me, Carl Linnaeus, I have gathered evidence in form of pictures. However, unlike him I don't know many names of plants, so If anyone know the names of these flowers either in Swedish or English, or both, please tell me. (Also, unlike him I don't find it right to apply the taxonomy system and race, which is something I study now, to humans, but that's a completely different topic.) It would be really nice if I would be able to bring the bit warmer early spring weather here with me when I go back to Sweden in a bit more than 3 weeks.

Barista

When i work in the college bar I mainly serve beer, cider or easily made mixed spirit drinks, so not really any cocktails or such. One drink I do very well though is my own special coffee drink. It's very simple: you just take a glass and put it under the coffee machine and press 'cappuchino', then when the coffee and milk has poured down you press 'espresso'. Then you just let it be for a few minutes, and voila, you have your own very luxury looking coffee drink, and which surely will get you awake and ready to start studying or do whatever you're up to!

Cappuchesso

Just nu: Vasaloppet

Gårdagen blev inte alltför blöt, men dock rätt seg när jag vaknade (ett inlägg kommer senare). Så vad passar då bättre än årets bästa bakis-tv, Vasaloppet, som går att streama live på SVTs hemsida. Har många första söndagar i mars genom åren legat i fosterställning i soffan halft apatisk och lyssnat på Jakob Hård komma med kommentarer som "...och nu ska vi se hur mycket han leder med...vi tar tid på den där tallen... (bilden är helt stilla, ingenting händer på 1-1.5 min) ...och där kommer dom jagandes bakifrån!". Kan inte bli mycket bättre och slappare en Söndag! Fick förresten nyss höra Hård tala om att årets kranskulla är en 19-årig gymnast och cirkusartist, låter ju inte dåligt.