So it’s been a week since I last blogged, and I won’t have another chance for a while, so here goes! Last time I mentioned we were going on a bike ride, and we did! After fika Scott, Natalia and I slowly worked our way down the river bike path to the lake. By the time we got there it was dark and cold, but the journey was amazingly fun and pretty. Scott took some great photos, the best of which are on Facebook. All in all, I think we rode over 20km, which is quite an effort for three people who haven’t ridden in quite a long time!
Monday I went to Stockholm to meet Craig and Rob (my bosses from emotum) for lunch. I got there a bit early, so spent a couple of hours wandering around Södermalm (mostly Slussen). On the way there, though, I walked across Gamla Stan, and found myself in what I think was pretty much the most tourist-centric street in all of Sweden. I was glad to be rid of it. Stockholm is so amazingly pretty though, it’s just a shame it was so cold and all I wanted to do was get inside.
Lunch with Craig and Rob was really nice; it was great to catch up with them again, and a jolly time was had. On the walk back to the Bredbandsbolaget offices (they had meetings for the day), Craig pointed out lots of interesting places around Stockholm (you can see a lot from Katarinavägen!), and also offered me a job of sorts. So I’m testing out the 3G network (and how our software interacts with it) in Sweden in return for 3G Internet. And, you know, lunch, and accommodation in Oslo, and a summer tour of the fjords. The usual. (I’m pretty excited).
After lunch, I was still cold so I found a museum in Gamla Stan near the palace thing. Turned out I picked the most boring museum in the entire world – the National Museum of Economy. It was a bunch of coins and medals. There were only a couple of things that were mildly interesting, the best being a thing about Sven Svensson, who I took a photo of, to send to my old manager back home. He appreciated the joke.
After that I still had a few hours to kill, so I sat in a cafe with some varm choklad, morotskaka (hot chocolate and carrot cake, which I totally ordered in Swedish) and read my book. Maybe a bit of a lame way to spend my first day in Stockholm, but I really enjoyed it. Afterwards I headed out to Stockholm Universitet to meet Bella and see a Cinema Politica documentary about Coca-Cola and paramilitaries in Colombia. The documentary was pretty badly made, but it was interesting, and good to catch up with Bella again.
Then I’ll skip to this weekend, because I’m pretty sure that although I had a nice week, not much happened worth writing about. Friday night I went to Smaka, the vegetarian restaurant at Kalmar, with Julika, where we met up with Axel and his friend Madeleine. The food was pretty delicious, and afterwards we (well, not Julika) went back to Madeleine’s for a while, where I got to try glögg, a traditional mulled wine mixed with spices and served hot (I’m assuming at least part of that description would be unnecessary if I knew the meaning of ‘mulled’, but eh). It was so delicious! I want more and more and more, forever. I also managed to score myself an offer for a Spotify invitation (haven’t got it yet, though… getting worried), which would be pretty cool.
Due to this diversion, though, I missed out on pretty much all of Markus Krunegård, who I had a ticket to see at Katalin. I figured there would be a support, but apparently not, so I only saw the last song. Scott and I were thinking of going to a festival in Umeå, though, so we would get another opportunity to see him there, too.
Last night (Saturday) was the Reccegasque – the gasque for all the new students – which was amazingly good, due to a great number of factors. The first bit – speeches by random University people, all in Swedish – was kind of boring, mostly because I generally had no idea what was going on, but the rest was good. Dinner was delicious, and I met some lovely new tablemates. We sang lots of Swedish songs (I got a songbook for this purpose) and generally had a good time. Oh, and I mixed at least 5 kinds of drinks over the course of the evening (not my fault, they were given to us!). Surprisingly okay this morning, though.
After dinner we went to the afterparty at Smålands, which had a pretty terrible cover band playing. Good fun though, and I finally ran into Anna again, and we danced the night away. Very extravagantly, mostly, making fun of the band. Afterwards we were chatting, and we’re having coffee when I get back from Munich. That alone made the night a win.
Oh yeah, Munich! I was looking through my diary the other day, trying to figure out when I have some free time to travel, and it turned out I had quite a bit next week. So I got chatting to Andreas, and I’m going to stay with him (actually, I’m going to stay with his girlfriend’s parents, but same thing?) from Tuesday until next Tuesday. I’m pretty excited; a whole week in Germany with excellent company and bier!
And that pretty much sums up the week. I don’t know what my Internet access will be like in Munich, but I’m sure it won’t be terrible. So maybe you’ll hear from me, or maybe you won’t. Until next time!
