Saturday I decided to participate in the local and somewhat cheesy Harvest Festival in the city park. For such a widely publicized event it was smaller than I expected but it was still pretty cute. I had a Swedish waffle and then bought a bottle of applemust from a cute, old Swedish couple.
I have no idea where I was at this point but it was nice to find.
Later that night I felt very Swedish with my Swedish yellow pea soup with mustard and the applemust I bought. Pretty delicious.
Today I attempted to ride the 8-9km route over to Lomma Beach. After about 5km in, riding with the wind directly blowing against me, I started to second guess my decision to go on this bike ride in the first place. But I still really wanted to get to the beach so I kept going. At this point it's so windy that there are tears streaming down my face and I realize that I have not seen one other person on the bike path, however, I still wanted to make it to Lomma.
So I kept going and then I get 2km away and I hit a freeway. The bike path veers left away from Lomma and the only way I see to get to Lomma is crossing the freeway over this highway bridge, but there's no way to cross to the right side of the highway to get on the bridge and get over the freeway. I'm utterly perplexed now and felt I had no choice but to turn around.
The only thing that salvaged the ride was seeing these super cute Swedish cows.
I have been getting more into my academic routine in the past week. My research group and I have made some great progress on the Iceland project and I've even been emailing with the Head of Information from the Ministry for the Environment in Iceland.
On Thursday I volunteered for a study for the Literature and Language Department. It's the one time where being a monolingual English speaker was actually an advantage! However, I hope I won't be forever. Although I'm not really sure how the researcher is going to use the data I got a free movie ticket for participating! And since a movie ticket costs about $15 here in Sweden that was actually a really good use of 30 minutes.
Like the rest of the week, Friday has been a very studious day. However I did take some time to saunter through the city and do some shopping. And good news, I finally bought a hair dryer! I realized my situation was desperate when I was going to the gym just so I could dry my hair, so I gave in today and spent $50 so I wouldn't have to worry about coordinating my activities around how long it takes my hair to dry.
Friday was my one month anniversary of being in Sweden. It doesn't really feel like it though because there are so many things I'm still confused about and I haven't been getting much better at understand Swedish, only at understanding English with different accents. Klara invited me over for a real Swedish seafood casserole that night. We enjoyed avoiding talking about our Iceland climate change project and instead delved into Swedish versus American politics and social welfare.
Saturday morning I attended a PhD dissertation defense for someone from the Human Ecology program, or programme, as they spell it here. It was a very academic, intellectual, and Swedish morning. Although the "opponent" said that his dissertation was so great that it was difficult to find any flaws in it, the discussion went over my 45 minutes. I was stuck in the middle of the row and so could not escape the nearly 3 hour session. Once the panel finished asking questions we were all invited to the top floor of the department building for drinks and appetizers. I finished a glass of sparkling cider and some sort of smoked salmon canape, but couldn't really stand to wait around anymore so I sped off on my bike through the rain wishing Kenneth Hermele well with "Land Matters".
To return the favor I invited Klara over for some Californian food for dinner. I used the enchilada sauce seasoning sent to me by Aggie Winters (the mother of one the first kids I was ever an RA for) to make enchiladas. Though they still aren't coming out quite like home, mostly due to the huge lack of cheddar cheese in Sweden, I still introduced my Swedish friend to some delicious Californian/Mexican cuisine. I also bought a really nice apple-strawberry applemust (which we had to research since Sweden apparently has five different terms to define what type of juice the juice is) that we finsihed drinking while Klara explained the importance of the Eurovision contest to me. Apparently Sweden won last year.
I decided that Sunday should be both a productive and a relaxing day so I used most of the morning to watch Top Chef Masters episodes that I missed after leaving the US, then made a BLTA on wheat, and walked to the Espresso House with Mehreen where we spent a couple hours playing the part of ever studious, coffee drinking Masters students. Now to balance things out I'm going to watch some missed episodes of The Real Housewives of New York City. Please don't judge me.
I don't have anything exciting to tell you about so far this week because I am being a good student.
I've been catching up on reading and working on my project for Iceland with my research group. We've decided that we'll need to reach out to Iceland's Ministry for the Environment as well as the coordinating agencies also working on their Climate Change Strategy, including the Ministry of Fisheries, Ministry of Agriculture, etc. The group has decided that I will be the official correspondent for the project, mostly because English is my native language, and since none of us speak Icelandic we're going with English. I think our presentation for the project at the end of October will be pretty challenging. Anyone want to try saying Eyjafjallajökull (a volcano); Vatnajökull, Langjökull or Hofsjökull (glaciers) while still sounding professional?
While I'm now being introduced to Icelandic, Swedish is still a challenge. This week I went to a yoga class that was taught completely in Swedish. The only words I understood were in and ut, and I'm sure you can figure out what those mean. Luckily I have done enough yoga and pilates that I was already familiar with all the poses, I just didn't know when the instructor was telling us to do them.
I also come across this weird blog the other day that actually made me laugh harder than it should. Here is the king of Sweden Photoshopped to be wearing different kinds of hats in different settings.
Saturday I worked as a photographer for the Exotic Hairstyles and Hats party for Event Masters. It was a very fun experience but I ended the night having to ride home in wine soaked jeans after accidentally sitting on someone's spilt drink. Not very cute.
Me, Idil, and Meriyem...
Friendly coat check guy bombed our picture.
PS - I apologize for doing this out of order. It's late for me.
I was hoping to get some relaxing hiking in on Sunday. There was a tour organized by the school so I met up to go with Alexandra. Once the guide finally showed up at the train station, he told us it would be a 30km hike--which is not at all what I had in mind for a relaxing Sunday. We decided to start off with the group and take the train north to Landskrona. There is not much to say about or to see in Landskrona except the citadel.
But I did find this very strange statue...
We decided not to continue with the group and somehow found our way back to the Landskrona station. We weren't exactly sure how to get back so we stopped an older lady on the street and asked her if she spoke English. She didn't so I used my broken Swedish to ask about the train station and so we stood on the corner for a minute both gesticulating trying to tell each other what we meant.
So we hopped on another train and arrived in Helsingborg and were able to salvage our Sunday. Alex and I found the remains of a castle (built in the 1300's and fought over for years between the Danish and Swedish kings) and even had time to stop for a varm choklad by the yacht club before making our way back home.
