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-19 °C
9:30 am 
1:14 pm Finally, today my Slovenian record for lowest temperature was finally broken. I’ve been looking forward to this for quite some time.
Update (19.15h). I’ve just received news that some exchange students went to Kiruna today. It was -35 there today. Maybe I shouldn’t be laughing but they are stuck there now. Their car froze (they actually couldn’t get inside) and when they finally did they found that battery is dead. If my information is correct they will spend the night in ice hotel there.
-16 °C
9:15 am 1:35 pm Ok, so this week I was helping at International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM), here at LTU.
So what exactly was I doing? Well first two days I was mainly at the reception helping with registration of newly arrives and showing them around. I was also allowed to go to listen to whichever presentation I wanted and of course all the food and drinks were free for us.
I’ve managed to listen to keynote presentation by Google and I think it was really good. He showed some nice applications we’ll be able to see in near future and of course didn’t forget to show us all the new Google toys aka Nexus 5, Google glasses etc…
For each day of conference we got a coupons that covered all expenses in central restaurant, for lunch. Almost all volunteers (students) were finally able to try the most expensive dish from the menu, with all the extra drinks and stuff (which normally costs around 10€). I think this was the first time since I came here in Lulea that I had pork and some other kinds of meat. Usually I only eat fish or chicken since other kinds cost more than 30€/ kg (and you can’t buy less than 1kg).
Here in Sweden they have a tradition of having so called “Fika” every few hours. Hm how could I explain this? It’s something similar to English Tea (time) though it can happen any time of the day. So every 1.5h of conference we got Fika, which included cakes, drinks, sandwiches, cookies, etc…
So despite being volunteer and not getting paid, I saved around 100€ in this week on food and drinks alone (since I didn’t eat/buy anything at home), and probably gained few kg (of winter isolation 😀 ).
We also got invited to welcoming event in 4* hotel downtown. Needless to say it was awesome.
Overall it was really great experience and I’m happy I’ve been given an opportunity to be involved. I’ve been able to listen to some very good presentations, meet and talked with a lot of new people including presenters. And lastly if I’m not mistaken we are going to get recommendation letter from professor next week. All in all it was great!
Yesterday (or today to be exact), just before I went to bed, snow started falling again. The wind was blowing and snowflakes were big and many. It was fun watching cold winter, from a nice and warm room.
Today I’ve decided to go up the ski slope hill, to stretch my legs and take a photo or two. Sadly it was cloudy, combine that with strength of the sun up here and you have a twilight lighting at best; not good for photos. Still it was fun plowing through about 15cm of freshly fallen snow.
Hah here is a picture from my weather forecast for this day. Look at icon for 9 and 14’o clock. =)
-8 °C
9:04 am 1:33 pm Today and yesterday I finally received grades from the two courses I took in the first quarter. I’m not sure what took them so long, exactly 1 month, to correct our papers. It’s true that here professors correct exams and not assistants but still, there weren’t more than 20 people taking these courses.
As I said earlier exams weren’t that hard, here I think program is more “bolonian” than in Slovenia, here focus is on projects during quarter, exams are only worth around 40% of final grade (of course this differs from professor to professor). So yea I’ve passed both of them with flying colours 5/5. Though grade scaling is weird, 3 is lowest possible grade (except fail) and 5 is best. Even so translation of grades to % is something like this 5 => 90%, 90 > 4 >= 70, 70 > 3 >= 50.
Ah I almost forgot, despite me complaining about my project group we did really great. At end we scored second best. If I take in to account how much work we put in to it I think we were light years ahead of others, since I always had that feeling when you know you failed at something since we did minimum amount of work to pass.
Talking about grades I don’t remember if I said how Swedish exam went. I’ve passed it with grade 4, thus proving once and for all that I suck at languages and will avoid them from now on.
In the following week I’ve volunteered to help at a computer science (multimedia) conference that is held here at LTU. I’ve never been at science conference before so I’m quite excited how it will look. More on this in next few days.
-6 °C
9:00 am 1:35 pm Ok let’s start first with the good news. Now its official, Veronika will be here in exactly EXPIRED!. I can’t wait to see her after all this time. I actually get butterflies in my stomach when I think about it. Can’t wait to see her and can’t wait to see her expression when she leaves train just to step on icy cold air of -20 or something. It will be so fun, and all the things I have planned to do here with her. Can’t wait!
Now to the sadder part. My stay here is coming to an end. Yesterday we just did our last bookings and traveling arrangements and now everything is set up for my return home. We will leave Lulea on January 1st in the evening. After a night’s ride on the train we will arrive to Stockholm where we booked a really nice hotel. Though for that price in any other country we would probably get much more, but heh, this is Sweden. Do you want to know how pricy hotel and Stockholm is? Well buffet breakfast at hotel costs 14€ per person for 1 time.
After 3 nights in Stockholm it will be time to leave Sweden. We found a semi cheap plane that goes via Amsterdam so yey another country added to my list of visited ones, though only for few hours. On Sunday evening around 11pm we’ll arrive to Venice and my trip will be over.
I’m really sad to leave this place. I would love to stay for at least second semester but it is impossible to do so with my IŠRM program in Slovenia. Here there is only 1 course of mathematics offered in English and I would need 4.
On the other hand I can’t wait to see Veronika again and finally be with here again. So it’s not that bad in the end.
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Thanks for the postcard from Saint Petersburg!