13:24 Mon.

23 Sep, 2013

Birthday

Happy birthday Mikel!

Day 46 , 101 remain

Tags: birthday, cold, sashimi, sushi

Lulea , Sweden

9 °C

Mostly Cloudy

6:14 am

6:30 pm

Yesterday my roommate had a birthday so we baked him a cake. I normally prefer fruit cake, but this one was really good (maybe because I helped quite a lot with the baking).

The fun part was after we ate a cake, Chinese decided to have sashimi. I don’t know what actual difference is between sashimi and sushi, for me it looks and tastes the same: -raw fish. And yeah it tastes like … raw fish. You have to dip it in to a special sauce I don’t remember how’s it called, it tastes like really salty horseradish, I didn’t liked it that much but others loved it.

On this picture you can see making of sashimi and a birthday boy excited about his new cap and raw fish. 🙂

Mmmm .... not realy :) — Mmmm …. not realy 🙂

Today is really cold day. I think air temperature is around 8, but it’s windy so the “real feel” temperature is supposed to be 6 degrees. When I rode bike to school this “morning” my hands were so cold/numb I couldn’t hold a key to lock the bike.

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00:29 Sun.

22 Sep, 2013

Autumn Equinox

The "long" night ahead

Day 45 , 102 remain

Tags: autumn equinox, chicken with coca-cola, chinese, cusine, dinner, food, french, september aquinox, spanish

Lulea , Sweden

11 °C

Partly Cloudy

6:08 am

6:36 pm

This week was very intensive in regards to school work. I couldn’t have waited for the weekend to come. Yesterday I slept for almost 12 hours, compensation for work until 2AM during week.

Yesterday evening (Saturday) we had a dinner with friends. We had 4 main dishes, French, Spanish and two Chinese as each one prepared dish from his country. I think Slovenian cuisine will be on the menu in two weeks although I still don’t know what I should cook. I’ll be very happy and thankful for any suggestions you can give me on what is a good Slovenian dish. 🙂 Anyway the food was really good and it was fun to taste what people in the other countries eat.

Here is Spanish dish. It’s fried potatoes with eggs. It looks like and is prepared somewhat similar to pancakes, but tastes nothing alike.

Mikel made us spanish pancake, well it's fried eggs and potatoes. :) — Mikel made us spanish pancake, well it’s fried eggs and potatoes mixed together. 🙂

French dish made by Jean, contains potatoes, cheese ham and lots of fat. :D — French dish made by Jean, contains potatoes, cheese ham and lots of fat. 😀

Chinese rice by Lin, made with rice and sea fruits.

Spicy as hell Chinese broth made by Allen and Leff

All together (except chicken which took longest to cook). (We didn’t burned the table, if someone is wondering)

Needles to say we were full as a drum (old Slovenian saying :))

Since I’m talking about food a fun fact … I bought some salad in local market few days ago. The salad was in some kind of bag (like bag for bread), you could only see the top of it (salad), so you knew it was a salad. The surprise came when I was at home and took salad out of the bag. It actually came with a pot. I’m not sure why is this, are you supposed to grow your own salad from now on, or is it just to keep it fresh a bit longer? Anyway just to make sure, I have a pot on the window, maybe I’ll grow some salad from now on, who knows. 🙂

September Equinox

Today (Sunday) is autumn equinox. This means that the day will be of equal length as night. Until now I had longer days than Slovenia (or majority of world for what it’s worth). From now on, days will continue to get shorter and shorter until only 2 hours of daylight in late December. Although I’m fond of seeing how it is to live only by artificial light, I’m starting to regret my decision of departure in first semester. I think it would be better if I went after New Year’s. If that were true I would arrive when the days are short and leave in June when there is daylight all day long.

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00:29 Thu.

19 Sep, 2013

Hockey

First training

Day 42 , 105 remain

Tags: first training, hockey, ice hockey

Lulea , Sweden

15 °C

Fair

5:59 am

6:47 pm

Since I’m up here in the north it’s only fitting I try some winter sports. Hockey is very popular here in Sweden. If I remember correctly Lulea’s team was second in national league this year and Sweden took the first place in world championship.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been gathering some hockey equipment, I’ve managed to find some (really bad) skates, which I’ll have to replace asap, I’ve bought second hand stick and knee protectors and took my skiing helmet (although it looks stupid).

Today was our first training/practice. We divided in to two groups, those who knew how to skate and wanted to play and those who just wanted to practice skating. For some reason I took the first team. It was really fun, although I have a feeling we were playing only against Swedes, because they were scoring goals every 45 seconds. I managed to score two goals myself. No one was keeping score but at the end I think we scored around 15 goals and other team scored like 50 (again they were all Swedes from LURC 😀 ).

During the game you become surprisingly hot, a lot of people were playing in t-shirts, I had a winter jacket on and at the end I was as wet as if I jumped in to a pool. We played 4 vs 4 with 2 people in reserve with whom we exchanged places every few minutes. At the beginning I just wanted to play and spent as little time as possible in reserve, but towards the end I was so tired that I went to reserve every minute.

Now, at home I’m starting to feel every muscle (or lack of them) in my body. I think I only fell 3 or 4 times but the last fall was really spectacular, somehow I made a backflip directly on to my elbow. It’s already turning purple. I should have bought some elbow protectors before first practice …

We played in the big hockey arena (although not on the main field) in the centre of the town. First few practices will be free, but later on we’ll divide the rent of arena among the players. Contradictory to everything else here in Sweden lending hockey field for 1.5h is only 15€ (for whole field not for 1 person), for comparison in Slovenia its 180€.

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00:54 Mon.

16 Sep, 2013

Comments

Blog almost finished

Day 39 , 108 remain

Tags: comments, fall, fog, mists, misty morning

Lulea , Sweden

15 °C

Cloudy

5:48 am

7:00 pm

This week I’ve been kind of busy with assignments so I wasn’t able to post much. On the other hand there wasn’t much to post about. On Friday we had a quiz at Software engineering. I think I solved it kind of correct, we’ll see when I get results.

Over the weekend I’ve been working on blog. I’ve finally managed to make comments feature. So now I’m almost at the end with what I imagined blog should look like 1 month ago, before I actually went to Sweden. So yey only 1 month late. 🙂 The only thing I have left according to my plan is some weather animation/detailed look when you mouse over it.

Yesterday morning (and by morning I mean 5AM) I managed to wake up and go take some photos of the lake. There are some really nice mists forming overnight there, although they were too strong (yesterday) morning for a good photo. Maybe I need to find a better viewing spot.

Fall has arrived. Leaves are already turning orange on trees.

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22:37 Mon.

9 Sep, 2013

One month

Already?!

Day 32 , 115 remain

Tags: one month, people, swedes, waiting for bus

Lulea , Sweden

11 °C

Fair

5:31 am

7:21 pm

Today is exactly one month since I arrived here in Lulea. By now I can safely say this is the longest I’ve been away from home. Though it really doesn’t feel like one month. I’ve been quite busy last 4 weeks with all the trips, exploration, parties and school. It’s really nice up here and now I’m kind of sorry I’m not able to stay up here for whole year. The only thing that would make everything even better is if Veronika would be able to come here and live with me. Then, it would be perfect!

So far I’ve gotten used to the colder climate. Although I’m really happy that I bought winter jacked yesterday. Mornings are getting really cold, especially if it’s cloudy in the morning. Days have gotten really short (compared to when I arrived), sunset is around 19.30, sunrise around 5.30. I don’t remember saying this before, but the only deciduous here is birch and the leaves on them have started to turn yellow and red. Now I can finally say Winter is coming! (haha I’ve been waiting months to say this!).

People up here are noticeably different than in Slovenia. The first thing you notice is that 4 out of 5 people are blond. The populous is in general fit and tall. You rarely see an obese person up here. The second thing I noticed is that clichés about Swedes are surprisingly accurate. They really are shyer (at least that’s how I’d described them). They love standing in lines (not a joke!). I’m sure they get double kicks when going to amusement parks, first one when they are waiting in line for ride to start, the second one when they ride the ride. When standing in line they are calm and no one tries to cut in front or jostling forward. I don’t remember if I’ve shown this photo before, but here it is (again), how swedes wait for bus:

In general people are really nice and helpful and everyone speaks English very well. I was really surprised when saleswomen/men talk to me in perfect English. And this is tested in multiple shops, restaurants, kiosks …

The prices here are quite higher compared to Slovenia, but so are the salaries. I talk to a student doing a PHD here and he told me that here he gets around 3000€ monthly salary. For comparison PHD student in Slovenia gets 800€, professor around 2400€… The food costs I would say around 20-30% more than in Slovenia, the really expensive things are different kind of services like barber for example. Here it costs around 50€ for men. Oh ye, almost forgot about gasoline: little below 2€/l.

Thus be it for now, I shall describe more wonders of north in months to come.

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