New Year’s Eve

Tuesday 31.12.2013, my last day in Luleå.
Toward evening we prepared some food and headed to other building where majority of students who were staying here over holidays gathered. Again there was lots of food from all over the world, tons of people who I never saw before, or at least talked with them.

Toward 11PM we left apartment and took bus downtown. It was around -7 outside and snowing quite strongly. Yet to my surprise there were really a lot of (young) people (girls) dressed in miniskirts, wearing high heels. I don’t know how they weren’t cold or how their feet didn’t froze, since there was at least 5cm of fresh snow on the ground.

There was no stage or band in city centre as usually in Slovenia. Instead of this there were 3 stalls selling some drinks and sweets and that was it. After following crowd few meters we found a place where they were going to shoot fireworks from. Guess where? From the middle of harbour on almost half a meter of frozen sea.

A lot of people gathered to watch fireworks. Although you could tell you’re not in Slovenia since everyone made sure to have enough personal space around them.

We soon found a nice place to view fireworks from. Just at the edge of pier looking directly onto the sea. After counting backwards from 10 to 0 fireworks started at midnight sharp.

Fireworks were amazing. They were big, colourful and close, I even got hit by shrapnel which somehow made it underneath my shirt. All in all it was amazing.

After it Veronika and I decided to go home alone, since we had a busy day in front of us. We went by foot, my last hike here in Luleå. We had a plan to go over the frozen lake, snow was falling really hard by now, a great last memory to have!

After waking up following morning we ate something and began to clean apartment. When we were done it was already time to go. We said goodbye to our friends and were off on bus. It was sad, driving by the lakes and paths I’ve grown so used to in the last half a year. By the time we came to the rail station I already started to miss this place…