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.
Snow covered bikes
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.
Snow sledding from the highest hill in LuleåView on snowed landscape
Hah here is a picture from my weather forecast for this day. Look at icon for 9 and 14’o clock. =)
Days are getting pretty short. Look at the icon for 9 and 14 o’clock
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.
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.
First an old news: I finally bought snow shoes. They are warm, look kind of cool and if it is to believe the salesmen (multiple of them for what matters) they are the best you can buy here. I also got a haircut at a Turkish barber, who isn’t part of barber’s cartel, so I “only” paid 25€. The haircut isn’t the best one I’ve gotten but it’s still better than the long hair I had before.
Today I woke up to an ice-cold, blue-sky morning. As soon as I stepped outside I was smacked in my face by a -15 ice cold air. It’s weird but other than face (which was unprotected) I didn’t felt much cold, I’m sure that when it was -2, the other day, I felt colder with same amount clothes.
On my way to school my bike chain broke as I started to climb a small hill. It took me around 10 minutes to repair it, since I didn’t want to touch any metal without gloves.
On my way back from school I decided it has finally been cold long enough for lake to freeze deep enough. As I approached the lake I saw some people skating on it, so I felt pretty safe that it will hold my weight.
Frozen boat in the lake.
This was first time I ever walked over a frozen lake. To my surprize it wasn’t as slippery as I imagine it would be. After few stapes I got a really big adrenalin rush as I saw quite deep crack in the ice. After much deliberation I decided to examine it a bit further. Ice wasn’t cracking as I approached it, and when I was finally close enough to see it clearly I saw its only 5cm deep. The surrounding ice was more than 20cm thick, so I think it was quite safe. Nevertheless I did try and avoid cracks later on.
Walking over frozen lake.There were some cracks in it. It was a bit scary walking over it.
As I reached other side I decided to go take a picture of some bushes near the lake. I went over something that seemed like sewer drain. After few steps ice under one foot gave and I stepped into shallow water (I hope it was only water -.-). Thank god I was wearing my new shoes so my feet didn’t get wet, but my pants got soaked around ankles part. Needless to say pants froze in 1 minute. It was actually funny, I could break them in half.
I could literary broke them in half. Look at the right foot. Shoe isn’t that wide and round 🙂 .
After this, I decided it would probably be a good idea to go back. On the way back I took some pictures and while looking toward sun and through camera viewfinder my eyes watered a bit. This normally isn’t a problem unless your tears freeze each time you blink and therefore glue your eye lids together.
Long shadows over flat surface of the lake. Note how long the shadow is, this photo was taken at 12:13.Sunset over the lake.
It’s been a while since my last post. Last week I was busy with my last assignment from 1st quarter. I finished it on Monday morning (8 AM), after whole night marathon. The worst (best?) part was that when I presented it to professor, few hour later, he didn’t even checked if it works or not, he just looked at some graphs in my report and that was it. Huh I could have saved whole night of programming and just “faked” the results. Though all in all it wasn’t that bad.
In this assignment we were playing/working with some “big” toys. We were using Amazon server farms to create distributed applications. We were actually using real servers, the same ones that NASA uses to calculate new path for mars rovers, for example. As here, you are charged according to how much you use, by rough calculations, on Monday night (alone) I spent around 200$. Thank god that university paid for it. 🙂
It’s really nice if university has a bigger budget and can provide you with some “real” tools that you’ll be using later on when you’ll get a job. Sadly I don’t think in Slovenia something like this would be possible.
So this was on Monday, as you may guess I spent the rest of the day sleeping. As I stated in previous post we finally got about 20cm of snow. Besides being really nice to look at this brings some problems along the way. Tuesday I spent whole day looking for snow shoes in big “shopping” area about 30 (bike) min away from me. Sadly I couldn’t find anything good (looking) enough to buy. On the other hand I did find a shoe from ALPINA. I was really surprised to see it there, firstly I thought they went bankrupted, secondly its first Slovenian brand I’ve seen since coming here. I would sooner expect to see some kind of Slovenian food product instead of shoes up here.
In the end I ended up buying new gloves that should be warm enough for -30 and some tape for my hockey stick (it later turned out that I bought wrong tape, so I had to buy new one today).
When you are riding a bike in this weather you can really feel cold, if you don’t have good enough equipment. Firstly bike sit is usually frozen, if you are lucky wheel is still turning and you can start pedalling without kicking ice from wheels for 5minutes. After few minutes you start feeling cold air coming through gloves (if they are not air sealed, that is), shortly after you pants, below knees, start to freeze (despite mud protector, tiny bits of snow fly off the wheel on to your legs) and lastly you lose feeling in your feet. This can all be avoided if you have good and warm clothing from head to hills of course.
Roads never get cleared of snow.
Earlier this month I volunteered to help at a computer conference that will be held here at LTU at beginning of December. Yesterday we had our first meeting before conference. I’m telling you this, because professor, who is in charge for preparations, paid for our lunch in a restaurant where we had the meeting. I was really surprised about this, we were 10 people, and each meal costs around 10€.
Later that evening we prepared surprise party for a friend. It was really fun and again lots of people prepared some of their (home country) dishes. In retrospect, I spent whole day eating.
Today I went shopping again. This time to city centre. First thing I bought was correct tape for my hockey stick, secondly I finally found some good snow boots that I will probably buy tomorrow, I just need to check another store before to be sure those are the best.
I also need to get a haircut (2 months ago). I’ve been delaying this for so long because of the price. I was complaining to some Swede about the price of hair dresses and he said that hair dresses in Lulea are run in cartel. Haha it’s really funny when you say it like this, on the other hand when you hear price… every hairdresser in town charges exactly 500 SEK (around 50€), and this is not for women, it’s men’s.
-7 °C
9:06 am 
1:29 pm 
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