07:07 Tue.

1 Oct, 2013

Back to Luleå

Haven't slept in ages

Day 54 , 93 remain

Tags: bus, lofoten islands, norway, trip

Lulea , Sweden

0 °C

Mostly Cloudy

6:40 am

6:00 pm

Now (at 7 AM) I’ve arrived from a 4 days long trip to Norway. The trip was amazing and I think worth every penny, though it was very exhausting. In 4 days I think I only slept for 15h altogether. For some reason I couldn’t sleep on the bus toward islands, on the way back I was so tired that I managed to shut my eyes for around 4h.

I’ll go in to more detail in future posts (during weekend) when I’ll upload a big load of picture (I took around 500 of them). For now it’s enough to know that islands are really as beautiful as they say and that Norway is incredibly expensive country.

2 teaser pictures.
For now I’ll let you wonder what it is. Let me just say it’s not a dog or a cat.

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Thus says Jani Bizjak

01:41 Fri.

27 Sep, 2013

Snow!

First snow in September!

Day 50 , 97 remain

Tags: first snow, group project, lofoten islands, norway, snow, trip

Lulea , Sweden

6 °C

Mostly Cloudy

6:22 am

6:17 pm

Oh I hate group projects so much. Another sleepless night, finishing group project … alone.

Enough complaining for now (or I’ll be here till morning). Today (oh I mean yesterday) morning was really cold. A teacher told me that at 7 AM it was still snowing, sadly I missed this spectacular event (for September) as I was sleeping till 9 AM. By that time snowfall has stopped, temperature raised to 1.5 degree above zero, and whatever snow (if any) stuck to the ground melted shortly. Strangely temperature continued to raise throughout the day (and night) to now warm 7 degrees. Ah so much for snow this night …

The temperatures dropped quite a lot this week. I’ve been going to school with cap and gloves for quite some time now, but lately I’ve started to feel cold even in this. Maybe it’s time to upgrade my winter jacket.

Today evening I’m going on a trip to Norway for 4 days. We’ll visit Lofoten islands. They are supposed to be very beautiful (I won’t check pictures beforehand, because I don’t want to spoil first impression). Even though Lofoten is beyond polar circle the temperatures are milder thanks to the warmth of Gulf Stream. Even though to reach it we will pass over mountains where I expect temperatures well below zero. It shall be fun.

I will return from the trip on Tuesday, hopefully with great experience and tons of pictures to share.

For now, here are pictures from another group dinner yesterday and some nicely collared forest as seen from my window few days ago.

Tomatoes and eggs, it's actually quite good. — Tomatoes and eggs, it’s actually quite good.

Noodles with cabbage and Swedish meatballs made by Liff and Allen

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Thus says Jani Bizjak

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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Thus says Jani Bizjak

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.

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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Thus says Jani Bizjak