Today I’ve been working on blog some more. I’ve almost finished gallery, you can’t enlarge photos yet, but hopefully I’ll manage to do that tomorrow.
On the other news I’ve finally managed to buy a bike. I’ve got it from some Swedish guy for 500 SEK. He said he’ll buy it back in December when I’m going home, so total price will be cheaper still. The bike is basic with only 1 gear but it has a light (which will come in handy in few months) and I got a bike lock for free. It’s a good bike for price although I’ll probably struggle with it when it comes to slopes, thankfully there aren’t that many around here.
When I came home I met my new roommate. He’s from France so I’ll probably be able to buy another bridge or a river (internal joke).
The days up here are getting short really fast. Now you can barely see horizon at the darkest of the night and the sunset is well before 9pm already. This morning (or rather middle of night) the sky was coloured with really nice blue gradient. Exposure was around 10s, so the picture looks much lighter than it was in reality, but the sky is approximately the same colour, although I don’t know where those concentric circles came from.
Night sky in Luleå
At around 11am I and my only (for now) roommate, whose name I finally know, went to the university where we had “get to know each other” picnic. Well it wasn’t really picnic for say … When we were to go outside it started to rain so we sat in the lobby and talked, while too many people were eating salads (come on, you don’t eat salad on picnic 🙂 ). After about an hour the sky cleared so we were able to go outside. We went on a nearby field where we played some (Swedish) games.
Oh yeah, and for socializing part, I found out there are really a lot of Germans here with Erasmus and I met another Slovenian. It was quite funny actually as I didn’t know he was Slovenian and all of a sudden someone says something to me in Slovenian, I must have looked confused because everyone laughed then and he repeated sentence in English, it turns out we actually go to the same faculty in Slovenia.
Winning teamSwedes taking care of us. Look at the hair. 🙂
Later this evening another Slovenian, this one I know, came here. He’s name is Nejc.
Noting much going on today. I’ve been working on page split for way to long but now it’s finally working. I still have some ideas on how to improve it but it will have to wait.
On the other hand I’ve heard from Veronika that she’s got a job at bank. While this is great news it also means she won’t be able to come and visit me as we previously planned. That just sucks, I’m missing her already and it’s only been one and a half week. Maybe we’ll be able to go on a short trip during Christmas break.
Yesterday was raining whole day so I didn’t do much. I worked on blog and watched some films. At around 8 PM raining stopped so I decided to go on a close by hill to take some shots of drying landscape. The sun was just setting down so I got some really nice shots and I took one from where you can see my building and university in the distance.
Lulea’s centre in the distance.
Luleå city center from afar.Sunset road
You can see my house and university in the distance if you look closely.
University and my dorm
Today I went for a walk around northern part of the area (where I haven’t been yet). The interesting part started when I decided to take a shortcut through a forest. Everything went well at first, there were a lot of mushrooms, berries and moss was covering the ground.
MushroomsMushrooms
When I came closer to the shore the grounds started to get wetter and wetter until I was stuck in the middle of the bog. I was in that stinky mud up to my knees and to top it off a cloud of mosquitos came from nowhere. It took me about an hour to free myself from that mud and to get to the closest road. I was all covered in this reddish mud that stinks really badly from all the decomposing stuff in the bog. The worst part was I was about an hour down the main road from home. It must have been quite a site for all the cars passing by to see some guy walking covered in red mud from toes to head.
Forest pathInfamous bog
When I finally came home I took the longest shower of my life and started to clean my cloths. I needed to wash my pants twice. Now I’m drying (with hair dryer) my shoes for about 2h and they are still wet.
Tomorrow I’ll probably stay at home because my shoes will be, by the looks of it, still wet. Hopefully I will be able to finally start working on gallery for blog and I need to split posts to multiple pages, only images on them are around 20MB at the moment.
Today’s one week since I’m here in Luleå. I can’t believe how fast it went by, I still feel like I arrived yesterday. The main reason I know it’s been so long is because days are getting shorter amazingly fast. Today the day is shorter for about an hour than it was last week. I don’t think it’s possible to see horizon throughout whole night anymore, although I’ve had some cloudy nights lately so I can’t say for sure.
Anyway this week has been fun, I did a lot of walking, exploring and took tons of photos. I wouldn’t mind if the weather would be few degrees higher, but that’s how it is up here in the north. I still haven’t managed to get a bike, hopefully I’ll find one soon.
After waking up this morning I went for a short run around the Björkskatan. Predictably I found out that I was out of shape although I didn’t break a sweat (guess why). After that Sofi called me and told me that king of Sweden is in Luleå and that we should go see him. We went to the old town (Gammelstad) where he would make an appearance.
I was hoping that he would be wearing a funny hat (example: King of Sweden) but no such luck. There were a lot less people there than I would have expect, probably because old town is quite far from centre and he was visiting a lot of places all over the city. I’ve managed to take some pictures of him. And yes, now I can say I was this close to the king of Sweden.
King of SwedenKing of Sweden
After that he went in to the old church and sadly, we weren’t allowed to go in with him. We used this time for a tour of Gammelstad. After king came out of the church we were allowed to go in again. The church is really old and nice inside, I took some pictures and then we were off to a coffee shop nearby.
Old doorChurch in Gammelstad
Ordering at the coffee shop was a bit strange for me as you firstly had to pay for what you wanted and then took/poured it yourself from the table nearby. I had the most amazing cupcake in my life and Sofi had some warm sandwiches that looked more like salad than sandwich.
Cupcake
After that Sofi took me to a shop where I could buy shower curtains (yes I was missing one if I didn’t mentioned it before so every time I took a shower the bathroom was flooded). I bought a pillow as well. To my surprise this two thing were quite cheap (or at least I think they were) costing around 12€ in total.
After I came home a guy came to fix my window. It wasn’t a big fix he only greased the hinges of handle and the thing somehow started to work. Well I’m not complaining as long as it continues to work.
Today and tomorrow there is some sort of festival in the town. I was too tired to go today but if it won’t rain tomorrow I’ll probably go take a look.
14 °C
4:29 am 
8:36 pm 
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