18:26 Mon.

13 Jan, 2014

Ice skating and Hockey

Woop woop!

Day 158 , -12 remain

Tags: coop arena, hockey, ice skating, Luleå

Lulea , Sweden

-14 °C

Cloudy

9:24 am

1:57 pm

Being so warm lately I was a bit worried about skating over the lakes, although I think the ice must have been more than 30cm deep. But still it’s not easy to go on a lake when you see water all around (upper layers of ice melt, while below there is thick layer of solid ice still). So we decided to go to a hockey arena which is open for public (free) multiple times per week.

Veronika did surprisingly good job on skates, she didn’t even fall despite me being prepared to capture the moment on my camera. 🙁 Too bad we didn’t have time to try out hockey.

On Monday there was hockey match in the arena next door. We decided to go and see it. We bought the cheapest “sits”. We were actually standing and not sitting, later on it proved to be a good decision. During the game while all the swedes on the sits were just sitting and maybe clapping from time to time, here on stands people were actually yelling and cheering for Luleå team.

This was the first time I (we) saw hockey game in real life (not on TV). It was really good, fast and exciting. Lulea team is one of the best teams in Sweden, and Sweden if I’m not mistaken won World (or something) cup last year, so we really were watching a good game.

Our team (Luleå) won, naturally! =)

Busy

End is here

Day 132 , 15 remain

Tags: end, hockey, leaving, not working, project

Lulea , Sweden

1 °C

Clear

9:51 am

1:03 pm

Haven’t written anything in a while, not because I don’t have anything to write about but because I’ve been incredibly busy last few days (weeks). I had a project presentation last Monday, seminar presentation this Monday and we are rushing as fast as we can to finish our last project as soon as possible. We were hoping we will finish it until today, when one of group mates is leaving Lulea, but sadly we missed this deadline.

As usually when you are in a hurry nothing works as it should and I’ve got yet another confirmation to avoid 3rd party APIs when it comes to programming. Not that we choose to use it, it was mandatory, but still the thing is less documented that the code I write, it only works on my computer, so instead of programming simultaneously with 3 people, only 1 is programming and the other two are looking at my screen giving suggestions and comments.

Anyway I’m so fed up with it that I just want to finish minimal requirements and get a pass on it, instead of working on those extra features to get better grade.

In other news as you may have guessed majority of people is leaving this week. So usually when you see people around they all look kind of sad, be it for leaving Lulea or leaving all newly acquired friends behind.

For me it’s something in between. My time has not yet came, though some of my friends will leave shortly. Unlike majority of others I have Veronika’s visit coming next week, which is really keeping my spirits up and adding views to blog’s statistics, since I’m checking every few hours how much is it still left on the timer that I’ve posted in one of the previous posts.

Lately we’ve had some really nasty weather here. It’s gotten surprisingly hot, around 0 or even 1 degree, so snow is starting to melt, on the other hand it has snowed really hard in previous few days so now we have ice and snow everywhere. Thankfully Swedes are putting gravel on the ice so it’s not that slipper and they are doing this almost in real time, I saw one truck sprinkling little rocks yesterday at 4 am in the morning (what I was doing up at that time is a story for another post).

Hm so this is becoming quite boring, wall of text with no pictures again. Today we had our last training of hockey so here is a picture from there.

Our hockey team - well most of it at least. Last picture on last training we had. — Our hockey team – well most of it at least. Last picture on last training we had.

One more thing before I forgot. Today I’ve sold my hockey equipment and bike to a friend, who is going to resell it in next semester. So from now on I’ll be walking a lot again.

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€.