12:44 Sun.

22 Dec, 2013

Farewell dinner

Last time together

Day 136 , 11 remain

Tags: dinner, farwell, last time together, STUK

Lulea , Sweden

-8 °C

Foggy

9:38 am

1:27 pm

After coming home from Christmas market I only had 1 hour to defrost and get ready for a farewell dinner. Even though, I put hair dryer into my shoes as soon as I came home, I didn’t manage to get them dry in time so I had to wear my summer shoes. It look really weird and felt extremely cold, since they are below ankles, not to mention that evening was record low -19 degrees.

This time the dinner was in STUK not central restaurant, so it was half the price of welcome dinner. When we arrived we had a chance to mingle a bit with people and then we were seated. The program was fun again, this time a lot of students volunteered to do sketch shows so everything was almost 4 hours long.

Again we heard women choir singing us some Christmas songs, but we all agreed the best part was when the slide show with pictures from our stay here started rolling. Whole room was full of emotion, you could feel everyone being a bit sad since the end of our adventure was near. I don’t know anyone that is happy to go home and everyone would love to extend their stay for at least one semester if they could.

The food was ok. The fun part was with waitresses. Since STUK is student’s bar/club/restaurant it is managed by students. All the waitresses were students but for some reason, they were all acting like a professional restaurant. And by that I mean at the beginning of each course they all (around 10 waitresses) came out at the same time. Then they waited at the beginning of the tables until one of them gave signal to start. Even later on when they took our dishes back they always came from the right side etc… Really interesting to see.

After the dinner and shows we had party at STUK. How was it I don’t know, since I went home to defrost some more. Besides I don’t like clubbing that much.

Daft punk show during the farewell dinner

This dinner was beginning of the end, it was the last time we all got together and it is sad that I won’t see some many of them ever again.

Games night & BBQ

Swedish games ...

Day 18 , 129 remain

Tags: BBQ, club, games, STUK, swedish games

Lulea , Sweden

15 °C

Fair

4:46 am

8:17 pm

So I should probably start where I ended last time. Student union up here has its own “club” at the university. You need LTU student card to get inside and drinks are approximately 3 times cheaper than in a normal club. Somehow I managed to go to the BBQ, before going to STUK (name of the club: student something something something) at 11’o clock. I’m not sure if it’s just prejudice or is it real but it felt like Swedes on a dance floor are further apart than what I’m used to in Slovenia. You could almost walk right through the thickest crowd and almost didn’t have to touch anyone.
The drinks are still very expensive a beer is around 35SEK (4€), spirits start from around 100 SEK (10€) per shot. We have a saying in Slovenia “Rola se mi tudi brez alkohola” (quick translation: You can have fun without alcohol) I guess we’ll be practising this a lot. We went home at around 2 am.

On Sunday morning we had a trip planned to a close by shopping centre. Everything still hurt from previous day but somehow I managed to rode a bike for 20min to get to the shopping centre. After forgetting to buy half the stuff I should have bought we went home. This was pretty much it for Sunday as I was too tired to do anything else.

Today morning we had a “welcoming” event at the university. Vice chancellor and all other staff from university gave speeches. The chancellor had a really interesting speech. It was something like this “Don’t forget to study, but while you’re up here go out, have fun, go skiing, on trips, you’re not likely to come to this environment ever again.”.

In the afternoon we played some fun Swedish games.

In the evening we had another BBQ this time near the university. Here we firstly played some kind of Swedish baseball. It’s OK I guess but I prefer normal baseball. After that we went to eat something and play the game with the sticks (see post #11). We also met with a lot of new people. It’s really fun, you just go around and talk to strangers, and you are strangers no more.