23:55 Mon.
26 Aug, 2013

Swedish games ...

Day 18 , 129 remain
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.

Swedish games
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.

21:26 Tue.
20 Aug, 2013

Meeting new folks

Day 12 , 135 remain
Lulea , Sweden
15 °C
Fair
4:25 am
8:38 pm

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
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 team
Winning team
Swedes
Swedes taking care of us. Look at the hair. 🙂

Later this evening another Slovenian, this one I know, came here. He’s name is Nejc.