Mini Road Trip in Svealand

You think we would take a break after a ten day trip to Russia, but since we arrived in Stockholm and Emilie has a house in Stockholm it was actually more convenient to stay there and recover for a day before heading out to her summer house in Grisslehamn where we had planned to spend a few days for her birthday weekend. Mel met up with us in the evening in Stockholm. Kara, Emilie and I had spent the day sleeping some more and relaxing on her back porch. We had this rental vehicle delivered to Emilie's house and fortunately it was an automatic so I could drive too (helpful as the girls are used to driving on the other side of the road so they were slightly hesitant at first:).

The first few days we toured the lakes and woods around Grisslehamn and had dinner and wine in front of the fire place in the cozy cottage. The next day we walked through some swampy areas and made good use of the wellie boots! It was fun...we ended up being completely silly and goofing around like little girls.


Valborg or the Siste April is the day before May 1st and it is a huge celebration amoung Swedish university students. It usually begins around noon and the students sit in the park and have barbeques and drink beer. The result is a bunch of really drunk uni students around 5 in the afternoon. The shocking thing was that when we arrived around 4 we were walking through the park and there were just huge amounts of rubbish everywhere and there werent just drunk students but also old drunk alumni men (who did not wait for the toilet but chose the nearest tree!). I have not seen anything like it. After finding a nice spot on the hill we joined in the festivites by drinking beer and cider. Above left you can see how I have mastered the act of standing on two beer cans without crushing them :) Uppsala is a nice city but we still all agreed that we like Lund better, the only thing missing in Lund was a river like the one that runs through the center of Uppsala.

This last photo is of the old town in Gävle. It is I think the oldest wooden town center according to the Lonely Planet travel guide. There isn't much to this city but its noteworthy as the Gateway to Norrland and also the northernmost city in Sweden I travelled to.

Moscow, Russia

The capitol of Russia! After an overnight bus trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow we arrived around 10 in the morning after a breakfast stop at the Zelonograd McDonalds...which is apparently one of the biggest ones in the world. I opted for the convenience store next door. My best advice is do not get the pastry that looks like it has chocolate filling in it, they are actually poppy seeds and its a bit rich for that early in the morning! Anyways the photo above is me in front of St. Basil's Cathedral. It in the Red Square and has recently been repainted which is why it is still so brilliantly colored. The Kremlin shown with all the magnificent onion domes is enclosed in a triangular wall. Inside are the main government offices of Mr. Putin. On the first day we took a bus tour of the city (bad planning after having spent the previous night on the bus its really the last thing you want to be doing....but oh well) and on the second we had a guided tour of the Kremlin. Moscow was interesting but I found that most of the 'touristy' spots basically center around the Red Square. The rest of the city does not seem near as interesting or beautiful as St. Petersburg. Nonethess after an evening spent at the Opera in the Kremlin Theater (tickets were only 140 Rubles each which is approximately 5 dollars) watching an Opera I unfortunatly don't know the name of given that the title was also in Russian and the lady at the ticket office could not help with a translation, we went to the Red Square.

After wandering around for a bit we decided to go back to the hotel (pictured above). The trick with this one was that even though we looked up the metro route we got off at the wrong stop (didn't succeed at matching the cyrillic alphabet letters well enough!). It was ok though because we located our hotel and started walking in that direction...turned out it wasn't far at all. However, as we got closer nothing appeared familiar and the area felt a little less central. The building we were walking to wasn't our hotel after all, fair mistake considering this hotel Ukrainia is one of six identical structures in the city of Moscow. Why? Stalin liked the design of the building so much that he had it replicated six times, one of which is the hotel another a business and yet another Moscow State University. We gave up on trying to work the metro once again and just stuck our hand out by the road. It took only a few seconds for two cars to show up, a little bargaining to be done about the price before we were in the cars and back at the hotel. All in all it was a great experience to have been to Russia and back! The photo below was taken by a friend of mine on the ferry ride from Finland back to Sweden, wish I would have seen this one live but I was catching up on much needed sleep in the cabin :)

St. Petersburg, Russia

Of all the places I thought I might visit I honestly never thought I might make it to Russia! The idea wasn't mine but was recommended to me by my friends Kara and Emilie fairly early on in the second semester. I did not hesitate but immediately said that I would join and I'm glad I did. The ten day road trip to Russia was with a Finnish travel company called Niinimäki. Kara, Emilie, me and six other exchange students from Lund travelled to Linköping and then got on the bus which went by ferry from Stockholm to Turku. From here we bussed to St. Petersburg where we waited forever at the border crossing because the Russians had implemented some new fee and more paper work (they really like stamps!). When we arrived in St. Petersburg it finally became clear where we were. We had only seen countryside for the last 10 hours but the city was absolutely gorgeous! The Neva River flows through it and there are also many canals.
This photo taken from my hotel room shows St. Petersburg at night. Below is a pic showing the St. Peters Fortress. Ice was melting from a large lake north of the city which is why there were random pieces of ice floating down the river, yet still people were bathing in the river as you can see if you look closely.
Another one of my favorite places to see was the Hermitage museum. It was as beautiful from the inside as it was on the outside. It was actually just as interesting to see the architecture of the building as the artwork inside.

The photo to the right shows one of the many trams in St. Petersburg. We were told that this city has the most extensive tram system in the world with over 400 km of tracks in the city alone. The subway system is also really interesting, it was about nine stories down (or so it seems) had the fastest escalators and the most intricate stations I have ever seen. Despite all of this we still opted for the taxi (ordered by holding a hand out in a street which causes a vehicle to stop in less than 30 seconds) more often because it was soo cheap! A ten minute ride only cost like 9 dollars and I would like to point out that I have never driven in a cab so fast and crazy.
Finally a bit of educational sightseeing! This is a statue of Mendelev and the periodic table he derived all those years ago, both a source of intrigue and misery for me! There was a lot of construction going on on the main street because they were preparing for the G8 summit meeting.

Easter Weekend

Easter weekend was a nice time to spend some time with friends that were not able to go home. Kara came over and Sofia and I had organized a little Easter Dinner. Sofia's family lived in town so she decided to have another dinner with some of her friends. The Easter buffet was essentially the same as the one we had for Christmas so we knew what to make, though there was some discussion as to what else one should make for the dinner. Before dinner we spent some time cooking and coloring eggs as well as cutting out some shapes for the påskris (easter sticks that you decorate with brightly colored feathers). That weekend Lily and I cycled out to Häckeberga Slott which ended up taking us about 4 hours roundtrip. We packed a picnic and met up with Kara, Emilie and her boyfriend Iain at the Söderskog Nationalpark just north of Dalby for a walk through the forest before we headed on the the castle. We had nice weather although Spring should have long arrived by now, but as you can see most things still look pretty dead and not blooming!

Krängardagen

Krängardagen is the official day on which the Karneval Newspaper (seen in photo :) was sold all over cities in southern Sweden. The different groups in the Karneval each went to different destinations. My group, Området, went to Kristianstad which is a city about an hour away by train. The story behind the photo is this; my friend Pierre thought it might be a fun way to sell newspapers if he put me on his shoulders and asked the people to buy the newspaper so they could buy my plane ticket back to Texas. The funny thing about this strategy was that is actually worked! Selling the whole day was slow, but during those few minutes we sold about 5 newspapers. The rest of the day consisted of walking around the town and going for coffee before hopping back on the train to Lund. Turns out that out day ended up being more excited than most groups because apparently many of them stayed in Lund and it was tough selling because there were so many students trying to sell that paper. After arriving back in Lund we all went home and took a nap before meeting up again at the Expedition for pizza, cheap alcohol and a good pre-party before heading out to Krängarfesten tent that had been taking up most of the Kemicentrum's parking lot.

Tour de Chambre

This is a popular party among student corridors at Lund. Its probably done elsewhere as well but I personally dont know about it :) As you might guess this is a really quick way to get drunk if you are not careful about how much you have of each person's drink. I'm not sure which room we started in but I do know that mine was one of the earlier ones so it wasn't too crazy yet! I had made a pitcher of a fruit drink that was kind of my own creation....it contained almost a full bottle of Barcardi, ananas/apelsin juice, cranberry juice and fresh cut pineapples and mandarins. It was really good so I was quite happy it worked out as a last minute thing. The really funny thing was most people were running late as was I, due mostly to the fact that everyone in the corridor seemed to be waiting on the one vacuum cleaner :) Of course, everyone at some point during the day could be oberserved cleaning for the evening festivities. I think when I came home I saw at least three people with piles of shoes outside their doors because they were cleaning!
The evening started in the kitchen where we all had like a little warm up drink and get together to decide where we would start and to make sure everyone was there and ready to go. All in all it was a fun evening. In the photo above its me and Elsa and the one below is of Lisa and Sofia. These three girls are the ones I probably had the most contact with because we always either saw each other in the kitchen at the same time and had a lot of common stuff to talk about. Elsa also studies chemistry and was the only person younger than me living on the corridor (only by a month or so). Lisa spent a year in Australia and Sofia worked for several months in Dublin so we often shared stories of experiences abroad....theirs in reflection, mine as they were folding out at the moment :)

This photo was taken at Lunds Nation during Stephan's last night (far right). I did of lot of partying and traveling with these guys. The night before we had all had a pretty big pre-party at Stefan's place before heading to Hallands for another great Friday night party... I think all of us at the party ended up dealing with a pretty big hangover the following day. We ended up going out this evening anyways though because it was Stephan's good bye. The photo is actually decent for once since none of us really had any drink that night except some water! Anyways, just thought I would share that experience because for some reason it sticks out as being sort of memorable!