The Final Post

Today is my last full day in Stockholm.  It's hard to believe that this time tomorrow I'll be on a plane heading back to America.  I've had a wonderful time in Sweden.  I'm going to miss all the friends I've made here.  I'm also going to miss living next door to a forest preserve and a beach, and this city in general.  Stockholm is my favorite city that I've been to (though I haven't been to many).  I won't miss sharing my kitchen with strangers.

Only packing and a 9 hour plane ride until I am home for the rest of the summer.  I can't wait to see all my friends and family back home!

Svalbard Synopsis

Hey guys!  So since it's been over a week since I was in Svalbard, I figured it was about time to write about it.  I probably can't give a good overview of it anymore, so you can check out this blog: http://eucenterillinois-abroad.blogspot.se/ instead.  This is where people from my class post about each day, so they're really detailed.  You'll have to sort through some other guy's blog too, but most of the posts are from us.  My favorite part of the trip was probably the glacier hike (shown on the right), even though I loved it all!  I'm planning on going back to the Arctic when I retire so that I can see an actual polar bear.

Since we got back, I've pretty much just been relaxing since Svalbard was so intense.  We have to write papers in groups of 3 that are 7000-7500 words.  I finished my part at about 2,200 words a couple days ago, so I'm free of that until we write the conclusion.  On Wednesday, a group of us went to Drottningholm, the palace where the royal family actually lives when they are in Stockholm.  We didn't pay to get a tour of the inside, but the grounds were HUGE so there was lots to look at for free.  It was a very beautiful place and I would imagine it would be a nice place to live except for the crazy amounts of tourists.  I wonder what it was like there before the tourists...Here's a picture of me in the garden at Drottningholm.

Yesterday I was going to head for Barcelona for the remainder of the trip, but unfortunately my travel buddy got really sick, and we ended up not going.  I guess I'll just have to come back to Europe another time!  For now, I'm enjoying the time that I have left with the people who are still here.  Today we are planning on going to see the Olympic Stadium from the 1912 Olympics, find a beach in the city, and then watch the opening ceremony later tonight.

Last 10 Days and I'm about to leave!

So much has happened in the last 10 days, so I'll do a quick list and then elaborate on anything especially exciting.  You can also look at the pictures can be seen on my facebook, and I give you props if you make it through all of my excessive pictures.

• Natural History Museum
• Out with Sofia

A few of us went with Sofia, a Swedish girl in our class, to a restaurant/bar just outside of Stockholm's city center.  It was a really nice place where you could sit outside and get a view of Gamla Stan and the rest of the city.  I got some great pictures of the "sunset"

• Indian Buffet
• Skeppsholmen/Kastellholmen

These last two were done on the same day.  The Indian Buffet was in a really tiny building in Gamla Stan, so to conserve space they had the food in drawers in a heating cabinet.  It was really strange, but the food was good.  Afterwards we went for a walk on Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen, a couple of small islands next to Gamla Stan.  Kastellholmen has a small castle-type building and was originally used as a military base, but now the two islands just have museums.

• City Hall

Stockholm's City Hall is AMAZING.  They have the dinner for the Nobel Prize presentations here.  There is a room that is entirely covered with 23.5 karat gold.  It took 10 kg to cover the room with the mosaic pieces.   There was a lot of symbolism in the building too, such as the three chandeliers in the "Tre Kronor" room.  The word for chandelier is the same as the word for crown (kronor) in Swedish, and the Three Crowns is a symbol of Sweden.

• Nordic Museum
• Ice Bar

This is a MUST for any tourist of Stockholm.  This bar is entirely made of ice, even your cups!  They give you a coat and gloves to wear, and you stay in the bar for about an hour, which is plenty because it's cold!  Every year the Ice Bar is rebuilt with ice form northern Sweden.

• Djurgarden

Derek, Noel, and I went for an innocent walk around Djurgarden, a HUGE park/forest right in the city of Stockholm.  Djurgarden used to be the royal hunting grounds, but is now just a park.  We ended up walking for almost 5 hours because we wandered almost to the end of the island, but we saw a lot of cool things along the way.  We found the most AMAZING playground ever, were practically able to touch a swan, and saw some hot air balloons take off.  We ended our walk with a run to Gamla Stan for delicious ice cream. 

• Uppsala

9 of us took a day trip to Uppsala, Sweden.  Here we saw Uppsala Cathedral, Uppsala University, the Silver Bible, botanical gardens, Uppsala Slott, and Gamla Uppsala.  Everything was so beautiful.  In Gamla Uppsala we saw the burial mounds, where people (probably ancient kings) were buried in huge mounds in the earth, kind of like a pyramid, but way simpler.  There was also the old church, which used to be the main church of Uppsala.  I liked it because it was like a mini version of the Cathedral.  There was also an old-style graveyard around the church. We were lucky because while we were in the Cathedral, a brass quintet was performing, and in the old church they were practicing the organ.  I took videos of both, so you should go check it out.

I guess I sort of talked about everything that's happened anyway, haha.  Tomorrow we leave for Svalbard/Spitsbergen.  I'm so excited!!!! It will be a long day of travelling because we have to take 3 flights and there's a long layover for one of them, but it will be so worth it to get this chance to go to the Arctic circle.  I just wish I didn't have to write a paper when I got back :(. 

Midsommar and More!

I should really update this more often so that I don't have to cover as much each time I do it.

Friday the 22nd was Midsommar, one of Sweden's biggest holidays.  You can watch a video about it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ZLpGOOA1Q.  Basically everything in that video is entirely true!  We did not have a sudden downpour, though.  A few of us made the flower crowns and we all danced around the pole.  It was a great day.  Elin, a Swedish student, lives in the same housing area as us now, so she came with us when we celebrated in Bredang, a suburb of Stockholm.  We got to see people in traditional clothing do the more complicated dances too. Here's a picture of Elin and Rachel being elephants!

Later that night we had a fire down at the beach.  On Saturday, we went out to dinner at Vapiano's, an Italian restaurant.  The food was delicious, and the atmosphere wonderful.  I wish it was easier to find traditional Swedish food here, but there is too much influence from the immigrants.

On Saturday, a group of us took a tour of the Royal Palace.  We also saw the Treasury, the Tre Kronor Museum and Gustav III's antique museum.  All were amazing and beautiful, but pictures were not allowed.  While we were at the palace, we saw the Changing of the Guard Ceremony.  The band from the Swedish Navy marches in and has a sort of concert while the guard changes.  It was really cool.  I took videos, so I'll figure out how to put those up at some point.

Today a few of us went to Hammarby Sjostad, a place on the outskirts of Stockholm that is being rebuilt into the ultimate sustainable city.  It was really cool!  Basically what they did here was tear it all down and start over from scratch.  You can find details about it here.  http://www.hammarbysjostad.se/inenglish/pdf/HS_miljo_bok_eng_ny.pdf.  If I were to live in Stockholm, this is where I would probably choose to live.  Because I love sustainability!  There are very few parking spaces, so as to encourage people to bike or use the public transit.  You can even take a boat as transportation! Sadly not included in my SL access card.  My favorite part was the trash receptacles, haha.  Here they are:

Beginning of the Arctic

Yesterday we had our first class that is specifically on the Arctic.  And we got to meet the Swedish students!  Even though they're all masters or PhD students, the class doesn't seem too daunting....yet.  Not all of the new students are from Sweden either, one is from Spain and a couple are from the US. Two of the Swedes are also female engineers, so I'm looking forward to getting to know them.

Most of the work we have to do for this class is reading, but we also take turns writing an entry for a blog on the Illinois European Union Center's Website.  My partner's name is Aaron, and yesterday was our turn to do an entry.  You can check out our blog here http://eucenterillinois-abroad.blogspot.se/2012/06/politics-campfires-and-peace-prizes.html

June 13-16

Not too much has happened the last few days.  On Wednesday we went to Skansen, a sort of living museum.  Skansen is set up like a mini Sweden, so that you get all of the history there has been, and they are all in the correct location.  Such as the Sami Camp is in the northern part of the park, and in real life the Sami are from the north.  While we were at the outdoor museum, it decided to pour rain on us, so had to wait for a half an hour under an overhang until it stopped raining.  Afterwards it was pretty nice, though.  We went to one building where a woman taught us about how fibers are taken from the flax plant and then spun into thread to be woven into clothes.  It was quite the complicated process.

On Thursday we went and bought a cheap frisbee so that we would have something to play with.  Then I went with a few people to a thrift store, which wasn't quite as thrifty as one in America, so I didn't buy anything.  Then later, when we were at the beach playing frisbee there were a couple people skinny dipping....at 6pm.....so that was interesting.

Friday we went out to eat at a bbq place.  I kept myself from getting the unlimited ice cream bar, even though it looked delicious.  It's hard to find authentic Swedish food here because of the influence of immigrants here.  In class we learned that in the 90s one in five Swedes were foreign-born.  And this all happened suddenly.  After dinner we tried to go watch the football game in the park, but we were too late to find a place to see, so we just went back to our dorms to watch it on TV.

Today we had originally planned to go to Uppsala, but the weather didn't agree, so we went to the Nobel Museum instead.  The museum was interesting, but it was kind of small.  They had an exhibit where a photographer had done interviews with some of the more previous recipients of the prizes.  The recipients were told to draw their discovery on a poster sized piece of paper and then they had their picture taken.  The way that the photographer did these interviews showed the humorous sides of the scientists, so it was fun to look at the pictures.  Now I have to write a 500 word essay about the history of Scandinavia and read about 100 pages for Monday, so I have a fun weekend ahead of me!

First Couple Days

The last few days have been pretty relaxing.  On Saturday I went to get some groceries since I'll be staying in one place for a while now.  The cheapest store here is called Lidl, and it's set up EXACTLY like an Aldi.  No joke.  The only problem is that they don't sell peanut butter, and I'm almost halfway through the jar I brought :(.    In the evening we decided to go see a movie at Filmstaden Sergel, the biggest theater in the area.  We had planned on seeing Snowwhite and the Huntsman at 8:50, but when we got there around 8:15 we found that there were only 16 seats left and we had 13 people, so we chose the 11:45 showing instead.  The weird thing about the movie theater is that you order your tickets on a computer and you have to reserve which seats you want as well.  To get into the bathrooms you had to enter a code that was on your ticket to unlock the door.  And the theaters were so huge that they had balconies.  It was quite the experience.  When we got out of the movie it was after 2 am, but it was bright enough out that we all felt wide awake and had trouble falling asleep.

Sunday a few of us went to Woz Cup 2012, the 7th World Cup for Segway Polo.  Yea, that's right, people play polo on segways.  It was probably the strangest thing that I had ever seen in my life.  We also went to this little beach that is down the road from our dorms and worked on our homework for class.  It's not warm enough to swim, but it's nice to be out in the open air.

Monday (yesterday) was our first day of class.  Class goes from 9-12 but we get a half hour coffee break in the middle.  We went to a 711 for our coffee break, where they sadly don't have slurpees, but they do have iced cappuccinos.  In the evening our professor took us for a walking tour of Gamla Stan, the old town of Stockholm.  There are lots of historical buildings in this area, including the Royal Palace and the Nobel Prize building (in front of which 82 people were once beheaded).  We also walked down the narrowest street in Stockholm, which is barely wider than my shoulders.

Today after class we went to the Vasa Museum.  This is a museum for a ship that sunk on its maiden voyage in 1628, but was found in 1961.  The ship is the only almost fully intact ship from the 17th Century that has ever been salvaged.  It was really cool to see all the intricate carvings that went into the construction of the ship.  After the museum we went to dinner at a cafeteria-style restaurant where I got my first meal of Swedish Meatballs!  They were soooooo good!   They also gave you bread with your meal, and I may have brought some home with me haha