vi ses lund

Having cleaned my room from top to bottom, taking down all my posters and my Great Wall of Travel Tickets I have left behind Sparta, my humble yet grotty student residence, to stay at Penny's for my last night in Lund. Now I'm writing from Penny's half broken computer, which is flashing colours at me, so apologies if post is slightly disjointed. Today we both set off for France on seperate busses- me to Paris to visit Fiona, my Scottish lass and her family for NYE, and Penny to go to the Alps for a skiing extravaganza with assorted buddies and her swedish mentor Victor.

We attempted to stay up all night last night so that the next 19 hours on our busses wouldn't be so painful. But what started out as a quiet night turned into a bit of a party, with Victor and Nikki coming around and drinking the bottle of home-made Swedish style vodka. It's a crazy recipe - get a bag full of salty liquorice, feed it piece by piece into a bottle of cheap Polish vodka; let sit for four days; strain and drink. The result is a liquid so heart-stoppingly feral - vodka saturated with dissolved sugar and salt - that if you happened to be smoking a cigarette at the same time your body would probably explode in an inferno of unhealthiness. We headed to Victor's at about 4am for a late night viewing of Europtrip to get a feel for our impending journey. Now we are all medicated on asprin and about to head to the hamburger stand.

So i am living out of my backpack - or Thomas the Belgium's backpack - for the next month EXACTLY. I arrive back to Lund on the 29th of January. I am a mixture of apprehensive and excitement, but i know that I'm more prepared than my Norway trip, so everything should be fine. I'm really looking forward to eastern europe, i reckon it'll be quite different to what i've seen so far. My suspicions were confirmed by a comment on a hostel booking website: "Everyone should come to Bratislava once in a lifetime if only to remind yourself how lucky you are to live in the West". I can imagine the type of person who would write this comment (spoilt, American, loud, possibly overweight, likes steak). But you know. I've also been trying to brush up on my French. It's pretty worrying - whenever I open my mouth, i end up speaking Swedish by mistake.

Ok, well i'm pretty tired and i really can't think much more, but i promise to write regularly and keep you informed of my adventures.

luv y'all.

silent night at Sparta

Merry christmas to one and all, wherever you are in this wonderful world. Christmas in Lund doesn't really feel like "christmas". I'm really missing the week-long McGowan family fiesta, which includes the Indiella christmas concert, the nativity play, tennis, kris kringle, swimming in Grandpa's dam, deep and meaningfuls with my aunts, being asked about my career future by my uncles, the total fire ban, Bloody Marys with mum from morning to midnight on Christmas day, midnight mass at Sacred Heart....ahhhh, i'm getting sentimental already!

I've just gotten back from the Lund Domkyrkan midnight mass, which I attended with my fellow Australians Nikki and Penny. The mass was good, and quite the cultural event - like many Australians, Christian Swedes only attend once or twice a year. This means that they really don't know when to stand up or sit down or what to say, and everyone has a slightly awkward air. Like the Sacred Heart Mass of Wodonga, the first ten minutes or so are really fun and interesting. Then the novelty wears off very rapidly and by the end of the sermon you're making faces at your friends and remembering all the reasons that you hate mass. It's even worse when it's all in Swedish! We slipped out during communion to go home and watch romantic comedies on TV. Decline of society, etc, yeah i know.

In all likelihood, Penny, Nikki and I are the only remaining exchange students in the whole of Lund. We're definitely the last ones in our respective accomodations, which makes for a rather lonely existence. It's both a blessing and a curse - finally i have sole control of our corridor's scooter and can ride it to the kitchen; raid other people's cupboards for abandoned food; study for hours without interruption and go to the toilet without locking the door or even shutting it sometimes. But I've lost all motivation to do the dishes. And it's good knowing that people are next door in case you need a chat or other form of procrastination.

We're trying to find ways to keep ourselves distracted though. On Friday we caught the bus to a lovely little town called Bjarred, where I had the most intense sauna experience I have ever experienced. Picture this: a crystal-clear night over the Baltic sea. A picturesque saunahouse at the end of a kilometre-long jetty. A completely dark sauna (something happened with the lights) full of naked Swedish women, overlooking the twinkling lights of Copenhagen. Then the ritual: you shed your towel, run naked out of the sauna into the freezing night air, hurl down the steps and jump straight into the choppy unforgiving waters of the Baltic. After much bad language, you pull yourself out and sprint back into the sauna. Repeat ad infinitum. It was such an invigorating experience that we're going back there on Wednesday, when Nikki's parents come to town. It HAS to be good for the constitution.

Preperations continue for our Chrismukkah. Sweden, being the ecologically-friendly country that it is, has a great way of getting people to recycle. Every time someone buys a bottle or a can, there's a refundable tax charged on it (PANT). You drink your drink, then take the vessel back to the supermarket and feed it into this colourful machine embedded into the wall. It then gives you a receipt that's refundable next time you shop. GENIUS! One of the upsides of being the last people around is that we can take sole advantage of the semester's worth of hard partying students. So today we took all the cans and bottles from Nikki's place to the local supermarket to fund our feast. It was quite the hilarious experience - I took some photos and a video of Penny if you're savvy with the multimedia.

Armed with around 250kr of feel-good refunded money from the cans, I scoured the meat section for a turkey. I forgot how much I miss the meat section of the supermarket...Sweden's expensive prices have made financial vegetarians out of many of us. I found my turkey and was pleasantly surprised at its price - 62kr, about $12AUD. I assumed that it was on special/spirit of christmas kind of thing. Unfortunately when I got the receipt, Nikki pointed out that it was actually 62kr PER KILOGRAM.

One semester's worth of drinking paid for one. lousy. bird.

I rode back to Nikki's with a turkey worth around $50 AUD on my backseat. (view transportation arrangement here). There is now intense pressure on me not to, uh, fuck up my part of our Chrismukkah celebrations. This is why I am awake at 2.45am on Christmas morn, scouring the internet for stuffing recipes and wondering if the sky will fall if our turkey doesn't possess a "pop-up thermometer"(?). I also just realised that turkeys take about 5 hours to cook. Well, AS THEY SAY, nothing worth having is easy...

cos i'm leaving on a jet plane

21st December is the day that Lund's international student population reduced by half. For some reason, probably astrological, a fair chunk of exchange students chose this auspicious occasion for their return trip home. Things are changing pretty quick. The sound most familiar now is not that of a bike coming up behind you on the wet gravel, but rather that of a metre-wide wheelie-suitcase being dragged to the Centralen. In my corridor, Sparta F, this is also accompanied by Thomas' blasting the Ally McBeal soundtrack and singing along in his belgium accent. I'll be doing the "final walk of farewell" with him tomorrow morning - this is usually when you sling your arm across the departee's shoulder and walk along at slow pace towards the door, making promises of reunion for a month or year or five.

Vale and Dougal, two of my besties, left on Tuesday evening. I was dead sure I was going to miss them. Some poor planning left me and Murray sitting on the train back from Malmo chewing at our nails (at least I was, he was looking pretty unruffled) as their departure time inched closer, then sprinting along the Lund Centralen platform and almost falling a over t jumping down the stairs and yelling at their bus to "WAIT!! " whilst I gave Dougs and Vale a parting hug. Vale I will see in about a month when I come back through Lund in late January. Dougal has officially completed his BSc and has headed to London in search of fame and fortune. He had his first serious post degree job interview today, complete with tie. I'll miss him. I have been reminiscing over our time together and our highs and lows, such as this famous incident which could be considered both a high and a low, depending on your outlook.

These next few days are filled with study for yet another essay, my Role of Religion in the Middle East Conflict class. It's due in on the 5th January but i'm itching to get it finished before Christmas. An assessment-free christmas would almost top a white christmas, the likes of which we're probably not going to see in Lund (too rainy). The good thing is that the Role of Religion In The Middle East Conflict - and it's not possible to shorten that course title into a catchy acronym, unfortunately - is really interesting. I'm doing my essay on Lebanon and their role vis-a-vis the conflict. The textbook is amazing and I think i'll buy it for father as a Swedish souvenier. I can share this information with you because, at least while my family are travelling around information-censored communist Vietnam, they don't have access to my blog. UNLEASH THE DRAGON, etc.

In between my angst for the citizens of Lebanon and playing soulful melodies on Brad's borrowed guitar, I am organizing my Eastern Europe Extravaganza. And what an extravaganza it will be. The great thing about Europe is that it's cheaper to fly than to bus or train it to your various destinations. So I am taking full advantage of Ryanair, WizzJet, FlyMe and the other bargain airlines. My plans so far look something like this: Christmas in Lund; Bus to France (19hrs, just to say that I've caught a bus across Europe); New Year's Eve with Fiona in some quaint village 2hrs south of Paris; fly from Paris to Budapest; zig-zag up through Old School USSR (Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Czech Republic); tearful rendezvous with Nikki in Krakow, a diagonal line up through Poland to Gdanzk; back to London; then flying to Marrakech for a few days in the "sun" (it's all relative here in Europe/Africa) with Love Interest; back to Lund for aforementioned last hurrah; and then flying out of Copenhagen on the 1st February for
Melbourne Australia. Exhausting, but seeing as I probably won't be in this neck of the woods until my i finish my undergrad studies, in approximately 2012, i want to knock over as much as I can while i'm here.

I better head into town to pick up that bus ticket before all those other lunatics that fancy travelling across Europe's midsection on the second last day of the year beat me to it.

stjärna

this will be an extremely short post because it's almost time for the Hall F and E Ground Floor International Dinner Farewell Feast. Everyone is cooking a dish and as you may imagine, it's quite the multicultural fiesta. I'm contributing my famous corn fritters with sweet chilli sauce (inspired by mum) but there's also fritatta, pizza, sweetsoup with sago, crepes, chilli pasta, something mexican and a lot of meatballs. The Swedes had to be represented somewhere! Jen from Scotland was the first to leave our corridor today - she's packed up her room, removed her Swedish flag and caught the train up to Gothenburg to fly out to Edinborough. Quite a sad event, really, everyone leaving and going their seperate ways. I'm here at least till after Christmas. Not only do i have my final assignment, but i'm having a "chrismukkah" with Nikki and Penny. For those not up with the lingo or refuse to watch the OC, a Chrismukkah is a hybrid between YOU GUESSED IT Hanukkah and Christmas. According to the invite: "Our parentals will be proud of us embracing the traditions and customs of många cultures" and i am to cook the animal (not pig).

This week has been crazy. Everything is speeding up again like it did in those last few weeks before I started exchange. Lund continues to look exceedingly christmassy, but manages to do it in a classy, oldschool european way. Quite unlike the decorations that pass for festive in Albury or Wodonga (most notably the one and a half metre tall cartoon kangaroo with a santa hat stuck on top of Sweethearts)

I had the Luciakonsert on Wednesday 13th. This was my most cultural event to date. You can check out the pix on my flickr, but in short it was very fun and very cool. Having to learn 13 songs in Swedish was not very cool, but I did pick up a few words which I can use to my heart's delight for the next two weeks until the merry season ends (light, angels, heaven, shepard, lord, etc) . We had three performances in one night, and had to dress up in those virginial white garbs with a big wreath on our heads and candles to light the way. They completely blacked out the hall and we walked in singing "Santa Lucia". A few of the songs I had to lipsync through since I didn't know all of the words. Some ingenious people wrote the lyrics out on their candle holders in antsized font. There was a bucket out on stage left should any hair catch on fire. I met some really awesome swedish people and got to keep the wreath, which I will be taking out tonight for some fun times before it starts to wilt.

The festive season continues with the Secret Santa/Kris Kringle party on Sunday. I've organised a gift draw and we've a heap of international students buying presents for each other. Sunday evening we're taking over Penny's extra large deuluxe room at Ulrikedal, heating the glogg on the stove, putting up the lights and perhaps getting a little visit from Santa. Tomorrow I need to source some mistletoe and tinsel downtown.

Food is on the table! write soon.

down the barrel

just a quick update before I begin two days of blinkered, self-imposed study solitude, emerging only to eat and shower...I have this Global Environmental Essay due in on Tuesday and all I've done so far is cut and pasted quotes and surfed around Swedish ecological websites and admired pictures of elks and moose or whatever those things with the antlers are. Exchange is a time of firsts, as in first times (if you needed clarification) and this is the first time in my academic career that i have attempted to write an essay - nay, the sole assessment for a subject - in two days. You may be able to pick up on a slight undercurrent of panic? But i am taking responsible steps to make sure that i will get through it:

I started off today with an alarmclock set to 8.30am, four hours earlier than what i've been recently waking up at, the Guardian, two cups of strong hello coffee, some orange juice and two pieces of toast covered in Vegemite. Our kitchen is covered with popcorn from a food fight from last night, so i tried to ignore it and just eat with my feet raised above the ground. I also tried to ignore Peter Allen's anthem "I Still Call Australia Home" that was sweeping around in my head, no doubt encouraged by the Vegemite.

Friday ended my "birthday circus" week. It was a good week for turning 21 in. Lots of parties, lots of fun times, lots of inappropriate photos. We laughed, we cried, etc. Memorable moments include: lunch at Lunds on Tuesday with the ladies who do lunch + a few random men, talking about periods and moon cups, much to the fascination/repulsion of the men (they can just deal with it basically); the present from Nikki and everyone else, a book full of quotes and photos and comments, wrapped in Swedish coloured ribbon; getting a Classik Svensk Massage at a swish boutiquey place called Tokyo by a South Londoner called Paul (probably the most multicultural Lund gets...); attempting to drink whisky at kalmar nation; smoking hookas all afternoon in a bedouin cafe in Copenhagen with Murray, then heading on to one of the poshest little resturants i have seen in my 21 years for a candlelit dinner; shopping with Nikki with Mum's credit card (don't worry mum, i only bought two things and they were on sale, plus i got them in a size bigger just in case i grow any more!)

Then to top if off a sittning on Friday with my favourite peeps at Hallands nation. The sittning was hilarious...a normally raucous bunch of international students left in stunned silence as all around them, Swedes had shed their normally composed exterior and were well and truly pissed, standing on their chairs/tables/shoulders of friends, singing lewd drinking songs at the top of their lungs. There was one song in English and it came from Scotland, and it's a bit too lewd to repeat here. We tried to get the Aussie Aussie Aussie chant going to compete, but were pretty much laughed out of the room. The food was good, the wine was good (it was the house but at least it was in bottles) the company was excellent. Then it was onwards to the nightclub. You can see some pictures on my Flickr page if you're wanting some visual kind of
experience. I took yesterday off to lounge around in bed, consume chocolate, watch Grey's Anatomy and generally get back on the horse.

Ok. I'm on the horse now. Off to the shower. Back in two days.

the cold swedish winter is right outside

I want to write about supermarkets. Supermarket - place of cultural learnings. Between the hours of 4 and 8 the queues in the supermarket are insane. If you should happen to stumble in during this time, it's best to bring a paperback or a lot of charge on your ipod. The Swedes are so polite in their queuing. There will be half of the cash registers open, the checkout chick will be catching up with the goss with her friends and there will be queues banked up 20 people long - and the customers will just look at their watches and sigh. There is no ruckus, no cursing the managment, no tearing of hair. Patience. I told a Swedish guy how impressed I was at this and he said: "we're not really patient, inside we just want to punch the person in the back of the head, but we suppress it. And let it all out when we get drunk". Unhealthy, but what the heck.

Also, if you're wanting some saffron, you can't get it at the spice section. You have to specifically ask for it when you get to the register. The checkout chick gets his/her key and opens up a special cabinet, and hands over the requested number of packages. INTERESTING.

On Thursday Alex had a potluck dinner at her place. It was such a good idea and I can't believe that it hasn't happened earlier, especially in a community of hungry young students. The way potlucks work is that everyone brings a dish and you basically have a big eclectic feast. So I have been thinking recently of all the foods I miss and I remembered the glory that was Stalactites, that all-night Greek resturant on the corner of Lonsdale and Exhibition streets, Melbourne. Before long I was folding wee Spanakopita parcels in our kitchen. Made about 40 in the end. They could have done with perhaps a little more salt but they made me very happy. next time Baklava? perhaps i should just save myself the trouble and simply go to Greece in January.

Some other things this week: i nearly got hit by a bus that couldn't see me because i didn't have lights. I am now getting lights! My bike has been locked outside our favourite bakery for the last 5 days because my key to it broke off in the lock, and I can't figure out a way to fix the situation without looking like i'm trying to steal it. I saw my first beggar in Lund. He was on the main street, in one hand an empty coffee cup for the change, in the other what looked like an identification/centrelink card. Strange. Permits for begging? Only in Sweden.

I went dress shopping this week. First stop was Åhléns to buy my Lucia dress. It's for the Luciakonsert on the 13th December. The fact that everyone in the choir has to wear one, including the gentlemen, is easing my pre-emptive humiliation a little. I haven't tried it on yet. Am gathering courage. The second dress is my 21st birthday dress. It's from my favourite op-shop, a vintage empress line strappy number, red with tiny black butterflies all over it. It's five millimeters too tight to do up the zip, so Valé our resident seamstress is going to do some alterations on it.

I am very much looking forward to my 21st. It's not going to be the same as it would be in Austraila, but nonetheless, we have already reserved the days from the 5th to the 9th for partying. On the Friday I'm having a sittning with my friends at Hallands Nation. Nikki drew me a picture of it and by the looks of it, it's going to be a pretty special event - Dougal will be wearing shoes and Penny will be wearing a skirt! And maybe Brad From Oregon will be naked, but negotiations are still underway so no promises yet.