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...