Making Plans

I've been really lazy because I've been sick (blahh) the last few days. I've watched a lot of How I Met Your Mother. There is some sort of weird European obsession with it (along with the Simpsons, etc.), so I figured I'd better catch up. It's actually a hilarious show. Too bad no one in the US has time for sitcoms.

Anyway, I've decided I need to absolutely plan out every moment in order to avoid this laziness. And I don't mean crazy-tour-guide-Barbie planning, but just having something to do each night and weekend. For example, tonight I am going to Antonia's for martinis before going to Lunds nation's penthouse.

Also, I just paid Petra for a sittning at Västgötas next week. Get this, our theme is 'Neighbor countries'. Which means you have to pick a country that neighbors yours and dress up in that stereotype. So I have two choices: Canada and Mexico. I also considered Texas, but I don't think everyone would get it. There is also the Bahamas, Cuba, etc., I suppose, but that's not REALLY a neighbor. So I'm going on a search for anything Maple Leaves or Maracas/sombrero.

I am thinking about trying to go to Copenhagen or Stockholm this weekend, too, but I need to find a companion first. I'm going to ask all the Germans tonight. I know that Eric is going to Stockholm already, but they might be taking Mathias' car, and I don't really want to drive to Stockholm (it's at least five hours).

Kara is coming from Prague next weekend (!!!!) and then she leaves and I have my exam in this class. I'm super excited to show her around Lund and go to a nation and stuff...maybe we will go to Copenhagen then for a day. Or Göteborg. Who knows.

I also booked my flight to Dublin Oct 22-25 to see Casey and everyone when she's there...should be quite a good time. I paid too much for that airfare, but made up for it because it's only costing me like 44 dollars to go to Prague in November. There's also my ESN trip to Russia at the end of November, which I cannot wait for. Who gets to go to Russia? ME! Chloe, I knew reading your Russian book freshman year would pay off...even if I only remember the alphabet...sort of. I also want to go to Berlin and Holland and Norway. But those plans will come.

My other big plans are having an all-american drinking games party for my birthday, go to the Munich-ers' (Müncheners'? something) Oktoberfest party, complete with pretzels and other Bavarian food.

I'm also definitely going to the flea market/farmers market/etc soon. I'm going to get some decorations for my super-super depressing room. And another towel, one just isn't enough.

The other thing I want to do is start hanging around Anita and Nora more. I've met them both, and always creepily facebook stalk them, and they are always doing cool things that I would love to tagalong on. I need to be pro-active in this endeavor. But anyway, Lunds Penthouse tonight! (They have the coolest stamp of the nations I've been to. I'll start taking pictures of them. You can see the VGs crown on Monika's wrist in the picture below if you look real close).

Anyway, love you all, update me on your lives!

Some pictures. I didn't take them.

I thought I'd put up some pictures for those of you who haven't stalked me on facebook. These are what other people have taken, obviously, I'll have mine up next week sometime.





The Welcome Party, L to R: Monika, Sarah, Sirca, Aline, Me.



Monika and I at VGs on Wednesday, after waiting in line foreverrr. .....


This is me with the head of the crawdad I just ate. Or, crayfish, properly.

Pub at Östgöta

To take a break from the infinite amounts of reading/exercises I have to do for my class, I went with Bianka's mentorgroup to the pub at ÖGs. Nations, as you have probably noticed, dominate pretty much every social event. They have restaurants for lunches on certain days of the week, pubs (which is dinner and drinks) on other days, and sometimes sittnings (you're served at a sittning rather than waiting in line at a pub) in ADDITION to the clubs.

Usually, on a night when a nation has a pub or sittning, they also have a club. If you attend the sittning/pub, most of the time you can stay and dance for free, which is awesome if you have that much time.

So anyway, tonight at Östgöta was pub night. It's traditional in Sweden to pea soup and pancakes on Thursdays (I'm still trying to figure out why). It's a yellow pea soup that's more like a paste and you're supposed to put mustard on it, and have a big thin pancake with butter and jam for dessert. They also had another dinner option of pork filet with vegetables, cheese, and lime sauce. That's what I got. When I hear lime sauce, I think lime juice is what they really meant. But no. It was like whipped cream almost, but lime. SOOOOOO GOOD. Next time I'm going traditional and getting the pea soup though.

I'm going to be going to nations for pubs more often, because the whole thing, plus a beer, only cost 60 kr. That's like $8.50, including the beer, which is 20 kr by itself. So yeah, that's really exciting.

Now, I will stop procrastinating and actually do the protein annotation and hydropathy plots....ugh.

(In completely unrelated news, I am now a grandmother!!!! at AGD of course. I can't wait to get back and meet my offspring's offspring. Hooray!)

Pork Chops for dinner.

I am a master chef. I made pork chops with bread crumbs, milk, cinnamon, oregano, dill, and salt. They will be delicious for the next three days.

Marshmallows in Sweden are all colorful and shaped in different ways, more like candy that marshmallows. So I had to buy 'BBQ marshmallows' for our cookout last week. Now I am snacking on the rest of them with my pretzels (Salta Pinnar).

I'm about to head out to meet Sarah, Antonia, the other Sarah, Monika, and some others, no doubt, at VG. Should be awesome. I just wanted to let you all know that my camera cord is on its way from Indiana, so I really should have pictures up soon(ish).

Until then, I want more comments. I'm that selfish. Comment. Seriously.

Welcome Party Weekend and the Monday that followed.

After the long Friday night of waiting in line with Robin, Pontus, Sarah, and Monika, the Official Welcome Party for International Students was on Saturday night. For me, that meant a sittning (literally means sit-down in Swedish, it's a three-course dinner where people get drunk and sing songs) at Östgöta Nation. But of course it was pouring down rain all day, the first day I was going to get a bit more dressed up, I had to ride my bike in the rain to Hallands to Magnus's corridor. Everyone was just miserably wet. Then we all made it to Östgöta around 7:30 for dinner...even wetter, but also drunker, than before. The food and drinks were quite good, Thibault and I split a bottle of Spanish wine, there was a mint chocolate cake-brownie thing for dessert that was delicious. Then, Sarah, Sırça, Monika, and I rode over to Kårhuset for the Welcome Party, where there was a QUEUE! Are you kidding me Sweden? I know you want to be totally official and honest and double check, but come on. Anyway, we picked the right queue out of the two and got in pretty quickly. We danced alllll night, and I ran into Bianka, Jonas, Antonia, Julia, Christoph, etc on and on with the Germans...lol, and found it was Simon's birthday at midnight! So anyway, the welcome party was a lot of fun, except, truth be told, I remember leaving, but I don't really remember riding home...

Anyway, Sunday was a day of rest and my first corridor meeting. They appointed me list-writer because I'm a native English speaker. We just talked about what we needed for the corridor, when we are going to have a warming party with an around-the-world tour de Chambres theme, and paid 100 kr to get some stuff.

Today, I had class all day, but came home to "make" some pretzels and a banana for lunch. P.S. I love Swedish coffee machines. It's actually good! For 3 kr...that's like, less than 50 cents. The coffee at the cafe costs 20 kr, in comparison. Then Bianka facebooked me and I met up with the Germans, Simon, and Petra to see Inglourious Basterds at the cinema. The movie was crazy, as you would expect, I jumped out of my seat at least twice. And besides that it was about killing Nazis. Creepy. But the funny thing was most of the movie was in German or French, with Swedish subtitles. Some parts were in English, but most of the time I was piecing together the French or German that I could hear and decipher with the Swedish subtitles. I think I got the gist of it. Mom, you don't want to see that movie. It was a good piece of artwork--totally Tarantino style, but wayyyy too violent for me.

So now, my Bioinformatics class again tomorrow...should be a BLAST. Haha. No one gets that except me.

I waited in line for about three hours total tonight. Two separate lines, and then we didn't get into Hallands...so made our way to Krischansta, where everyone left except Sarah and Monika and I (Simon stayed, but forgot his ID, so couldn't get in). We met the most amazing Swedish guys ever. They were nuts. But fun. Also, I learned that Sarah is very picky about guys. A perfectly cute Swedish guy totally wanted her, I knew, because his friend told me, and she was like, "oh no, he's much too clean." Oh, the English and their rock n roll lifestyles....lol. The music at Krischan was awesome though. In a really bad way: all Michael Jackson and Bob Marley and various other reggae/swing type with some pop rap mixed in. Awesome.

So, I totally forgot the most important part of Sunday in the last post. I sat next to Bianka on the way home, one of the ten business administration students from Munich. She was really nice, we talked the whole hour and a half back to Lund. So after another lonely day on Monday (no Swedish class), I just shopped and walked around basically, I went to my first BioInformatics course on Tuesday, and then to the beach at Lomma with Bianka and other Germans (at first i accidentally typed Germs, which made me laugh). these included Jonas, who looks pretty much like a younger, shorter, more European version of Isaac Dorau from the Academy. It's actually kind of weird. Also there was Meike, Evelyn, Christoph, and Antonia (yes, from Germany). And of course Bianka and I. It was such a nice beach, we went in the water for a little bit. It was really cold, but the water at Lomma is really shallow. Like, you can walk 100m away from the beach and you're still only up to your knees or maybe a little bit higher. There are jellyfish everywhere too. They are the weirdest things ever. It was a really clear and sunny day on Tuesday, so I got a little sun, and we were able to see the whole Öresundbron (Oresund Bridge) and even little tiny buildings of Copenhagen, or Kopenhamn, in Swedish.

Then we came back and played brännboll with mentor groups 9 and 10 (Bianka, Jonas, Christoph and Evelyn's groups). It was fun I guess, but there was this one Canadian guy who was taking it way to seriously and pissing me off, but whatever. So I can now officially say that one of my biggest pet peeves is when people are so bent on winning that they don't play honestly. He wasn't exactly cheating, but he was finding loopholes in all the rules. I just hated being on the same team as him.

So yeah. That was Tuesday. (Awesome). On Wednesday I had class again, came home, talked to Caroline, one of my corridormates, for a while and made a hot dog. Then I went to Kårhuset around 8 to meet up with the Germans and Simon (who is Austrian or Swiss, I am a terrible person and have forgotten). There was some sort of concert playing, but it cost 50 kronor to get in, so we just sat on the hill behind and heard the music fine, and I'm glad I didn't pay the 50 kronor because the music wasn't that great. It was just covers of American songs by a guy dressed in an Angel costume, or other similarly Swedish things. So we sat and talked and then went to VGs for their Wednesday Club. We waited in line forever and we were really near the front. But once we got in it was soooo much fun. I mean, I love Sweden because the cheapest beer you can get is a Carlsberg for 20 kronor, which is only like...3 dollars, and Jonas bought the first round anyway. So we danced and danced and I met a guy from Toronto named David with dreadlocks and he was sort of strangely flirting with me, even though I told him I have a boyfriend. He also smashed the plastic gun I found on the floor (from someone's cowboy costume) into bits! That was when I really didn't like him. He was like, "Guns are bad, Ellen, you can't shoot people everywhere like you can in America." I was really offended. I have never shot a gun in my life, nor do I plan to. So he smashed my toy gun for political reasons. What a jerk...Anyway, Jonas was the funniest of all though. He kept stealing this one Swedish girl's hat...like four times throughout the night, just thinking it was the best thing ever. I really like him, because he's just a gigantic kid. At about 1 am, a lot of people have left and the ones leftover are either with a big group of people (like I was) or hooking up with someone. Well, Jonas is like the only single one out of the group we were in, and he's super-cute and disappointed he hadn't picked up a girl yet. Luckily, in the next few minutes he started dancing with this girl and kissed her. Then Antonia and I were going to leave, and Jonas was said, "Yeah, I've got it out of my system now. I'm ready to go home." Boys are so weird. So then I rode my bike home, talked to Tom for a while, and went to sleep. It was a good night.