Forgive me for not posting over here!

I’ve kind of abandoned posting this month, but I promise to pick it up come December when more things are going on. Talk to you all then!

Stockholm & Röyksopp

I went to Stockholm and to a concert for the Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp this past Friday, so I’ll try to relay as much as I can about it as I can remember.

So Sarah and I met up with her older sister Marie and we took the commuter train down to Stockholm. I can’t remember exactly what her job entails, but we were talking about languages and I think she works with children with speaking disabilities as she said children learning Danish usually have the most problems out of any language in the world.

We got to the station and met up with Marie’s husband, Patrick who works as a programmer for Saab, then we walked downtown to this fancy Pizza Hut. I’m talking sit-down with menus, chandeliers, soft lighting, waiters, plush seats, etc. Eventually we were seated and this guy came over to take our orders. I was having the “pepperoni lovers” and I tried to sound as Swedish as I could and said “Jag skulle vilja ha en pepperoni lovers” and then he said some random German to me. He apparently mistook me for German and then when I explained I was American he started freaking out and getting really loud and excited. I honestly do not understand what he was going on about or why he was acting unusual. Swedes just DON’T act like that…even in the US, this would be weird behavior. He then said we all got free refills (weird, but okay) and then asked if I was from New York, but I said “No, Washington.” So he asked if I was from Seattle, so I just said yes to end the conversation and then he started going off about Nirvana and asking if I knew who Kurt Curbain was..it was ridiculous. I was like “Yes…I know who he was, thanks.” Then he made some sort of suicide with a gun motion to his head and said “PEW!” and I just stared at him like what the heck. Who does these things?! It was weird.

We left a bit later and headed down by the water to find the club, Berns. This club was seriously so amazing inside. There were chandeliers, ornate paintings, gold everywhere, whatever! There were also tons of people already there at 8pm even though the show didn’t start until 9 (little did we know that we’d be standing around until 10:15 for them to start). Marie and Patrick went off to the side to sit and Sarah and I made our way to the very front with only one or two people in front of us from the barrier. The concert eventually got going and it was so great! Well, it was annoying that two people in front of us were jumping all over the place and smacking us with their arms and ponytails, but whatever. Oh and some girl next to me with a sequined top was jumping next to me and kept scratching my arm with the top…ugh. But anyway, the music was really good and Robyn (a Swedish popstar that lives in Stockholm) showed up to sing in a couple of songs so that was amazing. We left around 12:30 and took the tunnelbana (subway) to another part of town to find Patrick’s car so he could drive us back to Uppsala so we wouldn’t have to take the train. Overall, really good night I think!

Massive Random Update

Now for updates about everything that isn’t school.

Choir has been going well and we have a concert on the 7th of November. It’s been a bit more tricky preparing songs for this time around, but those of us in the 1st altos have been doing some extra practice time to prepare. I’m hoping to be well enough to go to practice Thursday because I skipped two weeks ago, went last week, and now I’m unsure this time around.

Oh, you know how I was supposed to do that magazine? Well they never contacted me and I was getting worried because I knew the deadline was approaching, so I e-mailed them. Of course, one of the editors slacked about e-mailing me while the other was away so I only had 4 days to do an entire magazine. I was stressed about it but then I just said no way. I wasn’t going to waste my time on something that no one else even cares about.

This past Friday, I hung out with Anna and a couple of her friends at her apartment for a bit. We all spoke Swedish even though we were from Finland, the US, Belgium, and Germany (well, there was one Swede). It was fun hah. Then Anna and I tried to go to a nation to see this DJ perform, but the line was too long. We ended up going to another and dancing instead.

Saturday night there was a party over at Elena’s for her birthday and Sarah and Anna also came. I saw some people I hadn’t seen in awhile, but I ended up speaking Swedish with Sarah, Anna, and some friend of Elena’s the whole time. No one else there could speak Swedish so I felt a bit bad, but oh well. It was good practice for me!

Sunday morning I went out to brunch with Sarah, Anna, and Julia and had tons of delicious food.

I’m just trying to feel better now, as I said in my other post. I need to go to IKEA to buy a rug, pick up my ticket for the concert this Friday (I have to be better for this because I paid a lot for my ticket) and then finish preparing my costume for the Halloween party. Oh! Sidenote, but I got 2 awesome care packages last week. Mail is great.

Massive School Update

Things have been really rough for me over the past week, so it’s hopefully understandable why I didn’t blog.

I can’t remember if I said in the last post that Shakeb made a really terrible powerpoint (complete with a yellow background and blue type!) for our project, but he did. I just tossed it out and made a new one without asking because anyone beyond middle school should know that unless you want to make someone’s eyes bleed, you just don’t use those colors.

We had our presentation and it went over really well. Our teacher said we all seemed really calm and rehearsed (I didn’t practice, but whatever). We just had a few things to fix in our essay for resubmission and we’d be done! We had to make discussion questions up for the other group presenting and I tried to get Shakeb to think of some but he was zero help. We also had to write why we chose Stockholm and New York as our 2 cities and the only thing he could offer me was that they’re both “big” and are the capitals. Haha WRONG. Yikes. How could he not know this? We tried to divide up the work on the edit but Shakeb wasn’t going to do anything, so me and Jonas did it all.

Oh, we tried to talk to the teacher about it but he basically said because Shakeb’s name is on the paper, he will get credit. Shoot. We had considered saying something before, but we wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, y’know?

This week has been focused on me preparing for my final exam this Friday, but it’s going terribly because I’m back to being ill. I don’t feel ready at all and I’m feel seriously overwhelmed because my headaches are preventing me from studying. I might not even have the energy to show up for the exam come Friday because there is a retake on December 5th. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow though.

Next week begins my new course - Strategic Communication! And yes, it’s in English woohoo!

Blah blah blah.

I haven’t really felt like updating. I hope you guys understand.

We finally turned in our project for school and Shekeb was being lame about the whole thing. We’ve got our presentation about it on Wednesday, but otherwise we’re done with it and the class is almost over. Just a final on the 30th!

I went over to Sarah’s Friday night for her birthday along with Anna, Linda, and Linda’s friend Jenny (who was born in Sweden, lived in the US until she graduated high school, and then moved back) and we had cake and watched Swedish Idol (which was terrible if you were wondering). Then we went out dancing and had a really good time despite the rain.

I’ve really done nothing else since because I’ve been feeling pretty awful recently. I’ll try and pick it up.

Snow?! What?

Yes, yes. Today, October 13th, was the first snow fall of the year. Mind you, it was very minor and wasn’t sticking but hey, it was snow nonetheless. I didn’t really notice until someone pointed it out on facebook and I actually opened my blinds haha.

Yesterday wasn’t too interesting so I’m not going to bother with that. I worked on my economics paper and went grocery shopping. Woohoo?

Today we had class and me and my group were supposed to meet up to work and guess who isn’t coming? Yup. GWNIF or now known as Shekeb. Nice. He apparently e-mailed Jonas and said he was sorry but he doesn’t have time and it is too hard. Um…? Oh I’m sorry this is university and it is tough. I would understand if he had to look through my English portions, but they’ve all be translated now thanks to Jonas and I so Shekeb has no excuse. We asked him to write the introduction and he sent something to Jonas but it is awful. It’s not even relevant to our topic and he sourced wikipedia. Ohhh yeah…awesome. So he’s out. We’re thinking of writing our teacher tonight once we put the rest of the paper together so we can specifically point out which portions he wrote and how he should not get a good grade (he wrote maybe 2 paragraphs total in this 10 page paper…). We worked for a few hours and then went home to work more.

It took me a million years to bike back because it was so windy. I need to fill my bus card again soon because it’s starting to get seriously unpleasant outside with the windchill making it approximately 28 degrees. I didn’t do much for the rest of the afternoon but clean, study, and take some photos. I’m trying to think of something to do this weekend with my friends because the following two weekends my friends have planned stuff so I should do something…movie at my apartment? I don’t know. My apartment still isn’t feeling totally home-y. I need to get something for this blank wall, which I might do tomorrow. We’ll see how the weather is…

Körhelgen!

My choir weekend retreat was amazing! I had such a good time and it was a really nice way to get to know everyone in my choir so that now I actually feel welcome to sit and talk with anyone during rehearsal rather than just the few people I normally sit by. This weekend was also an excellent opportunity to practice Swedish. I spoke it the entire time (save for a few instances where I’d trip over my words, but after a sentence in English, it’d be back to Swedish) and I feel more confident in my skills now, woohoo!

So onto what actually happened.

I thankfully scored a ride with two newcomer altos like me - Jannie and Maja - and they came and picked me up ‘round 9am on Saturday. Way to early but we had to be out there by 10. We went into town really quick and picked up Jessicka (who’s also on the magazine with me) and we headed out into the country. We passed a moose sign, but instead saw some deer, and then we got lost. It took us a little bit to realize we had passed the actual place we were staying (a community house type thing?), but once we figured it out, we got there fairly soon.

We spent the majority of the day singing, of course. We got a ton of new Christmas songs, although most are Swedish and you wouldn’t recognize them…I’ll post a video of one of the songs after I post this so you can at least hear one of them. Thankfully the altos have the melody in this song. I think we spent a good 6 hours singing, actually. If we were singing, we were eating lunch or fika. As a side note, it was freezing out here and I’ve made a mental note to purchase thicker socks and more cardigans if I plan to survive the winter.

We all had to have nametags because there would be a contest later that night to see which group (sopranos, altos, tenors, or basses) could name the most choir members the fastest or something. Someone thought my name was French for some reason and then no one could pronounce mine, even after I explained it. Typical. I should just go by Christina from now on. For dinner we had to all help in some way and I didn’t understand until some of the better choices were already dealt out so I had to be in the group to serve the food. This was unfortunate because everytime I finished serving, my food would be cold…blah.

When we were done singing for the night, we all got into our costumes for the magic themed party and because I didn’t bring my Hermione costume from home, I didn’t have much to work with. I ended up just wearing gold leggings and a black dress and saying I was “black magic” haha. Dinner was good and we had asparagus soup for starters, then salmon, potato salad, and salad for dinner, and ice cream for dessert. Oh! And we all had to draw a piece of paper to say where we would sit according to the Hogwarts Houses. However, I got one that said Professor McGonagall so I sat at the teacher’s table.

Dinner went on until midnight or maybe 1am (there were a lot of random contests intermixed), I’m not sure, but then we all danced for awhile and I think we went to bed at 2:30…I was really tired and I didn’t bring a mattress pad to sleep on so it was the hardwood floor for me, ew.

The next day we did some more singing and cleaned up…nothing too exciting. But overall it was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the next one!

Totally forgot to write!

Wow. I totally forgot to write at all this week…my groupmates and I have been so occupied with working on our economics paper that it’s making me forget about other responsibilities. Sorry ‘bout that.

Not much has happened, I don’t think. Like I said, we’ve been hard at work on our paper on rent controls. Super boring blah blah. It’s due next Wednesday and then we must prepare our speech and powerpoint to go along with it, on top of preparing for the final. I’ve been neglecting my reading to help prepare this paper -sigh-

On Tuesday I went out to lunch at this Asian buffet with Sarah, Julia, and their friend Anna (they all said it was really good…I had doubts about what they consider “good” asian food). It was really fun and we were there for a good three hours talking about whatever there is to talk about. Oh! While they don’t celebrate Halloween in Sweden, Julia and her corridor mates are having a Halloween party! Woohoo! The theme is pumpkins so we have to bring food that looks like or is made of pumpkin and we have to dress like a pumpkin or one of their pre-approved costumes that falls under the acronym P.U.M.P.K.I.N. I can’t remember all of them, but I’m thinking I’ll be a vampire for “undead.” It’s easy haha.

Also on Tuesday I attended the first meeting for my nation’s magazine and it is basically a disaster. I could write a million things about how awful it is but no one there has any concept of design or even what interests people…I’d liken it to a high school paper with slightly higher printing quality. That’s how much it bites. I’m going to have to take the whole thing over design wise because no one has any idea how to use InDesign and all the pages looked horrid. I hope I have time for this because it is seriously a ton of work.

Choir on Thursday as usual and this was the first time I managed to go in 2 weeks as I have been sick. I was surprised at how many people were there! We started two new songs - Jingle Bells (it’s hilarious to hear Swedes try and pronounce “jingle”…I think the “juh” sound gets them) and Baba Yetu (a Swahili song from a video game, but it’s awesome). I met several new people and had a good time during our fika break.

As for today, I attempted to find something for the magic themed party at my choir retreat happening this weekend, but I didn’t find much. I bought some gold leggings I’m not sure what I’ll do with. I originally wanted to buy fairy wings, but there were none to be found at any of the toy stores. Whatever.

So tomorrow I’m off to the choir retreat! It starts at 9am and I thankfully snagged a spot in someone’s car so I don’t have to pay for the bus. We’ll be singing and hanging out all day to get to know one another better, then at night is our “magic” party. Still unsure about the costume, but I made a circle with an 8 in the middle so I can be a magic 8 ball if I feel like it. I also made a lame looking wand out of tinfoil I’ll bring along if I decide to be a fairy godmother or something, who knows.

I’ll try to be more in depth on Sunday when I return…I just can’t think much anymore because I’ve been lacking serious sleep this entire week.

Routine Sunday

I’m starting to think all my Sundays are going to end up being the same, so I might not even write about them.

Basically I wake up, go grocery shopping (I accidentally went over budget today, whoops…), make lunch, clean the apartment, then mess around online and study until dinner and study some more with a cup of tea. Nothing special.

As for random notes, I’m on a bit of an autumn kick right now though and I bought some butternut squash for later in the week, and I plan on getting acorn squash next time and baking it with brown sugar mmmm. The weather has also been contributing to this feeling and I’m thankful it’s at least started raining because if it’s raining, it’s warm. Otherwise, it’s incredibly cold when I bike around with temperatures in the low to mid 30’s. No thank you. Linda claimed it would snow but I don’t think we’re due for any of that for at least another month. Up in Northern Sweden they’ve got some, but then again, they do live above the Arctic Circle.

I get to sleep in tomorrow - no class until noon, yeah! <3