Sweden!

My increased travel continues! Last weekend, I went to Sweden. My program is set up such that for this semester half of my cohort is in Groningen with me and the other half is in Uppsala, Sweden. I have been wanting to go back to Sweden since the second we left at the end of summer school, but it kept not working out! It's tough to get to Sweden cheaply... But when we found out we had a long weekend between our second and third courses, a friend and I finally bit the bullet and payed more than we wanted to, but we got tickets!

So last Friday, we left out dorm at 8:45 AM. We then took a 3 hour train ride to Eindhoven (the only Ryanair airport in the Netherlands-Bremen, Germany is closer but didn't have good flights). After the train ride, there was a 20 minute bus ride to the airport. Then a 2 hour flight (and associated check-in and waiting time). Then a 1.5 hour train ride from Stockholm-Skavsta airport to the city of Stockholm. Then a 45 minute train ride to Uppsala. We didn't get in until 9pm... Same thing on the way home. It was a TON of traveling. But totally worth it.

Friday night one of my classmates cooked a Brazilian dinner, and we all hung out and ate until late, then grabbed a bus home and sat in the kitchen of our host's dorm floor and talked to some of his floormates-a Swedish guy and an Italian guy, both drunk. We learned the general rule that Swedish people will only really talk when they're drunk. And talk he did! It was a very interesting conversation though, and lots of fun. Went to bed way too late, of course.

Saturday we woke up and looked out the window to realize with shock and jealousy that our classmate's dorm room basically had the view you'd expect in a ski chalet-it was on top of a hill and his floor was just at the tree canopy height, with beautiful snow covered conifers everywhere. Really gorgeous. After gushing for a while, we bundled up and headed out. We were actually quite lucky with the weather. It was only around -10C/14F while we were there, whereas it has been as cold as -22C/-8F the week before. BRRRRRR. I'm not saying -10 is warm, but it's warmER. Weather is such a relative thing :)

Saturday was spent checking out the town, which I absolutely loved. Though it only has about half the population of Groningen, it feels both bigger and cuter at the same time. It only took me about half an hour to decide that I am DEFINITELY spending a semester in Sweden during my two years in Europe. The plan is to go Spring 2012. Plan your visits accordingly.

It was so nice to be in a place with both hills and forests! Uppsala is quite hilly, with several parks and gardens of various types, some cool university buildings and museums, a cathedral where Linnaeus is buried, a river running through the center of town, and more. It really was gorgeous.

And there is fika! Fika is a Swedish tradition where you have coffee and pie/cake sometime in the afternoon. I think you can do it any day of the week, but the big thing is to do it do the weekend. We had fika Saturday afternoon (ours included sandwiches for lunch). It was great! 

Saturday night was spent checking out the nightlife. Students in Uppsala join "Nations" which are social clubs. You basically have to join them, as they are the main social entities. Alcohol (and everything else) is expensive in Sweden, and the nations have cheap alcohol. Each nation has it's own pub/bar/dance area, but once you're a member of a nation (or a weekend guest) you can go to any nation. We did a bit of a pub crawl, checking out the nations of several of our classmates, which was really cool. There were also snowball fights. A lot of them. So much fun. So much fun, in fact, that we only got an hour of sleep Saturday night before we had to get up and leave to go home. That was not so wonderful, but as you probably remember, we had a lot of transportation time to sleep...