Alrighty then. Been doing quite a few stuff over here and been fairly busy. Guess I'll start from where I last ended, which was a trip to Denmark. It was okay, nothing very exciting actually. The person who invited me down was stressed due to a Rotary project she was working on and didn't really have much of idea of what we should do, even though she invited me. Needless to say our personalities did not mix well. Probably won't go again.

I did get to see some of a cool castle:



And a really big gun in a museum:


Going to Denmark is always cool because it's just so close. It takes about thirty minutes to travel from where I live to the closet town in Denmark. A different country that is right next store, so cool. However, I do like Sweden more than Denmark. I don't think there's any particular reason, it just seems that Sweden is a bit more clean, and brighter in general. Just is.

Afterwards, had the week off of school. which actually wasn't as fun as school. There wasn't really a lot for me to do due to the fact that I don't really know a lot of people very well. I'm also more prone to be lazy than active. School over here is fun because it gets me out of the house and I get to hang out friends, (I don't really do a lot of work at school, it's really nice.) especially this one!


This is Anna min bäste vän over here, hon har lärt mig mycket svenska och har varit jätte trevligt. She brought me along with her family to the Universeum, a really cool science expo/bio-dome/really cool stuff place. It's a little hard to explain so here's some pictures.










The part that I didn't get any pictures of is the other half of it which has a lot of small science exhibits. Such as a small part explaining lasers, there was also a section of games/demonstrations(?) that provoked certain parts of the brain. It was fun!






(Her family)



Later that week I was able to go horse back riding with a friend who lives right across the street. She takes care of a horse at a stable and she usually goes riding twice a week so she asked if I wanted to tag a long. I hadn't been on a horse in about ten or so years, so it was defiantly new to me. It was really fun, I've kind of have been wanting to learn how to ride a horse well, so it was nice to go and try. Didn't really do that well, really had no idea what I was doing. But I only fell of twice! So maybe next time I'll do better, third time's the charm, right?



Then this last weekend had a Rotary thingy. It was a type of going away party for the students who are leaving in January. We were at a glass art hotel. It was awesome. The hotel was amazing, every room was designed by a famous designer. There was glass art every where throughout. And the best part was that there was basically a spa there. Hot tubs, cooled pools, saunas. Really awesome, it was great for my back after the incident with the horse. We also had a tour of the glass blowing factory where everything is hand made. That was cool. There was an old guy who is famous for making glass trumpets. He is the only one in Sweden that makes them, and he is really old so he actually retired. We were all able to see him make his last trumpet ever. So that was just a cool little thing there. Also, we were given a glass cup as a souvenir that we had to cut out. Cool as well.







Then earlier this week I was able to go to an old castle and go fossil hunting with an archaeologist my host father knows. Theres a lime stone query not too far away from me that has a lot of old fossils lying about. The majority of them are from prehistoric sea urchins and clams. It was pretty cool to find lots and lots of fossils juts lying around. The archaeologist lady also gave me a fossil from a prehistoric squid. The fossil is about 6" long, pretty cool.


The castle was really neat too, really nice scenery around it. The main thing that will be really cool with it is that every year there is a medieval market that happens there, so I'm looking forward to going to that during the summer.





Well, thats about all the exciting things that I have been up too. One thing that I'm still waiting for is that Anna said she wants to take me shopping so that she can dress me like a Swede and everything, that should be fun if we get around to it.

Hej Då!

Long Time Again.

Writing is too annoying....

So yeah! Last few weeks have been pretty fun I have to say! Sweden is just overall really nice. The general atmosphere is just nice and peaceful. Nothing too much different has really happened, I did get to go sailing this Saturday in a skiff. Forgot my camera for pictures though. It was really cool, its a small two man boat with a really big main sail. Goes nice and fast. So sailed around in that for a while, and we capsized it a few times for fun-ish. (Dry suits are really nice to have in very cold water).

Going to Denmark tomorrow for a few days! There's another exchange student living there who is from Mexico, so it will be nice to get some of the at home feeling of having them around. We're just gonna hang out for a bit, don't really know what we're going to do, pretty spontaneous action this is, but that's what being an exchange student is all about. Doing something new everyday and jumping on board with every opportunity.

I'll see about trying to put a longer post up when I get back, writing is just such a pain for me! Heh.

Hej Då!

Long Time no Write

Well, Sweden is still nice.

Nothing much has really changed the last two weeks. Still doing the same procedure throughout the week. Language is still coming along slowly, but I can tell that I'm getting better at reading/listening but speaking it is still hard due to my small vocabulary knowledge.

Last weekend just had a lazy time. Didn't do anything at all except watch movies. Good to have those types of days sometimes. Did a zombie movie marathon. 'Twas fun. That was all for those days.

This weekend however was the Rotary District Conference, which is a large meeting for all of the Rotary members in the extended area that I live in. It was held in Karlskrona, town 3.5 hour train ride away on the other coast from me. At the meeting all of us exchange students, three others from the USA, four from Australia, and one from New Zealand, were supposed to put on a little show for everybody. So what we did was sold raffle tickets throughout the day too all the members for a cookbook that we put together. It included recipes from every continent. There were about 200 some people at the meeting, and we sold 463 at about $1.50 a ticket. It was really successful and we had all the founds go to the Rotary charity for helping to end Polio.


While there we were able to go to a famous Navel base and a car museum. The Naval base was really cool. Got to see the Swedish stealth boat which apparently is an interest to many super powers. Unfortunately I did not see it up close, we only went to an old part of the base. Also, we were not supposed to take pictures of any part of the harbor where the ships were due to security concerns.



The car museum was also really cool. They had some really really nice cars there:






And a beautiful bike that I would really like:

Well, not a lot more to say really, been writing to much on here that I keep using less and less words every time.

Hej Då!

Kristianstad Camping Trip

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Camping! Went camping this week, had a really good time. Wasn't anything too serious, did some hiking, played some games and had a few competitions. The people at the camp were the American exchange students that I already knew along with some Aussies that are here. Probably the most fun thing that we did was axe throwing! Also got to shoot a few shots out of a .22, even though its such a small gun it was really nice to shoot again, its been far too long. I really miss my guns.




The area we were at was really nice. There were some parts that had lots of ferns so it felt like a really old type of forest. We walked to a water fall while we were there, very similar to the one back home next to the highway.
The water was a bit cold and I didn't have any spare cloths so I didn't try to go for a swim. It would have been fun though.

One of the Australians is going to take me up to Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden. Its about two hours north. She says that there is a store up there that sells imported goods for cheep prices, and one of the items they have is Mountain Dew. It is going to be so good to have that again, I can't wait.

Besides that, nothing else much has happened.

Hej Då

High Lights of Last Week

Hmm. I'll start with the sailing so far. The last two times has been fairly interesting. Two times ago, the wind was kind of impradictable, fluttering on and off. So while leaving the dock I didn't have enough wind to control the boat with and inadvertently ran into the propeller on the boat next to me. Totally wasn't my fault... I was not properly steered off the dock, yeah. That's how the story goes. My crew-mate and I just kind of kept going and didn't say anything. After that, we were going down the channel to get to the open sea, started to make a tact, then the wind died... Got pushed in to some of the rocks on the side. After pushing away from them, checking to see if anyone saw, I then promptly gave to rudder to Maja for her to steer. I didn't want to run in to anything else. The rest of the day went smoothly though, and no damage was done to the boat.

The next time, (yesterday) started off well, once again the wind was finicky. We spent most of the time practicing starting procedures for races. Did pretty well most of the time. We then had two races, the first race was bad, got about half way through by the time the other boat finished, so we just restarted. The second race was to be out to a buoy then back to the dock. We were also supposed to try and used the spinnaker, a large sail that you put on the front of the boat for use going with the wind. Maja was steering and I was going to try and put it up, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, by the time I got about half way through it was time to take it back down. While I did that the front of it dipped in to the water and caught a lot of water and acted as a break. Also, while reeling it in I heard a ripping sound. On the way to the dock Maja was joking about how she doesn't want to sail with me because I tend to break stuff it the boat.

One cool thing that happened was the discover that I'm on youtube! See if you can find me! I'll give you a hint though. I'm on the left side of the person that is standing on the rail with the megaphone.

This is part of the Malmö game that I went to with my host brothers. Really fun game, and loud, as you can hear.

I went to the Airforce museum here, that was cool. They had come really cool planes there and a flight simulator.

Got a cool shirt and some buttons as a souvenir.

Beside that nothing much else exciting has happened. I'm going camping this weekend, so that should be fun. I'm also expecting posts to not be quite as frequent due to laziness and the overall excitement of being here dying down a little bit. I'll still try and do it once every 10 days or so, I think that's a good number.

Hej Då!

Surströmming!

Yummie. Had surstömming tonight, the food that everyone has been telling me to stay away from and that it was mean that my host family was going to have me try it. I thought it was actually pretty good, I liked it. It had a salty, strong flavor to it with a kind of weird texture. Let me clarify what exactly surströmming is. It it this:
Raw. Basically rotten. Herring. Yeah.

Well, that's all I wanted to share in this post.

Hej Då!

1 Month down

Wow, its already been a month, sure doesn't feel like it. Times going by fairly quickly so far. I've just about settled in to routine here, which means that not everything feels as new. Not that it's not special, just that I'm getting used to everything. Which is good, my brain is finally calming down and I can rest a bit easier.

School has been going really good. I'm mostly enjoying everything, most of my classes are fun. One of them in particular is going to be fun, its a design/engineering class. For it I'm going to attempt to build a small desk that would fold up and have a place to put my computer equipment. It would be perfect to have for when I go to LAN parties where I usually end up not having enough room for myself.

I've got a new friend over here! Her name is Anna Knutsson. She's been a really big help to me at school, translating everything for me, showing me to all my classes and such. She's also the reason that I am doing the technical program at school instead of the natural science. She suggested that I change to it because it would be more fun. She switched to it from natural science and enjoyed it much more. And its really convenient for me because I can just follow her to all my classes! But yeah, Anna has been really nice.

Language is going alright, slowly I'm getting it. Some of the work for a class is translating from English to Swedish and vise versa. I can't really go from English to Swedish that well at all, seeing how I don't really know any Swedish. But I can mostly figure out how to go from Swedish to English by figuring out what seems the most logical. So maybe after a while I can start translating to Swedish!

Other than that I've done one interesting thing this last week. Mushroom hunting! As in, walking through the woods, which are beautiful, moss covered, open and flat. Through some of the woods there's stone walls completely covered in moss that were built in the 1700s. There's just nothing like that back home, it really is amazing walking through he woods here. The mushrooms we were gathering really quite big, about 5-6 inches in diameter and about 7 inches tall, on average. I didn't even know mushrooms got that big. What was fun was when we were walking around they would point out mushrooms not to get because they would probably poison me and kill me. So yeah, it was really interesting.

Well, sorry for the lack of picture, I don't really have a reliable camera yet.I should be getting a new one in a week or two though, so then I'll start taking more picture.

Hej Då!