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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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