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!

School starting

Hmm, where to start. Alright, well this last week was fairly slow, at least the first half was. Hanna took me in to town for me to get a sim-card for my cell phone. So that was really nice. And my host mother bought me unlimited texting, which was nice as well. So now I've got a fully functional cell phone, which is good. I did some more sailing again, this time I was in the class for younger kids, 12-17 age group I think. I was in the adult class before. At the class I met a girl that goes to the same school as me, so that was nice to meet her. The next day I went on a bike ride around the area, by my self, with out knowing where I was going, right before it was about to rain. So yeah, I ended up following a bike path that just goes in a big circle around the surrounding area. Got to go through a lot of the area, houses, park, downtown, through the forest, next to the train tracks. It was really cool. Ended up taking about an hour or so, and after about fifteen-twenty minutes it started to rain, luckily I brought my rain coat, my legs still got pretty wet though.

I haven't taken a lot of pictures of the area yet, mostly because I'm lazy, but also I'm not sure if there's anymore AA batteries in the house, and I haven't asked if there are. I miss my old camera...

School started up Thursday, well kinda, it was more of an introduction. I met all the teachers and, that's about it... Everything was in English, so I didn't really know what was said most of the day, I guess the teacher forgot to translate for me. I did meet all my other class mates, they were all really nice. They translated things for me when I asked. Which was good, because the next day, Friday, was kind of a 'game day'. All the classes went together to different games, e.g building a tower out of marshmallows and dry spaghetti. My class was really glad to have me because no one there had ever made a building out of stuff like that. I've been doing it since I was like, four or five, so I knew what I was doing. Consequently our class won that game with a tower of 94cm. By the end of the school day there were a few kids that were talking to me, who had also invited me to sit at the same lunch table to talk to me. So that was really nice.

Besides that I haven't really done anything else. Oh, so some stuff over here that have stood out. Construction workers actually work here. Like, the whole time they're on the job, there might be one guy taking a short break while the rest work, so its pretty outstanding compared to back home. Shopping carts have a lock on them that you need to pay to unlock them, you then get your money back when you return them, so its a really cool way of keeping them from spreading all over the place. All the soda here is made with real sugar, so its pretty awesome.

So yeah, after writing this I've discovered that I still don't like to write. Regardless of how well I know the subject. But yeah, oh well.

Hej Då!

Wow I'm tired. The jet lag and mental stress of seeing, learning, listening to something new every. single. day. finally caught up. This last night I slept for about 16 hours, and am probably going go to bed even earlier tonight. So yeah, I am really exhausted right now.

So, the last week has been really long. Spent it at what was called language camp, to try and learn the Swedish language. We were staying in Kristianstad, town about an hour train ride from here. Well, I didn't really learn the language that well, but did learn a lot about the culture and history of Sweden, which was nice. Their state religion is recycling. Just about 96% of all waste is recycled here. There was a lot of information that we learned, it was over all fun. I was able to meet up with the other exchange students here, one guy from Colorado and two girls from Florida. There was also one girl from New Zealand that has been here in Sweden since January, she kind of acted like a guide for us, it was nice. I just did a lot of little stuff throughout the days while there, so kind of hard to re-cap it all. The most fun part was when went to a type of reconstructed viking town. It was really cool to light a fire with flint and to mess around with a sword, helmet and shield.

One topic that came up over dinner one night with the other Rotary members was when they were talking about how a quite of few of Rotary exchange students get married shortly after to people they meet on their trip, wither to other students or natives. So who knows? I've been told a lot that I'm going to find some Swedish girl and get married...

One other cool thing we got to do was go to an old church. It was built around the 1400s. It was really beautiful inside, and was very large for the size of the town that was around it. It was uncommon for churches to be built so large in smaller towns such as Kristianstad. The basin for baby baptisms is still the original one from when the church was built, which is very neat.

Besides that nothing else really happened. I did get to meet with Hanna today, that was fun. She was very nice. We went down to the beach and hung out for a little, she got back from Virginia this earlier this year as an exchange student as well. It was nice to hang out with someone not associated with the family or Rotary.

Well, that's about it. Now for some more sleep.

Hej Då!

Light Festival and Danmark

The last two days were pretty fun. Yesterday I went to the local Light Festival. It wasn't really any thing special, really just a boat parade down the middle of town on the river. The boats were mostly dressed up with lots of lights, but a lot had just a few strands of them, so it was nothing special at all. This was the first time for my host family as well and they were wondering why it was so popular, they didn't think it was that great either. (It was hard to get good pictures because I had to use an extended shutter time)
They did however have some live entertainment that was pretty cool. The only ones that I saw was of some African music and a fire dancer type guy. The African music part had four or five men playing on the drums, I think I saw two Djembe, and one guy singing and dancing. It was interesting to see this in Sweden. Apparently there are a considerable amount of immigrants in the Southern area. I think the number I saw online was that about 16% are foreign born. The Fire dancer was cool to watch, the first to parts of his act were not very spectacular, he was just swing some stick around that had their ends on fire. Anyone could really do it. The last part though was fun, he had two chains that were on fire and was spinning those around his body and such.
Afterwards there were some fire works, but we didn't stay for them. We did however see some of them from the house. The last two or three were large smiley faces. It was really cute. Good way to end the day.


Today we went to Danmark to visit Kronborg castle. Kronborg is the castle that Shakespeare based the play Hamlet at. It was really awesome. It's about 40min total travel time from Ängelholm to Helsingør, Danmark. Really simple too, just get on a train to Helsingborg, then a ferry to Helsingør. Kronborg was really cool, it was originally built in about the 1420s as a way to collect tolls from passing ships. Then in the 1550s Fredrick II rebuilt it as a more strategic castle for defense and kept evolving until about the 1800s. One fun little tidbit about the castle is the myth surrounding it. Holger Danske (Ogier the Dane)

According to his legend, he is the son of Geoffrey, king of Denmark. In La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche, he had a son who was slain by Charlot, son of Charlemagne. Seeking revenge, Ogier sought out and slew Charlot, and was only barely prevented from killing Charlemagne. He resisted Charlemagne for seven years but made peace with him to fight at Charlemagne's side against the Saracens, in which battle he slew the giant Brehus.

Currently he sleeps under the castle and will awaken of Danmark is ever in dire trouble to save the country. It was really cool to be able to walk around the tunnels beneath the castle, it was very dark with a lot of side rooms, so it would have been more fun to be able to crawl around for an hour or so just in the tunnels. We then walked around the upper levels of the castle through the Royal apartments. There were a lot of old paintings and tapestries. Some dating back to the 1500s. Most were on average 300-350 years old. It was very interesting to see all of the old furniture and decoration, very fun too. There was a flag bastion that over looked the sea in between Danmark and Sverige. It was a beautiful view too look over. You can really tell the significance of the castle's position on the channel when looking at the surrounding area.
The castle was great fun to go around and as a souvenir I got a mini Holgor for my desk, maybe if I'm ever in a lot of trouble he'll wake up and help me. After the castle was slowly made our way back to Sverige. Had some good Danish food and overall a real good time.