Baby one more time

Well it turns out you're never too old to jump around for hours with your friends singing 90s songs. :) Until literally 4am last night, French, Dutch, Canadian, and American alike all had a dance party singing every word to all our favorites from N*SYNC, Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls, Britney Spears, the works. It was a blast to say the least. 

And then today at brunch I put some plans together for yet another adventure I'll be having in the last month of being here...we're going snow horseback riding next week!! I'm so excited. And then after that I have the farewell weekend at a hotel up north with the exchange students, followed by weekend of snowboarding in Åre, the biggest ski resort in Sweden, and then the big holiday party/gift exchange! Time is just going to shift to hyperdrive now, I know it.

I also clarified the due date for my paper today, and it's later than expected. This means I have two options: I could finish it this week and never have to put a single thought into school in Sweden again, or I could take it easy for another week and churn it out when I feel like it. Jury's still out. I think tonight I'll just read for fun and see how I'm feeling tomorrow. :)

Despite boasting how little school I've had recently, I am in for a big week. THREE DAYS this week I have class. THREE DAYS! What is THAT?! Balderdash, I tell you. Just balderdash. I can see the Coe Conditioning taking some big strides this week. Productivity, let's be friends again.

Regardless of how well I spend my week, however, some news I got today will be a cloud stuck overhead until I get home. After months of hearing she's been in and out of the hospital, I found out today my grandmother has lung cancer. It's crap to feel stuck. All my warmest thoughts and prayers are shooting westward, and hopefully ending up somewhere in the vicinity of the U of M hospital. Love you Nana.

kt

quickie

Alright I'm going to make this quick so I don't distract myself too long from research.

Sandra, Anna, Julia, and Eva are all gone this weekend. They left yesterday. It's Saturday, and I already want them back. I can feel that something's missing, and this is just coming from four of the awesome people I've met here being gone! If this is anything like how it will be when it comes time to say good bye to everyone, I'm in trouble. 

Okay back to homework. ;)

SNOW STORM!!!

I'm sitting in my cabin, expecting the whipping snow to blow through my windows at any moment. It's one of those nights where you can actually feel the cold, snowy wind seeping through your walls. Good thing I still have some hot chocolate from a month ago. :)

Well today marked day one of Coe Conditioning. While I was making lunch today, I was so incredibly tickled by the realization of how little work I actually do here, that the concept manifested itself into a full-out one-person laugh fest. I actually laughed out loud for quite some time. (I think I'm alone in my cabin too much...haha.) And although don't misconstrue, I am LOVING this freedom to take another mile on my run if I feel like it, to hit the snooze twice or six times if I feel like it, to watch the next four episodes of Scrubs if I feel like it, to go out for an hour and a half just to take pictures if I feel like it, to ACTUALLY READ FOR LEISURE if I feel like it, to research new cameras online if I feel like it, etc. etc. etc. It's amazing. It's string-free. But I'd be a fool so say it's anything similar to the amount of free time I have at Coe. (I think there are some big implications to be seen here, too, regarding the Swedish culture vs. the American culture, but I'm not in the mood to dive into that at the  moment.) I know it won't be this way when I get back. I am saddling up for my most challenging academic semester at Coe yet, finishing up my Psych degree. This schedule of classes from hell happens to fall on the same semester during which I intend to party my face off with all my friends for my last semester of college with them. And I'll be broke, so season the mixture with a little bit of work, and you have yourselves there a recipe for a much busier Katie than you have now. 

So, I started training today. Kind of. The plan was to run, shower, volunteer, study at University, pick up groceries, come home for dinner, go to yoga, home. Instead I wimped out on a run in fear of the snow (replaced it with a mediocre circuit workout), sent some emails, stretched for twice as long as usual and ate breakfast while watching three episodes of The Office, showered, and packed a lunch. This all took me...yep three hours. Then I made plans with Sandra and Anna, read (FOR LEISURE!) for a half hour, joined those two on the way to University, studied a bit, volunteered at the Red Cross, picked up some groceries, biked through a snow storm to yoga only to find it was cancelled, came home. So it wasn't exactly the largely productive day I need to start getting in the habit of having, but I guess it was a start. :)

Funny side story, too: The streets at the moment are covered with a layer of ice, on top of which is a tightly packed layer of snow. When you throw in the fierce winds that we have had today, it makes biking on the roads quite the thrill ride. Well I was biking along, grumbling at how annoying it was to get all the way to yoga only to find out I could have been in my warm cabin the entire time, when all of a sudden this violent, snowy wall of wind literally tipped Gumpy and me over. It was one of those slow-motion spills, where you can see your fate well before it comes but there's nothing you can do about it, and I sure enough ended up flat sideways in the middle of the icy black street. It was so disappointing that no one was around to enjoy it.

Today was also a big day because another Patty Mraz package came!! I love these. This time we have:

-"The Audacity of Hope," which I specifically requested be purchased from Half-Priced Books, a feat that only Patty Mraz could pull off considering its popularity at the moment

-CANDY CORN!! to show Sandra and Anna, who had never seen it before (and I didn't just show them, we devoured it all in one sitting)

-A burned N*SYNC Christmas Album, personally created by Mark Mraz per my request

-Three silly comics ripped from a day-by-day calendar

-Two newspaper articles, one about the awkward meeting Obama and Bush would have to have, and the other about religiousness vs. spirituality in Minnesota youth

-A pen.

So yes, Patty pulls through again. :)

Well I'm going to wrap this up. Stay tuned for posts in the not-so-distant future that are no doubt going to be cursing the Coe Conditioning and the daunting concept of leaving this place in a month.... 

*muah*

kt

Cool times o0O

The o0O in the title makes a snowman! Get it? We have a lot of snow here...when I got back from Visby I was so relieved when I found Gumpy the Bike safe under the awning at the train station and protected from the three or so inches we got last weekend.

LAST WEEKEND! Last weekend was amazing. I really had a blast in Visby. It was the perfect trip to end the Era of the Eurail Pass with. And along with not paying for my transportation getting there and back (which included train-train-ferry; ferry-train-train), I also lucked out and had a place to stay for free while I was in the town. My friend here, Niklas, called up his sister who lives there and ended up getting me a MATTRESS and my OWN ROOM to crash in for the two nights. So I was already set for good things before I even left my cabin. 

I stepped off the ferry at 11:30pm on Friday night without a map and just an address. I soon learned that it's next to impossible to be really lost in Visby, and found Malin's apartment along the winding cobblestone streets in no time. Malin was awesome; she offered me a beer right away and invited me to join her and her friends in their "Sewing Party". The girls and Malin's boyfriend Bjorn are part of the SCA, the Society of Creative Anachronism (established in the States...), which basically is made up of a whole mess of history buffs all over the world; so they were sewing their dresses for Medieval Week that happens in Visby each year! (It sounds a lot like the Renaissance Festival, but I would be beheaded if they heard me say that out loud. :)) Anywho, they shared with me a lot of the history of Visby, and since they all lived there we planned my itinerary for the next day. Bjorn works at the museum, so I lucked out with his inside knowledge of the town...he shared with me a secret that few tourists actually know: you can actually rent the key that gets you in the ruins that are scattered throughout the town! So I had my plan for the next day and fell asleep excited to explore the city in the daylight.

The whole town is encircled by a stone wall that was built hundreds of years ago to keep out the peasants and the force merchants to pay a fine to enter the town. So right away in the morning I headed off in whatever direction I wanted, with the intention of hitting the wall at some point. The town is just so perfect to wander in. There must be city ordinances about advertising and signage, because the entire town matches itself; every single street I looked down was "the most perfect street to take a picture of"...needless to say I ended up taking over 200 pictures there. So I finally meandered to the wall and was walking along, picturing all the soldiers who positioned themselves for battle there, all the guards who thought they were tough keeping out the sickly and poor, when I came across a section that had fallen apart ever-so-perfectly into the form of stairs that were begging me to climb up them. I obliged, and ended up spending about half an hour running around all along the wall and capturing as many angles of the outstanding view I had of the town as I could. The little girl in me who fell in love with Kevin Kostner when he played Robin Hood was in her element. :)

Alright this description of just two days is starting to get long, so let me skip to the part where I have the super-awesome Key Of Power from the museum. This super-awesome Key Of Power was a power trip let me tell you. With it, I could unlock the heavy-duty padlocks that keep all the common tourists out of the 13th-century ruins and spend as much time as my elite heart desired exploring every corner of the old churches and towers. To walk along hidden corridors and climb back stairways that thousands of people had done 800 years before me was eerie to say the least. In one tower specifically, one that was particularly dark, might I add, I actually psyched myself out too much to spend more than ten minutes inside of it...I was just so shaken by everything that had most likely transpired there, not to mention the lack of sunlight was making it more and more chilling to be alone. Okay so I'm a baby, big deal. :) Anyway, long story short I was really moved by what I saw. In what ended up being my favorite "church" of them all (there were five in total), I camped out where the altar used to be for who knows how long. I couldn't scrutinize the details fast enough. The fact that this church still had parts of its ceiling intact, the fact that anyone could still grasp what its function was from the time it thrived, the fact that the chiseled artwork on the pillars was still distinguishable, all 800 years after it was built, just had me frozen in place. People built this stuff without the help of machines...stone by stone they piled on top of each other until the building finally took shape into a functional, symmetrical, impressionable place of worship. Sitting there in the apse got me thinking about the concept of work, and how it has or hasn't changed in the way we perceive it over the last 8 centuries. It made me feel more motivated than I have in a long time, to say the least.

So anyway, that was Visby. I feel like I might be forgetting parts but that's what really sticks out in my mind at the moment. I finally figured out how to load pictures up here with little to no hassle, so I'll most likely be putting up a lot of what I captured there for your viewing pleasure. I made a friend in the form of a VERY soft and snuggly cat who stars in a couple of them. :)

After my ferry from Visby on Sunday, I met Stacey in Stockholm, where we had a reservation for the famous Absolut Ice Bar...and it was just that! A bar sponsored by Absolut Vodka (exported from Sweden!) that's made purely of ice! Literally everything...chairs, tables, glasses, everything. We had to wear these ridiculous jackets that made everyone in the bar look like penguins, or boxers, however you want to look at it. It was awesome. And then after that excitement we caught our night train and headed home. 

So all in all, it was a fabulous weekend. I had a lot of time to myself to reflect on life in some of the most tried-and-true places in Europe, and it made me feel strong. :) I have thoughts about the rest of my time here, but I think I'll wrap this up for now. Hope to talk to you all soon!

kt

VISBY!

Well hello there! It's 7:32am here and I just got back from arguably my favorite place I've been in Sweden thus far. My weekend trip to Visby was AWESOME. Unfortunately, you're going to have to sit tight for the details because, true to form, I have put off a rough draft research paper due on Wednesday, and will be falling into the black hole of homework until it's done. See you when I get out, wish me luck!!! :)

MOON

Have you ever been able to see your shadow at night? I have. The moon is bright enough these days that I can actually see a distinct outline of myself as I'm walking on the Camping once the sun is gone. Can you believe that? It makes the environment so much more inviting. 

Just an update!

Hello all!

It's been a while since my last post so I thought I'd just give a little fill-in. I'm starting to feel the pressure of this semester coming to a close, so I've been really adamant about sticking around Sweden and enjoying as much time with my friends here as possible before I leave. This past weekend, then, Sandra, Kevin, Benoit and I headed off to the second largest city in Sweden, Göteborg. It's pretty well-known for its fishing industry, so needless to say we saw lots and lots of boats. The city is also home to the largest shopping mall in the Nordic Area, so when the sky opened up and it starting pouring on us midday on Sunday, we sought refuge in the massive shopping center. This felt oh-too American to me, so I secretly promised to not buy anything. It was fun to run around with Sandra and try on clothes though. :) At one point we also spent a few hours inside Göteborg's Natural History Museum, which was incredibly thorough in its displays. They had room after room after room of all types of animal species, from mealworms to orca whales. It was awesome. Overall, the trip was just a pleasant chance to bond. 

Then some excitement for this week was going to the Moose Garden today! About 20 minutes away from the Camping is this world-renound moose garden that sees over 45,000 visitors a year from all over the world. We got to go inside the pens and pet the moose, while the owner gave us all the background of the garden and little unknown facts about moose. They are incredible creatures. It's really sad to know how much of their byproducts are wasted by some of the ignorant hunters who take them out just for their meat and the antler trophy. I didn't know this beforehand, and please excuse the forwardness, but their poop is sterile! Yeah! And since they eat just mainly wood and grass, it's a perfect resource for making paper! I know it sounds strange but it's true...the tourist shop had yard upon yard of moose poop strung like beads all over the ceiling. They sold moose poop soap, that was translucent colored soap with a single moose dropping inside. It was really funny...can't say I've ever seen something like that before.

Well today I might be getting another ear piercing but I'm not sure. Tomorrow I leave for my last train trip, to the town of Visby on the island of Gotland. It's this famous Medieval town that has been preserved to still give off the impression of medieval times...should be pretty interesting! It's actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I'm rocking the trip solo, but I think that'll be good. I've had a lot on my mind lately. And then once I've gone there and back, Charlie the Eurail pass is over! (Moment of silence will shortly follow. :( ) She and I, we've had a good ride...get it?

Send me life updates! Love you and miss you!

kt