Visit from America

Now, I can finally move on to talk about the visit I received from Lily and Meg... my friends from Seattle. Lily and Meg came to me on March 20th an stayed with me in my flat until early morning of March 28th. That is why I left such a large gap in my blog posts.

We had lots of fun together and I got to show them around town and show them how I've been living for the past three months. I took them out to Vrångö, Donsö, and Styrsö on the ferry, to Göteborgs Konstmuseum, to Nefertiti (one of Gothenburg's best jazz clubs), to my salsa dance class, to my funk band rehearsal, to Babar (a restaurant where we got to have reindeer and wild boar), to Haga, Arkaden, Avenyn, and Nordstan for shopping, to Cafe Tintin to see all of the posters on the walls, to Cafe Villekulla (AKA Pippi cafe) for the cake buffet, and to a number of other places I know I'm forgetting to mention. They even got to take part in one of my Swedish Language Alliance meetings that I have at my place every sunday where we baked some awesome semlor and watched Noll Tolerans again. (This was my third time seeing this movie).

We cooked a lot of good food together and had a lot of Swedish pancakes. Lily insisted that we have pancakes every morning and we just about managed to do that. It was great. Here's a few pictures of the food.









































We also thought it would be fun to take a series of photos posing as statues and signs we found around town:












































































































Overall, we had a good time and I got to show them how Sweden really is.

Kiruna & Abisko cont.

Sorry... now, after a long pause, I am back and I would like to continue right where I left off.

So, being in Kiruna and Abisko was quite amazing. Getting there, on the other hand... not so much. It took 20 hours to get there, and 23+ hours to get back. Despite the long trip, I found ways to entertain myself. Aside from trying to sleep, I spent lots of time learning some language basics in Russian, Italian, Slovenian, Japanese, and French. Overall, it was a good time and I learned a lot. I'd like to share one really funny French tongue twister I learned. Below you'll find three different transcriptions for each line of the tongue twister.

The top line is a pseudo rhythmical transcription:
(| = barline, Q = quarter note, O = eighth note, o = sixteenth note).
The second line is the French language original.
The third line is the English translation.

O | O O O O o o O Q |
Combien sont ces six saucissons ci?
How much are these six sausages here?

O | O o o O O O O Q |
Ces six saucissons ci sont six sous.
These six sausages are six 'sous'

o o | O o o O O O O Q |
Si ces six saucissons ci sont six sous.
If these six sausages here are six 'sous'

O | O o o O O O O Q |
Ces six saucissons ci sont très chers.
These six sausages here are very expensive.

Hopefully that made some sense. The funniest part is that these lines fit into bars of music, but I'm sad that it looks so terrible here and that I couldn't find a better way to transcribe it.

Here's a picture of the sandwiches I kept making throughout the trip to tide me over.














And, an example page from my multi-language linguistic study notebook.














Moving on, we snowmobiled out 11 km into the wilderness to try to see some Northern Lights in Kiruna and we sort of saw some, but it was cloudy so we couldn't see them well. I guess I was lucky to see any at all though.

As for the Ice Hotel... this has been a place I knew about and wanted to visit for just over five years, so it was nice to finally be able to go. I should've realized how cold it was going to be though. I think they they to keep the whole Ice Hotel under -5 C at all times. Pretty cold if you ask me. Beautiful though. Here's one more picture from there before I take my leave.

Kiruna & Abisko

I went on a trip to Northern Sweden recently and I thought I'd share a few pictures with you. More pictures and thoughts will come later, but for now this is what I've got...

Here's a couple pictures of me with the dogs and riding a dogsled in Abisko.




































Here's a couple from the cross-country skiing trip, also in Abisko.




























Here's a few from the snowmobiling trip we made in Kiruna.









































And a few others:

Mistakes

I thought I would just write a little about some of the mistakes I've made here in Sweden so I can remember to never make the same mistakes again. Plus, all of you that are reading can painlessly learn not to make the same mistakes I did. :)

I:

• tried to turn my refrigerator on without plugging it in.
• used my bare hands to mix spicy chili pepper flakes.
• used "hade att" to try to say I "had to do something," when this phrase doesn't exist in Swedish. (var tvungen, or using behöver or måste is better, i think.)
• bought Comviq Kompis for my phone instead of Comviq Amigos and had to pay $1 per minute for international phone calls. (curse the company that names two completely different phone plans using the same word just translated into different languages!)
• heard people at Vasakyrkan saying "Kristus, förbarma dig över oss" and thought they were saying "Kristus, förbannade över oss"
• For at least one month, I thought that the tram stop: Getebergsäng was Geteberg + säng meaning "Geteberg bed" instead of Getebergs + äng meaning "Geteberg's meadow." (I still have no idea what Geteberg means though. Goat mountain? Göta province's mountain...)
  

(I plan on periodically updating this post along with other posts that are labelled "periodically updated.")

Nya kompisar

Here are some pictures of me with some of the people I've met here in Sweden!

live & love, bland annat.

Every once in a while, somebody asks me or I ask myself what I would do today if I were to die tomorrow. This is really an interesting question and now that I think about it again, I would have to say that there isn't a specific plan or schedule full of things I have to do on the day before I die. Rather, there would be a checklist of goals that I would want to have completed and a separate checklist of things I want to be at least in the process of doing. I think the lists would look something like this:

Things do make sure to complete before I die:

• Make sure everyone you know knows that you love them.
• Make sure you eat/drink as much of whatever you feel like eating/drinking.
  
• Make sure you listen to whatever music you want to listen to as loud as you want it.
• Spend some time with people. What people? Those that are nearest and dearest.
  
• Spend some time alone.
• Spend some time with the Bible and God.

Things to at least be working on before I die:

• Sharing my thoughts and insights.
• Sharing my love.

Yup, so that's it. Well, I mean sure --- there are also some very specific things I would like to do. These are things like:

• Go to a furniture store when you're really tired (probably after lunch) and take a nap on the sofa/recliner that you didn't have time to take a nap on before.

Well, that's all I can think of right now, but I'll add more when I think of them.

On another note, there is something else I want to take up right now. It's the concept of "love." I've always had a problem with this word and I say it almost never because it is such a commercialized, self-reciprocating word that has a different meaning depending on the context, tone, who it is coming from, and why it is said in the first place. I don't like saying the word, but people who are without "love" in the sense of having love in their own hearts for themselves and the people around them... are just empty. I don't want to be empty, therefore I feel like I need to redefine it for myself, because like it says on the first item on my list, I need to make sure everyone I know knows that I love them.

This is how it is: My life is a life of learning and I will always be a student, whether in a real school, or just in the school of life (as cheesy as that sounds). If I have ever met you or known you, you have added a perspective to my life that I would not have had otherwise. Whether I liked you or disliked you plays no role because this is really just a matter of whether I liked or disliked the things you did and the way you acted. This has no bearing on the way I feel about you as a person and lucky for you, I love you. I want you to know that I love you -- any & every one of you that I have ever known.

Now, as long as I eat/drink what I want, listen to whatever music I want, and make sure to spend some time alone, with the Bible, and with people everyday... I can die happily. Not that I'm planning on dying anytime soon, but now I can live like most people only wish they could live -- like today was my last.

Nowhere Orchestra

So, I'm playing drums in a funk band called Nowhere Orchestra while I'm here in Sweden and I just thought I would give you a little taste of one of our songs. This recording is from a rehearsal we had last wednesday (March 4th). We're not completely polished or anything, but I guess that's what funk it all about. Rawness. Enjoy.

"Hit the tempo" (clip)

not a superhuman, after all...

So, I found out yesterday that I'm really not a superhuman after all. I feel like most people my age or younger have this feeling like they are invincible or something, but we're really not and it's sort of an important realization to have... Not that you should let anything limit your goals and aspirations, because I'm still a firm believer in "if you put your mind to it, you can do it," and "most people are reasonable, that's why they only do reasonably well," but one should at least be aware of the sort of physical boundaries that exist. You know, the ones that determine your health at least.

Basically, what I found out yesterday was that I cannot go a full day just eating chocolate and cakes, and drinking only coffee, water, and orange juice. Actually, in some cases I think I might be able to handle this, but I think in combination with my lack of sleep and all of the running around I do all day... this was not a good and I paid for it yesterday.

I was over at my friend Mira's place studying Swedish after a long day of running errands, going to a short-film exposition, and hanging out at a coffee shop. I had only been eating sweets all day because I woke up late and didn't have time for breakfast... AKA: I bought 100g of dark chocolate before heading to the library. My mind was working very hard, as I was doing some very intense linguistic work with the Swedish.

My goal was (and still is) to create subcategories within the group 4 strong verbs where the subcategories actually fall into subgroups that follow a certain pattern (namely, ablaut or umlaut). In doing this, I need to know roughly what the vowel space looks like for Swedish so I can decide whether to call it ablaut (vowel reduction) or umlaut (vowel fronting)... basically. This has been something that has interested me for a while, and now it is useful because I'm taking a Swedish course again. Hopefully if/when I finish this, I'll post it to my Swedish website so people can see my work and use it to help them learn Swedish. I'm a huge advocate of shared knowledge and all things that are "open source," if you haven't noticed. I just hope that what I create is accurate and valid. If it's not, I'll at least have had good practice with the verbs. :P

Anyways, I just had some rice with kimchi and two fried eggs (a true Korean meal) and I'm making some 보리차 (barley tea) right now to fill and calm my stomach. Then, I think I'll have fully recovered and I can't help but thinking God is so kind for giving me such a mild scare. Finding out that I'm not invincible could have involved breaking my leg or getting hit by a tram or something like that, but instead I just felt faint and disoriented and just threw up a few times. God is great. And so is rice, kimchi, and barley tea.

:)

Good thing I'm well now though, because I'm hosting a meeting for this Swedish-Language student group I formed last week. We're called "The Swedish Language Alliance." Pretty bad-ass, I know.

Ice Breaker

This is how we break the ice in Sweden:

funny, ha ha.

So, our Scandinavian Studies class went on a tour of some old houses in Slottskogen today and this really funny thing happened. Well, it was funny to me at least, because I had slept a total of about 5 hours in the past two days before going on this field trip and I didn't eat breakfast before going. Yes, so I was basically running on empty. Here's one picture:














Anyway, we were at this old house that was renovated to be used as a folk dance hall and the lady there was telling us about provincial costumes and stuff (not the house in the picture).

This lady was flipping through a book and showing us pictures of things and she said something like, "... and this is a picture of when the pope came to Sweden," but it sounded like she said "...and this is a picture of when the poop came to Sweden." I'm fully aware that Swedish vowel sounds can be and are in most cases very different, but I guess I never heard a Swedish person say the word "pope" before.

I die when I hear funny language jokes, so after a few moments I started cracking up!! It was so hard to hold in this laugh, but I felt like I needed to or else people would think I'm laughing at the provincial costumes or something, which I was not!! I started coughing to cover my laughter and I almost left the room. Stupid thing was, I kept thinking about it off and on for the next 15-20 minutes that we were there and I almost started laughing again every time I thought about it. You know when you're trying to hold in a laugh and you basically have a body spasm and expel a bunch of air through your nose? Yeah, I was having these spasms and I hope Akane, who was standing next to me, didn't think I was just blowing air into her ear or something.

Well, here's a few more pictures before I end this post.