Halloween preparations

Today Mats bought a pumpkin at the store, so after dinner I taught them all how to carve it! They were pretty grossed out by the pumpkin guts, so they made me do that part, but then I helped Oliver draw on the eyes and Theodor draw on the nose and mouth and then cut it out for them. They were thrilled when it was done. They ran into their rooms and put on their costumes then turned out all the lights so the pumpkin would glow. Then I baked the pumpkin seeds with salt and they turned out delicious.

Halloween has really only been celebrated here for about the past 5 years, so the whole carving-pumpkins thing was new to my family. I'm glad I got to help them start a new tradition!



I never really updated much on my family beeing here, but it was great! We saw the Vasa (an 17th century swedish war ship that sunk minutes into its maiden voyage, but was taken out of the Baltic Sea in the 1960s and put in a museum), had many delicious dinners at Orwar and Marie's house, went to Skansen (an outdoor Scandinavian museum), had pancakes and pea soup (a Thursday tradition in Sweden) with my host family, and went on an archepelago tour that ended in the town of Vaxholm, where we got to do some shopping. Everything was so fun!

Rudberg Familj!

My family arrived yesterday! Saturday we attempted to go to the chocolate festival at Nordiska Museet but the line was SO LONG. So instead we walked around the city then went to Orwar and Marie's for a delicious dinner of salmon and homemade coffee ice cream for dessert! Today we went out to lunch and on a "Under the Bridges of Stockholm" boat tour with my host family. It was a gorgeous day and a fun tour. Then we went to Orwar and Marie's for dinner again, this time with their friends. It was a very traditional Swedish dinner with a salmon cake, herring, meatballs and strawberry-rhubarb pie for dessert. We also had Aquavit ( a swedish liquor) and sang Swedish drinking songs.

More fun things to come!

10-10-10 in Amsterdam

After spending a few days in Nantes, I hopped on the train to Amsterdam with my friends Zoe, Emily and Charlotte. Many people from Grinnell were meeting up there in honor of "10/10," which is the biggest party of the year at Grinnell and takes place on the Saturday closest to October 10th.

Over the next few days we toured the Anne Frank house (very interesting), went to the Van Gogh museum, went on a canal tour by boat, rented bikes and biked around the city (EVERYONE in Amsterdam bikes, I have never seen so many bikes/ such a bikable city), ate lots of stroopwafels, went to an outdoor market, and partied with cool people, mostly Grinnellians.

The red-light district was a very strange place to see, and somewhat frightening. In some areas it was just a narrow alley and the doors with the red lights and girls looking for customers were literally inches away. The existence of "coffee shops" and the whole marijuana culture was also very interesting. That's all I will say about that...

Anne Frank house (middle)

"homomonument"- one of the few monuments to homosexual people in the world

on the left is the symbol for Amsterdam (from their flag)- they do love bikes!

"Travel Hotel"- our hostel, with a private room. Just outside the red-light district

The whole city is made up of canals- So pretty!

Me on a bike

Amelia et Laura à Paris!

This week I am on fall break, and I spent the first weekend in Paris, with my friend Laura from Grinnell, who is studying in Nantes, France. I got there Saturday morning and we met up, then went to the Eiffel Tower (not up it, just saw it, it was too cloudy to see much from the top), the Champs Elysées, and the Arc de Triomphe. Then we picked up a baguette, cheese, wine and chocolate and had a little picnic in a park right next to the Arc de Triomphe. There we met our friend Ria, who graduated from Grinnell this past spring and has spent the past month traveling around Europe.

Laura and me in front of La Tour Eiffel

Ria, me and Laura in front of L'arc de Triomphe

Champs Elysées (notice- no lanes!!)

After our picnic we tried to check into our hostel, but there had been a problem with confirming it, so they set us up in a hotel down the street for the same price and Laura and I got our own room with a sink and a shower! Great deal.


Then the three of us went and got more cheese, bread, wine and chocolate and sat in the park by the Eiffel Tower and ate dinner/talked, and at 8:59 the tower started sparkling! (It is lit up throughout the night but sparkles at a minute before every hour for 5 minutes.) It was beautiful!

We decided to get a better view, so we went to the gardens of Trocadero, which is across the seine but has a great view of the tower. There we heard live music (it was "Nuit Blanche"- a culture festival in Paris), and saw the tower sparkle again!

The sparkling Eiffel Tower from Trocadero

The next day Laura and I had pain au chocolat (chocolate croissant) for breakfast and went to the Musée D'Orsay, which was spectacular because I love impressionist/post-impressionist art. After that we went to the Obelesque, met up with Ria and had lunch at a café near by. Laura and I didn't want to wait in line for the Louvre because it takes hours, but we went there anyway to see the glass pyramid.

We tried to go to the Grand Palais to see their Monet exhibit, but it was 23€ (over 30 dollars), so instead we split a banana and nutella crèpe in the park before we had to leave for the train.

After a 2 hour train ride we were in Nantes (west coast of France). I am staying with Laura's host family here. They have 4 kids (3 girls age 12, 10 and 5 and a 7 year old boy). They are all lots of fun. Last night we made sweet potato turnovers for them, and the kids all helped. Timothé had a clever idea to prevent crying while cutting onions...

I'm looking forward to spending two more days here, then it's off to Amsterdam! 


(p.s. these are all Laura's pictures, because I didn't bring my camera cord. You can read more about her France adventures at www.lockwoodinfrance.blogspot.com)

Gotland, the Viking land

This past weekend about 25 kids from the program all went to Gotland, and island in the baltic sea that was origionally an independant viking state, but since 1361 has been under Swedish, German and Danish rule. Its now owned by Sweden.
It was gorgeous there; we were (obviously, its an island) right by the water, the architecture was amazing and the weather was SO NICE.

 

Friday we had a walking tour of Visby, the largest city, where we were staying.

A beautiful old church with only half a roof

By the water near the hotel

Gorgeous vine-covered building

Friday night we went to a club on the island called "Karma" and for a long time the 10 or so of us from the program that went were the only ones there, but we had fun dancing. 

Lili and I climbing a big rock (I'm at the bottom)

Saturday we took a bus tour of the entire island where we saw some viking burials, and some really cool big rocks by the sea that you could climb on (see pictures).

My friends Dru and Zoe

After our tour we had a "viking feast." When we got there they made us put on these burlap shirt/dress/sack things with different colored collars that divided us into 4 teams. Then we did viking crafts like make chains out of copper wire and yarn out of sheep's wool. Then we played viking sports like archery, axe throwing, and tug of war.
Finally we had the feast, which we ate on wooden blocks instead of plates with only our hands. They had vegetables with oil and spices and a giant lamb on a stick that had cooked over the fire (I didnt eat the lamb, but the vegetables were good!) After we ate we had our final competition. One member from each team went up (2 teams at a time) and sat on a log 3 feet in the air with mattresses under it and hit the other person with a burlap sack/ pillow until someone fell off. Of course, I wanted to play for my team. I won the first round, but lost the second. Regardless, it was fun.

Ginny and I fighting to the death

our viking dinner

The next day we had some free time to walk around so a couple of us went to these botanical gardens near the hotel. It was very pretty. Then we went to an ice cream shop with 100 different flavors! Soooo good. I had one scoop of "lion" which was caramel and chocolate and one scoop of Daim, which is my favorite candy here (its like Heath bars).

All in all it was a fantastic trip! Next on the table? Leaving on Friday for Paris/Nantes/Amsterdam!!

My friend Grace smelling a flower in the garden

In the garden

Election

This post has nothing to do with what I've been up to, but its an important thing happening in Sweden...

This past Sunday was the general election in Sweden (they have one every 4 years). The right-wing coalition (The Alliance- made up of the Moderate Party, the Centre Party, the Liberal People's Party, and the Christian Democrats ), which was in power last term and led by Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, technically won, in that they recieved the most senate seats (173 out of 349), although they did not get a majority.
The liberal colaition (The Red-Greens- made up of the Social Democrats, the Left Party and the Green party) got 156 seats in the senate.

The other twenty seats went to the ultra-conservative Sweden Democrats, who strongly oppose immigration and gay rights issues, such as adoption rights for homosexual couples. The party also has Nazi roots and their policies are still overtly racist. This is the first time the Swedish Democrats have made it into the parliament, and all the Swedish people I have talked to find their presence pretty frightening.

The upside is, now the Alliance is attempting to cooperate with the Green Party in order to gain a majority. As of now, the Green Party is opposed to collaboration, because of the Moderate Party's lack of attention to the environment. My globalization professor was saying, however, that if the Moderates offer to implement serious environmental policy in return for allegiance, maybe they will change their mind....

One thing that is interesting, that I was talking to my host family about, is that socially, all parties (except the Sweden Democrats) are liberal. Gay marriage is legal here, most parties are in favor of equal rights for homosexual couples (adoption is a hot issue right now), and they are all pro-choice. Most of the debate comes down to issues of taxes and social services.

It is cool to be here at an important political time. Seeing the ways Swedish politics contrast with American politics is really interesting.

Helsinki

This past weekend my friends Kat, Dru, Charlotte, Natalie and I went to Helsinki, Finland. We flew there, got in around 8pm and checked into our first Hostel, which was in the Olympic Stadium (not on the field, just in the building).
After that we (with the help of a young couple we met at the tram stop) figured out how to get downtown via tram and stopped at a bar called "Bar Llamas", because it seemed to be very popular. So there we were, 5 American girls from Stockholm drinking tequilla-beer in a Mexican-themed bar in Helsinki. A fitting first night in a city that is about as strange as the previous sentence.

The next day we walked around a little, went to a market by the water (where we spent a lot of time trying on fur coats, hats, earmuffs, etc), saw the "Buddy Bears" art exhibit in the Senate Square, and eventually made our way to a public sauna (saunas were invented in Finland and still very popular), where we paid 7 euro and went upstairs to the women's floor for a sauna and cold shower (some of the saunas have pools that you swim in after, but this one just had a shower room).

Then we went to the island Sumolina (a 20 min. ferry ride from Helsinki), which is known for the Suomenlinna Sea Fortress, where we were staying in a hostel for the night. We had some pizza at a bar/restaurant on the island then bought beer and candy at the store and hung out in our room (which had 6 beds, but no one was staying in the last one, so we had it to ourselves), because it was raining and the island was pretty quiet at night.

The next morning we explored the fortress, which was beautiful and by far the best part of Helsinki. Then we went back to the mainland and shopped (I bought a really nice wool coat with an epic hood), had a long lunch, browsed the design district (mostly the Marimekko store), and had a long fika before getting on the 45 minute plane ride back to Stockholm. By Sunday night it was good to be Stock-home.

All in all, Helsinki was very strange, but cool. It was apparent in the design of the city that Finland has been under both Russian and Swedish control over the past few hundred years. It was much more industrial-looking than Sweden. It was raining the whole weekend, on and off, but it seemed appropriate for the city. I'm glad I got a chance to go somewhere that is different than most of western Europe (not to say that I'm not excited for my upcoming trips to Paris, Nantes, Amsterdam, Rome and Copenhagen though...)

Our hostel in the stadium

A statue/garden in the center of the city

The Buddy Bears outside the Parliament Building

Our hostel in Suominlinna

Me, Charlotte, Dru and Kat sitting on a hill at the top of the fortress