Just got the results of my Forest Management exam... 5! In Sweden, you can get a grade from 1 to 5, 1/2 being fail grades. A strange thing: you don't want to see a check mark on your work, that means bad! You want an R. Not sure what that means yet but I'm sure I'll find it out pretty soon in my new class, considering I will spend about 10 times the number of hours in class as I did last term.
I have also heard that this is the warmest November in Sweden for at least 10 years. Apparently they don't even have snow in Kiruna?? This is yet to be verified on a weather website, but we are a bit nervous due to our upcoming Abisko trip. Can't dogsled if there isn't any snow!!!
So... the autumn ball/Höstbal! It wasn't until around Thursday that I discovered when they say ball, it means tailcoat, white bow tie, BALL gown. That was a bit of a shock considering I had two days to find some sort of floor-length dress... so I spent five hours shopping across the entire city looking for a floor length dress, of any sort. Unfortunately it's completely the wrong season to buy something like that. There wasn't even that much selection of proper ball gowns (the 2500+ kr ones... =$375+). Eventually I found a dress that was almost floor length and didn't fit quite right, but it seems to look fine in the pictures!!
The ball was organized much in the same way as the other gasks, except for you are seated with your partner. And since we don't speak Swedish and didn't understand the signs when buying our tickets, we didn't realize it was a date sort of thing... luckily the four of us all made the same mistake so we weren't alone...
It was a four course dinner (more than the other dinners), started at 4pm and lasted til just before midnight. Since that's eight hours of dinner, they actually had two 'breaks' of about 15 minutes, so that we could stretch/refresh and the servers could replace the candles and take away the dishes. There were many more speeches, but the entertainment was much better. We entered the dining room to a small orchestra playing!! There was also a jazz ensemble, two traditional choirs, one guy dressed in a top hat and cane singing a song about mashed potatoes, a skit, and a very charismatic songmaster. I will put together some video clips I took and post a link! The food was unbelievably delicious, including foie gras soup and ox meat, and many mystery drinks (one I believe was apple brandy but two others are still a mystery). There was much singing, including more songs with actions, and one where everybody jumps up and starts dancing with their partner, and of course standing on the chair for the final song. Luckily no feet on the table this time.
I also learned a new tradition: in addition to signing your table partners' songbooks, you can also bite the cover and leave your teeth prints. This doesn't seem to be across the board, maybe just for certain nations? But of course we all bit each others' songbooks anyway.
After the dinner, they had a live band upstairs playing music for ballroom dancing, and the non-student/older couples (the emeritus curators and whatnot, important guests) were all up there dancing, and they opened the lower floor for students and others who didn't actually go to the ball. It ran until 4, so we really did spend 12 hours in the nation!! Overall a great night, I will definitely go to the spring ball!! At least now I have a couple of months to find a dress... :P
PICTURES of the ball!
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