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| Biotopia Uppsala |
Today marks the first day of my internship (aka praktik). It will last Tues-Fri until December 6th at Biotopia. It's a very small, very old biological museum for kids, with an upstairs devoted to dioramas (with stuffed animals as old as 100 yrs) and a downstairs newly renovated in 2007 with an exhibition on the evolution of Uppsala's landscape. The plan is for me to help with the school groups in the mornings and work on a project in the afternoon, to be confirmed tomorrow in a meeting with my career coach from Korta Vägen. Started off the day with a nice fika, and fika at 3pm too of course :) The morning school group were 8 years old and they searched for bugs in the garden. The 15 year olds came in the afternoon and picked things out of the river with nets, brought them back in buckets and classified them by order. It was a lot of information and pretty overwhelming, but I met some nice people, Emil, Oskar, Dag, Anna, Karin, and Erika.
If you can figure it out, you can actually see the dioramas here:
http://www.biotopia.nu/vinterland
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| Emil holding a stuffed something. Stole the pic from Sverige Radio! |
I haven't updated my blog in a very long time (nearly two months!) because these months have practically been the busiest months of my life. SFI school, KV school, (homework for both of those), working at Snerikes, getting strep throat and several colds, and trying to visit with everyone before they disappear off to another part of the world, not to mention a couple of activity-filled weekends with Fredrik's family and a last-minute not-so-relaxing-but-still-exciting daytrip to Tallinn, Estonia.
Estonia pictures have not been sorted, nor have the pix from when my Belgian friend Mira stayed with me for the week back in July. At some point soon I hope... SFI is completely done with now, after many many exams and assignments, and just today I applied for the SFI Bonus (12,000:- coming to me in three weeks! 150% of what I made at Snerikes over the summer...) I celebrated by buying a pair of 700:- leather shoes for 99:-. :D
The first half of KV is over now, the purely Swedish lessons part of it. Now I only have Swedish lectures on Mondays, and my praktik the rest of the week. It barely pays anything but it will be excellent experience, I can already tell. Basic things like that salt water is called "sweet water" in Swedish... and the names for worms and snails and bla bla bla will come pretty quickly.
Side note, it's very easy to mix up bl.a. and bla. "bl.a." in Swedish means bland annat, which means "among other things" (that took me forever to figure out!!). Also the fact that röst can mean either voting or voice... and so many other words have two very different meanings. Rör for example... it can be a verb, to move, or it can mean pipes.
Also I have discovered a significant lack of proper English translations for words which seem so normal to Swedes... such as skadeglädje. This means taking joy in seeing other people's pain/failure, such as laughing at someone who crashes their bike (me on Saturday... the one crashing the bike anyway). There are a lot of words formed by simply sticking two words together that in English take up a whole phrase (can't think of any examples just now).
Another thing that has caused me a significant amount of confusion is the fact that a boss or a CEO is called "chef" in Swedish, pronounced something like 'hweef'. A chef (person cooking food) in Swedish is "kock". Yikes. The worst thing, though, is that the Swedish words for fill, drunk, and ugly sound almost identical to each other (fyll, full, ful). Vowel differences are crucial but sooo difficult...
One more strange thing I thought I would never see: a gypsy caravan. While driving through Stockholm a while back, we came across what appeared to be a long train of cars on the highway all with their emergency blinkers on. Upon closer inspection, it turned out all the cars were full of Finnish gypsies in traditional clothes (I've described them before, the long black sparkly velvet skirts with a ledge and long sleeved shirts). Maybe 15 cars in a row with their blinkers on the whole time, I guess so they could follow each other easily? Interesting experience.
Anyway, right now I'm just starting to figure out how this fall will go. Soon it will be decided what my tasks at Biotopia will be specifically. Fredrik starts school on Friday, he's finally done with the trekking back and forth between Vasteras, Eskilstuna and here for his summer job, though he may still have a few days here and there covering for sick people. I am registered in two classes right now, but am not sure if I will actually take them or not (depends on their hours among other things) and luckily there is no disadvantage to me (no fees or penalties) if I decide to drop them. Depending on how my money situation goes through the fall I may try to get a job with my classmate Rikki at the airport, but the hours are funny and they normally want someone for at least 60-70% time.
The weather is changing very quickly. Two weeks ago it was about 20 C during the days, last week around 18 C, and yesterday going to school it was only 12 C. Some leaves are already starting to change colour...
The new students are ALL here now and are ALWAYS in the park outside our apartment. Luckily we don't have to keep all the windows open all the time anymore.
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| tastes like chicken? actually like skyr |
Well, I've been experimenting with an awful lot of new dishes here, mostly because the cheapest food here is not the cheapest food in Vancouver. Fresh vegetables (as I have mentioned before) are super expensive comparatively, but frozen veggies are much much cheaper. Frozen spinach, salmon and cod, and boxed tomatoes have become somewhat staples for us due to the price (all WAY better than Van), and a new wonderful discovery of kvarg. It's called quark in English, and I have never ever heard of it, and still don't know exactly what it is other than yet another dairy product they have here that I have never heard of (apparently Russians eat it every day?). Full of protein, low fat, and you can use it in baking or have it for breakfast with some jam mixed in. Plus it's like $2.75 for a kilo?!
Well, it's time for me to squeeze in a nap before going out to visit my friend Juliet from UBC who's been visiting old friends for the week. She started her master's in Vienna and will be here in Uppsala next year.
Pictures soon !
