Week 1 (continued)

This week was full of mostly boring things that do not bear too much mentioning, I did a lot of shopping and errands, was rejected when I tried to open a Swedish bank account, bought a blanket, paid my rent for all 6 months, converted some money, and other little boring things.

Also during this week I decided that it was time for me to find a job, and after some discussion with my fellow students I discovered that the best place for me to find a job would be at one of the 13 nations (nations here are similar to the houses in harry potter, everyone has to belong to one and each nation has its own events every week standup, club, pub, restaurant, fika (coffee chat) and other things). Both Joe and I on our 3rd day here met up and had dinner at Kalymar Nation where I later asked if they needed anyone to do anything in the kitchen they gave me a sign up sheet and that was it I had a job.

I showed up on Tuesday ready to work and discovered that the first Tuesday of every month was one of the most popular days because they had a comedy club event which apparently was the place to be. After a night of flipping many burgers and trying (and failing) to understand the standup which was all 100% in Swedish I left back to my dorms and fell asleep with the knowledge that the job at Kalymar was fun but paid horribly, about 120 SEK (about 15 dollars) for 6.5 hours of work.

So I decided to find another job one that pays better even if only slightly so, and after talking to one of the other people who live in my apartment I was invited to work at OG nation working in the kitchen and at the bar, but that is a story for week 2.

On Sunday I went into town hoping to do all of the shopping and errands that needed to be done, I caught the bus at about 3:30 and discovered that on Sundays in Uppsala EVERYTHING and I mean every single thing closes at 4pm latest, except for the text that had been erected to protest the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and the loud Muslim lady who stood yelling on the street corner and burning children’s clothing. I was so mad (because everything was closed) and annoyed, while wandering around lost I stumbled upon the only store in the area, which happened to be open until 5pm (how late). The store was a department store located on the main shopping square of town, I go most of what I needed there and felt that the week had not been a total waste.

I also started my first class this week, the class is called Swedish Society and Everyday life, and the first lecture was mostly busy work and an introduction to the class, although there was one thing I thought would be interesting to share on here. Apparently in Sweden they have very strict copyright laws, so strict in fact that they have an actual copyright police who go to universities and make sure that professors are not infringing on copyright by making copies of articles and works for their students, because it is only legal in Sweden to make a copy of a work for yourself and for no-one else. So how are we to do the 120 readings for the class you might ask? Well the Anthropology department has 2 mailbox’s that belong to imaginary professors, in these mailbox’s they put all of our readings which we are allowed to make copies of for ourselves only and then have to put back for the rest of the class. Apparently this is 100% legal whereas if the professor made the copies for us even though we would have the same end result it would be illegal, oh Bureaucracy at its finest huh?