Week 2

This was an exciting week for me, I met a lot of new people, both international students and Swedish students and began to acclimate and familiarize myself with the surroundings here. I began by introducing my self to our neighbors who turned out to be some pretty cool Swedish guys, and spent a night of learning Swedish swearwords and playing Swedish card games, I also spent some time hanging our with a bunch of cool aussies (Austrailians) who live/hang out a lot in my corridor.

This week I also set out to finally buy a phone, I had been having a lot of bad luck trying to find the phone and model that I wanted (skypephone by 3) and my frustration only increased tenfold because I do not speak a (polite) word of Swedish. Then my Buddy Matilda who is awesome and has already helped me out a whole bunch finally helped me call the company and get to the bottom of the situation after which there was a phone in the post for me supposed to arrive in 2 days. 4 days later the phone arrived and I needed to go to the supermarket to pick it up, once I got there the clerk spent about 20 minutes looking for my package but could not find it anywhere so they told me to come back the next day. The next day I came back and finally picked up my phoned and was ready to start using it, only I noticed that every time the phone was turned on it would stay on for about 5 minutes and arbitrarily restart, so I had to send that phone in and am currently using a ‘standby’ phone waiting for my replacement to arrive (Matilda is convinced that I am cursed and I am also starting to believe her, I have gone through no less than 5 phones since I left the states)

Anyway back to my week, Erik one of my new Swedish friends invited me to an afterski party, which basically involves food, drinking, singing, dancing, and limbo. It was lots of fun, so much fun that I decided to join the nation at which this party took place (Norrlands).

I also found a place here that makes not great but decent scwarma which made me happy, and was escorted by a friend to a supermarket that sells all sorts of middle eastern food (zaatar, humus, pita, lafa, Turkish coffee…) that made me happy and gave me a nice meal without worrying about ham which everything here seems to have. I found a nice coffeeshop called Wayne’s Coffee which is very similar to starbucks only it is Swedish, but I liked hanging out there a lot.

This was also the week my second class, People Power and Food a global seminar on sustainability started. This class is really cool we have 5 different classrooms from 5 different places (Cornell USA, Melbourne Australia, Uppsala Sweden, EARTH Costa Rica, Zamorrano Honduras). All five of these classrooms participate and interact with each other through the internet, we have chat-rooms that every student and professor has access to and submits on, and we also have a 2.5 hour video conference every 2 weeks with all 5 classrooms participating, whenever a student writes a paper the professors collaborate on a grade so instead of needing to please one professor I have to please 6 (Cornell has 2) all that said however it is a very exciting class and I hope to learn a lot from it.

This week I also had the opportunity to work at OG nation in the kitchen and had a blast doing it, I helped prepare some of the entrée’s and then I served all of the appetizers and deserts, I enjoyed the atmosphere much more and got paid an hourly wage instead of a nightly one.

Also this week I had to observe a Swedish setting for my Swedish society class, so I chose to observe the coffee place which I liked and spent nearly an hour recording various pieces of data for the class, and laughing to myself because the assignment was very similar to the one that I assigned to my students when I was a TA for introduction to anthropology albeit this was slightly more advanced. I noticed that Swedish people are very polite and have no problem waiting in line (unlike Israelis who will cut the line even if there is only 1 person), I also noticed that they were very patient with the staff, in the states when I worked at starbucks if people were made to wait over 2 minutes in line then they got very agitated here very fast, at Wayne’s however I noticed people waiting in line for as long as 25 minutes without a squeak something which reflected their upbringing, discipline, and the pace at which life progresses here.