Sweden

Taken in Stockholm, Sweden. Original image on Flickr.

…are great! Have you ever tried to reserve tickets in Austria? You need to have a special member card, can’t get more than two tickets, need to register,… Here in Sweden you just choose the cinema you wanna go to, choose the movie, say if you want to pay or just reserve, pick your seats and enter your email and mobile number (which is your reservation code). That’s it. You go to the cinema and get your tickets without any problems. That’s it. See, it could be so easy.

Another week passed by - a wonderful one, thanks to my girlfriend who visited me last weekend. It’s really getting colder here, the leaves start to change their colors and it gets dark quite early already (at least for me).

At the moment I’m working on my basic skills in Swedish and on some seminar paper for our business course (I tell you, I’ll never really want to do that kind of work, at least not if it is that boring). Anyway, the course will be finished in one weeks time and we’ll start with our statistics class. And I finally gonna be looking for some cool project I can do with Rails (toyed around a bit with it the last few days, even under Ubuntu, which I installed a week ago on my laptop).

Yeah, it really is. I know it’s a shame that I haven’t written any posts for three weeks now but I’m really enjoying my stay here. I can’t tell you what happened in the last three weeks because it’s simply too much, but I gonna start with yesterday: Andi and I went to Gothenburg to visit some museums (there’s currently a Picasso exhibition in the Konstmuseum), but what we didn’t know is that all museums are closed on mondays.

So we decided to go to Asperö, a small skerry west of Gothenburg. I can tell you that it was really beautiful there. All the small houses, the peacefulness, no cars, just a handful of small streets and a marvelous harbor.

Oh yeah, I forgot, we also visited one of the university building’s of Gothenburg which was pretty small. And we found an Ikea lamp testing center (you know, when you visit Ikea they always have some of their lamps arranged in a row on the wall and you can test turn them on or off and test different light bulbs) and a great looking library.

Life in Sweden is really great (although we are here in “the boring capital of Sweden”, according to a Swedish guy we met while walking home from the city last Wednesday). The city of Borås has something about 60.000 inhabitants, so for me it’s actually quite big (he, I said quite!). Brick houses almost everywhere, our university looks fantastic and as I said before, the coffee is cheap and the sweets are delicious.

We (that means Andi and me) just dropped our English course the last day because it’s pretty basic and now we can focus on the important stuff: Information Systems and Business Processes and a beginners course in Swedish (we will have another course, Statistics and Analysis of Measurements, from mid October to mid December).

On Thursday I wanna go to Gothenburg (if the weather is fine, there’s hardly a day here in Borås without a short shower).

I’ve arrived here in Sweden last Thursday and I have to say that I really like it. The dormitory is, besides of the kitchen, pretty fine and Borås, the city I’m studying at, is really lovely.

There are some things I really like about Sweden: the cheap coffee (about 50 Cent for one cup), the brick houses and the easiness of things. And I like the weather. Kind of. It’s quite nice actually, with at least one rainstorm every day (lesson learned: take an umbrella with you if you’re leaving the house).

Today: 25° C, Sunny
Sunday: 25° C, Chance of shower
Monday: 22° C, Mainly cloudy

Blogging pretty much came to a halt due to my holidays. I hardly spent half an hour in front of my pc the last few days, only checking my emails every now and then and reading through some news feeds. And uploading photos to Flickr, which is really addictive.

I will leave Austria in exactly three weeks (17th of August) and I’m so excited, I can’t tell. There are still some things I have to in Austria so the next weeks I’ll be as busy as the last ones.

Now it’s official, I’ll leave Austria on August 17th for five months in Borås, Sweden. I passed my math test (spot landing), my room is already booked, the flight too and so I’m principally already away ;-)

Of course I will still maintain this blog but I’m not quite sure if I will setup a seperate one for my time in Sweden (like Martin did) or if I will just create an own category (maybe the latter, I must have a look at the styling possibilities of Wordpress).