canoing :) school :(

Hello again!

On Sunday a group of 12 of us took a bus about 30 minutes outside of Stockholm to a little place to rent canoes. We spent 5 or 6 hours out on the water, and it was absolutely amazing! It was perfect weather, too! The water is too cold for swimming (I know its hard to Texans to imagine being on a boat all day and NOT wanting to jump in the water), at least for us non-Swedes (there were plenty of Swedes of all ages splashing around). The scenery was just amazing, and we stopped off at a tiny little island to eat the sandwiches and such we brought. You can see new pictures added to my Stockholm album, pictures 152-177.

So after a wonderful Sunday, I woke up early Monday morning to meet with my KTH exchange coordinator to figure out this course registration nonsense. During creating a class schedule, we found out that classes actually started that day. Our exchange coordinator was also surprised since classes don't officially start until Friday and most not until next Monday, and said that our professors must have got special permission to start class early (lucky us!). So completely unprepared for classes both physically (I only brought one pen and a tiny notepad with me to Stockholm) and mentally (Wait a minute, I'm supposed to have another week of exploring Stockholm!), I started my classes. We (the 4 UT students) ended up leaving halfway through the first lecture because a lot of it was just orientation stuff that applied to the students actually doing the 2 year masters program. Yesterday we had a 3 hour thermodynamics review (the teacher was as entertaining as possible, but the material is boring) and today we were supposed to have a 4 hour heat transfer review. We left after 2 hours because both the teacher and the material was boring, and anyways they gave us the notes and will post the lecture online. So anyways, not off to a great start school-wise, but hopefully I'll get out of the these-classes-are-ruining-my-vacation mindset soon and the lectures will start getting more interesting following the review material.

Last night the international student association arranged a movie night to go see Tarantino's new movie, Inglourious Basterds. It was in English with Swedish subtitles, which doesn't sound like a problem until you consider that about 1/4 of the film was in French (with Swedish subtitles), and 1/3 of it was in German (with Swedish subtitles). So aside from a very small percentage of the German, I only able to understand the parts that were in English. It was interesting, but I'd really like to see it again with English subtitles. After that, Kyle, Eric, and I (UT students minus the other girl El) went and ate at a Kebab restaraunt near the theater. Then I returned home to lots of drinking Germans, and it's difficult to not join lots of drinking Germans. It started with a couple of innocent beers, and turned into shots of Jagermeister (of course a second bottle had to be opened, an off brand to compare with the name brand). Needless to say, living with Germans for over 4 months is going to greatly increase my alcohol tolerance. I also live with the perfect stereotype of a German engineer, who everyone lovingly calls "Papa" because he is like our apartment father; he organizes "family" meetings to discuss how to sort the trash (we have like 8 categories to sort it in) and how to keep the apartment clean (he created a rotating weekly chore chart, in excel of course), and he also organized our canoe trip last weekend. And did I mention he has the strongest German accent I've ever heard and looks so German...ahh funny stuff.

Hmmm...what else is going on...the other girl from UT, El, is planning a boat trip on Sunday out to an island, which should be fun. And we've got trip planning in the works to Helsinki, Finland the weekend after next. I guess that's it for now.