A last trip together with Hannah in Sweden - the High Coast

Hej folks,

Today I'm going to beat my girlfriend in terms of having an updated blog. Before the two of us left Sweden (she is finally returning back to the States and I'm going to stay in Germany over the summer) we managed to make a last short vacation in Sweden. From last thursday to sunday we spent the time on a road trip to Swedens highcoast - an area as amazing and wonderful as my girlfriend... We have connected the trip with my moving-out from Kantorn to Döbeln - my new residence after the summer. Hence we spent thursday until the late evening with cleaning, moving furniture, packing and other things and finally left Uppsala to the North again at 7 pm.

Going North on the E4 we decided to have dinner at Dragon's Gate near Gävle, which is a Chinese Health Center with a restaurant. Although everything was chinese/asian it was more or less a wanna-be chinese buffet: of course, Köttbullar med Lingonsylt needs to be on every buffet - regardless which kind of food you are serving :) After eating a lot in a short time we got back on the road by 9 pm. Our destination then was Skuleskogen Nationalpark, 130 km north of Härnosand in the High Coast area.

We approached the High Coast bridge which marks the southern border of the region around 1 am and enjoyed the sunrise. Yes, sunrise at 1 am but certainly no real night. It is worth mentioning that we were travelling under the midnight sun, therefore we changed our complete sleeping pattern. After taking some wonderful pictures of the sunrise we arrived at Skuleskogen Nationalpark around 3.30 am and instead of placing the tent we got from Hannahs polish friend Pavel we decided to spend the night in the car - our nice and sportive Volvo S40. Waking up around noon the next day we were originally planning on entering the national park but after reconsidering our equipment we decided that we don't have everything we need for this adventure. Thus we were planning on going shopping but got distracted by a moose in the wildlife crossing the road. Hannah saved our lifes, the car and our day. Afterwards she took a picture of the moose - enjoy!

Going further North on the E4 we found an outlet store from Fjällraven, Swedens biggest out-door company. Getting some very good deals we completed our equipment, got some lunch and got back into the national park at 3 pm.

After the first 20 minutes in the park we were appreciating that we decided to go shopping beforehand. The area was rather steep, stoney and not easy to hike. But after hiking for about 4 hours we arrived at Tärnettvattnet were we took a nap in one of the stuga's - public huts where people can spend a night for free without having a tent. The nature was simply fantastic - however we had not yet arrived at our final destination - Slåttsdalskrevan, the big canyon in the heart of the nationalpark. So we continued to hike eventhough the passage became more and more complicated. As a reward we arrived at the canyon around 9 pm and the view from the top was the best reward for the effort we made to get on top of the canyon. The canyon top was rather small so we had to get back downhill - even harder than the way uphill earlier - and finally close to exhaustion we arrived at a camping place at the coast were we made a fire (thanks to Hannah) and spent the night. We continued walking the next day with visiting some graves from the bronze time, a little village were you can rent cabins and more beautiful nature around us. By 3 pm on saturday we left Skuleskogen Nationalpark.

When planning this trip Hannah looked into a few guides of the high coast and figured out a number of very nice places like fishing villages, a hostel in an old lighthouse and other nice activities to do during our time there. By this time we simply did not know that the summer (which began in Uppsala about 3 weeks ago) officially starts in Norrlands the week after midsummer. As a result everything - even an entire fishing village - was closed. We finally made it to a restaurant but they had the warm kitchen closed already and we had just some starter and kladdkaka - but better than nothing - especially since it was our anniversary. A little bit disappointed by the fact that everything was closed we decided to follow our original plans - going to Dalarna, 6 hours south-west from our place and visit the world's biggest polar bear park "polar-world". We have seen some adverts and on the web it looks really amazing - however in reality they just opened this part of the bears park in Orsa about a month ago. Hence there were just two polar bears - laying around, sleeping - not really interesting. However the rest of the park was quite amazing. We saw bears with little cubs and big Kodjak-bears as well as Hannahs favourites - tigers. Check out the pictures on her flickr-account. Just click on her blog (alchemyabroad) and then "Pictures on Flickr". The high-coast set includes all pictures. Since she missed to charge her battery almost 90 % of the pictures presented there are taken with my camera. But we shared the moments and this time even the camera. Unfortunately the weather was quite bad: 5 degree, rain and very windy in the bear park. These conditions accelerated our departure. However we stopped in Mora and had some dinner at a Cajun food restaurant before getting back on the road to Uppsala where we arrived at 9 pm on sunday. The weather we had in Mora was almost worse in Uppsala - 72 hours of rain. As a bad side-effect we had an ant-invasion in Hannahs room where I had to play the exterminator. Somehow we managed to deal with it. Then Elisenda, a friend from the Netherlands who is living at Eklundshof gave us a ride after we dropped our car.

The following days were dominated by last requests from the professors at Uppsala - I finally got a B for my research report on Charged Higgs Searches with Dileptons and packing. Unfortunately the bad weather conditions left some traces - the two of us got a cold which I'm still suffering a bit of. We finished packing on wednesday and again - thanks to the lovely Eklundshof-people who gave us two rides (thanks to Fides, Johann and Elisenda) we had not to walk all my stuff to my new place. Falling asleep around 1.30 am on thursday we overslept our clock the next morning and got up only 8.30 - her cleaning inspection was scheduled for 10.30 and we had a lot of stuff to do. Anyways together we managed to do everything and the cleaning inspector was late and very superficial - too bad that we did not know in advance - we could have saved a bit of time. Exhausted, hungry and tired we finally left Uppsala to Arlanda in the afternoon. We arrived at the airport hotel and fell asleep immediately. The next morning we took our planes back to our home countries and I wrote the previous blog-entry on the plane back to germany.

So, now I'm separated from my beloved girlfriend but only for another 24 hours. On wednesday I'm going to fly to the U.S. and spend some more time with her. But this is another story.

Hejdå allihoppas, trevligt midsommaren, trevligt semestern!

Thoughts

Hej again after a long time of not blogging. I could post now all the
reasons of not having blogged (and there are many of them, but i won't
do so. Instead i will use my time to write a bit about things that
have happened in my life - here in sweden and in general.
Right now i'm sitting in an airplane back home to spend the summer in
my hometown and hopefully to cut expenses. However, as i wrote 'to
spend the summer' you may wonder, how this works. This blog was
intended to be about my erasmus year in sweden. Time has changed and
with time i have changed my plans too: Right now I am applying to
become a fully accepted international student at Uppsala. Hence I have
started to write my masters thesis two weeks ago. I will finish this
hopefully by the end of this year but this depends also on how the
burocracy im Sweden works. Another almost more important change is the
following: for almost 4 months i'm now together with the girl of my
life. Since we have spent the past four month and she was more active
with blogging I refer to her blog: alchemy abroad. There you can find
a very extensive report about our beautiful easter vacations and about
spring here in Uppsala.
It would be rather boring just to repeat everything Hannah wrote,
therefore I will just post here some additional thoughts from my point
of view:
1) Our amazing trip through europe
Erasmus-life is hard especially in Sweden where living expenses are
about 1. 5 times higher than home. However, apparently we managed to
settle a trip to 5 different places in europe in less than two weeks.
Thanks to ryanair we had to skip Oslo. As a consequence I will never
fly with this airline again - except that there is no other available
for my destination. Beside, the trip was awesome- and Venice was
amazing. Think about that- a trip to Venice after being together for
just two month... Now you can imagine how wonderful my sweetheart is.

One can argue wheter it is a bit too early to make plans to live
together, or one can accept my answer: we are different. In my
mothertongue there exist an expression which i like to quote "zu jedem
Topf gibt es einen passenden Deckel". Friends who saw our pictures
said that we were looking happy. Yes, I asm the happiest man on earth-
and graceful to met my angel.

Back in Sweden I had to catch up with class and exercises which kept
me busy until the most important event during the summer term- Valborg.

2) Valborg
Although we might not have been drunk enough to be considered as 'successful', we had a great time. Sad that we have overslept the speech but we would not have understood it anyways. Additionally, sleeping in sun is really tempting. All in all we took rather the old traditional than the flat modern way of celebrating Valborg - including the breakfast with your love. The time after Valborg wss rather tight and dominated by studying. I managed however on my infinite amount of time to work at Kalmar during the prom or varbalen as a waiter. After 12 hours and maybe 200 SEK I have regretted my decision. Here comes now an important advice - if you want to work at a nation in Uppsala to socialise, feel free to do so, but if you want to earn money, never work there. During the past year I worked about 40 hours and my final loan was 600 SEK. Additionally they reduced this amount by 25%- the local tax here in Sweden. At the prom we had some choir performance which some of my friends believe was our best in the year. Honestly, I don't think so. The final cncert in june was much better - at least for me... Ah and there was the night before the prom.

An old tradition in Uppsala is the singing of serenades by the men to the choir's women. In return you should get some unsch. Firstly, less and less people remember this tradition, secondly you should not sing lovesongs not to the girl you love and thirdly guys in Uppsala remember this tradition rather than girls. However, when we finally got to Annas place we were welcomed with cookies, punsch and a red latern. Worth mentioning that the girls at kalmar recognized the tradition and we got our first punsch there. Unfortunately my girl was feeling really bad and a few days after we had to go to the ER of the hospital. As a non-eu citizen, Hannah had to pay 6000 SEK for a full treatment. In the result the medics did a cat-scan. Found nothing and sent her home, encouraging her to come back if her pain gets worse or is accompanied by other inconveniences. At this day i found out that we can be proud of our health care system. eventhough in Sweden it is almost for free the treatment is rather sloppy and you have to pass three pre-nurses
before you see a doctor and, get treatment. Now i'm back home and i will continue blogging later. Vi ses, kram!