Weekend Happenings and Food Hurdles

Well it's Sunday morning and I just back from another train trip to Karlshamn to pick up a bike - hooray!! With that purchase finalized, I now feel like I have everything pretty much under control here in Sweden. Although not too many 'funny' things have happened recently, I thought I would still go through and fill everyone in on the latest happenings.

As 'Sven' mentioned before, this past week was filled with our first set of lectures and classes. Our professor is Karl-Henrik Robert (refer to the video below to get a quick re-cap of his general approach to Sustainability) in addition to a few others. Classes have been really awesome, and the energy from 80 similar-minded people in the room is contagious. The real challenge will be to keep that same energy with us once we leave the program and enter situations were not everyone has the same value system or mindset.

On Friday, we had a BBQ and found a sweet park with really nice beach volleyball courts, a field for ultimate frisbee, and a mini-golf course which seems like you just have to bring your own ball and club to - so I need to aqure both of those fairly soon. Soccer has also been a hit recently and we've got a strong group of people who play with us - hopefully we can continue that to some degree through the winter and dark times.

Yesterday, we had our class garage sale in which we sold items left behind by past students. There, we got a few beds, carpets, and kitchen items.



We also picked up a few more plants from the farmer's market - now the real test will be to not kill them. The rest of the day was spent mostly hanging out in addition to attending a meeting on a Film Festival. A few people from our class have experience in organizing film festivals and hope to do another here in Karlskrona. So if anyone has any good suggestions on what films to show, please let us know. This is a website from a film festival in Istanbul which two of our classmates organized, so we'll probably be using many of the same films.

In other news, it's been over two weeks since we've been here in Sweden and over that time, Matt and I have begun to develop a love of kebabs. We're working our way through the town to find the best (and cheapest) places that make kebabs. The food situation has been pretty good here, with a few minor hurdles to overcome.

First, peanut-butter is difficult to come by and when you do find it, it is often pretty expensive.

Second, Swedes for some reason love sauces, which is cool until it gets to the point that it's running all over you and making a royal mess.

Third, we still can't read a thing in the grocery stores so usually end up guessing on a few things every shopping trip. Last time Matt guessed correctly on Maionaise which happened to be in the form of a toothpaste-like bottle. Another problem with the language barrier is that we can't really make any recipes, because we have no idea what the ingredients are. Even a simple box of brownies is far too difficult to attempt (also considering that we haven't got a baking pan yet and would have to cook it in a pot?!?)

Fourth, and most importantly, ice cream seems to be hit and miss. There is an awesome ice cream shop that serves massive waffle cone ice creams (which we've posted about before). The locals claim it to be the best ice cream in all of Sweden (which although I haven't done very extensive traveling around Sweden, I'm willing to go with their opinion). When we discovered that our apartment is right across the street from this shop, we were thrilled, until a few days ago when we realized that the shop closes down for all of the winter, starting in a few days :( So, we went off in a search for other ice cream possibilities and ended up getting two containers of ice cream from the grocery store. Excited by our new purchase, we came home and each had a bowl-full of ice cream. Sadly however, we soon realized that this ice cream tasted nothing like that from the awesome shop downtown and rather resembles fluffy cool-whip died with food coloring. Fortunately, there are a lot of convenience stores that sell single ice cream bars and sandwiches and popsicles, but we are still out of luck for finding good old regular ice cream.

Nonetheless, we are managing to survive. The fruit issue has not presented any problems yet (which I'm sure disappoints some of you, cough, Vaughn) and additionally, I have found one of the best water fountains in all of my years of searching in the small cafeteria on campus.

That's the latest from this end, we'll hope to post back soon!

-Spud