Horne's Swedish Exchange

On Saturday, a group of us (most of the same group that went to Copenhagen) were planning on travelling to Göteborg (Sweden's second largest city) on a day trip organized by the university. However, Saturday morning while waiting outside for the bus that was to take us to Göteborg, we were informed that the trip was cancelled and would be rescheduled for March 10. As it was only 9:00am we decided instead to take a 15 minute trainride southwest to Malmö, Sweden's third largest city. Here we spent most of the day, visiting the museum of natural history and the Turning Torso, Sweden's tallest building (more on that to follow).

Afterwards, we grabbed some dinner at a local restaurant then took the train back to Lund and had a preparty [complete with homemade soup courtesy of Chris the Swiss] in our residence before heading out to one of the 'nations' (alcohol is very expensive at bars in Sweden [over $10 CAD for a beer] so the government/university subsidizes 13 student nations [named after different regions in Sweden], each of which has sports teams students can play for and several bars/clubs that are open on specific nights of the week. Here the price of beer ranges between $3.35 - $4.20 CAD and a standard fee of $8.40 CAD is required to enter and check your coat. These nations stay open until 2:00am after which it is quite common for afterparties to continue on in international residence common rooms until 5:00 or 6:00am).

Sunday night, my corridor had a mandatory corridor dinner in which each resident had to prepare a dish from their home country. As our corridor consists of 9 students, with all except 2 coming from different countries, the food was quite varied. Struggling to think of a quintessential Canadian meal, I cooked pancakes with imported Canadian maple syrup I bought at the grocery store.

This past week a group of 8 of us also booked a 4-day trip to Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden (located in the Arctic circle) and home of the world famous icehotel. While there, we will visit the icehotel, go dogsledding, snowshoeing, snowmobiling and hopefully see the northern lights. We will be leaving on Feb 23.

Pictures from the Malmö trip are below:

A flounder at the museum of natural history

At a park along the beach with the Turning Torso in the background

A lazy construction worker we saw...

The Turning Torso up close. The building was completed in 2005 and was designed by one of the world's most famous architects/engineers, Santiago Calatrava. The building is 190m high and contains mostly apartment and meeting rooms, with the apartment rooms ranging in price from 7000SEK ($1200 CAD) to 27 000SEK ($4500 CAD).
[www.turningtorso.com]

Better shot of the Oresund bridge connecting Denmark (Copenhagen) and Sweden (Malmö)

A Lamborghini parked just outside Malmö's central square

Miscellaneous pictures from the weekend in Lund:

Four Dutch university students were in town for the weekend visiting one of my corridor mates. We went out to one of the university bars Friday night then had an afterparty (pictured above) in our corridor.

After the afterparty...

Saturday, the temperature in Lund reached a balmy 10°C so myself and two of my corridor mates (Ivan from Holland and Ricardo from Spain) decided to bike to the nearest beach in a town called Lomma, a 25min bikeride southwest from Lund. Just outside of this picture is a small 'surf' school, likely specializing in windsurfing lessons, not traditional surfing as the waves at the beach are quite small.

Looking over the sea to Malmö (the tall structure in the distance is the famous Turning Torso, the tallest building in Scandinavia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_Torso). Further to the right, the bridge from Sweden to Denmark can faintly be seen.