Cheers

For lunch today I ate at a place where the Swedes think is better than McDonalds. It's called Max Hamburgare and it was terrible. The thing about hamburgers here is that every restaurant uses the same meat. Everything about it is the same: the size, taste, everything. They only change it with different toppings. There must be one company supplying the meat for hamburgers in all the non-fancy restaurants. Although the hamburgers in the nice restaurants fail to compare with a nice Carl's Jr. 6 dollar burger. With this in mind I've vowed to show my flatmates what a real American hamburger tastes like. I'm going to get a bucket grill from Ikea, season the meat of my choosing, grill it up, maybe saute some mushrooms and onions, and feast.

You know I was looking at some of my earlier posts and I've noticed that my writing was fairly poor and I want to address this. You see there aren't very many native English speakers here and we have people from all over the world with many many accents which makes understanding English some what of a challenge. So what I've noticed is that I've unconsciously dumbed-down the way I speak: taking out the idioms, using smaller words, using five words when I would usually use ten. That sort of thing. But now I'm trying to get back to my normalcy. Maybe teach some of my friends how we really speak in USA.

Another thing someone brought up was the most of the Americans here aren't what they expected us to be like. There's a girl from Texas on the floor below me and she was described as being very American. And I asked the person making this comment why they didn't think that I was "very American"? The reply was that I didn't act like what they saw in the movies and American television. I still haven't met this person from Texas but my knowledge of people from that state gives me a few hints as to why I may not seem as American. Also I don't think that average Americans study abroad. When I told everyone that education was free here they were blown away. I guess it's not common knowledge. But there's still the fact that schools in the United States are some of the best in the world. Many people I've met here agree completely that the schools in the US are dominant.

Another 2 cents. This school teaches in English, right? Most of the teachers here are Swedish. But their English isn't as good as I would expect it to be. I'm making a higher standard for professors. They translate many phrases directly from Swedish and it doesn't work all of the time. And pronunciation sometimes sounds like someone scratching their nails on a chalkboard. Take the word diameter for instance. During one lecture this word was used fairly often but the teacher put the emphasis on the first "e": diamEter. It may be a regional thing but it drove me crazy that day. Normally I wouldn't care so much but these are my teachers teaching complex ideas to multicultural students who will learn how to say these words and phrases this way and perpetuate false grammar. Such is life I suppose.

I was going to put some photos up but another problem with this university is that when everyone is on the internet it gets a bit slow. I'll get it done some other time.