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.

It's almost made up

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 8,378 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Still Cruizin

I can't believe it's September already. Time has flown by. It feels like I've been in Sweden for months, like I've figured out most things already. The days here have been fun like last Saturday we experienced the best weather here. The sun was shining with hardly any wind so my flatmates and I spent the entire day outside. It started at the farmers market where I got some nice pastries, then we went out to lunch at a nice place close to the lake where we ate outside, had some nice hamburgers, and just chilled for a while. We checked out the lake after that and just enjoyed being outside.

I think Monday I went to play tennis with one of the guys on my floor. He's really good at tennis and has been an instructor at times. In Sweden if one wants to play tennis or basketball or just about anything one must rent a court or something to play. I like the american style where there are places to play sports everywhere. Tennis was fun but i think I strained a muscle in my leg. it's not bad. That night there was a pajama party at a sports bar not far where i live. It wasn't the best party but I had lots of fun.

it's about time for me to go. Until next time...

Makin sweet sweet music

So yesterday a German friend of mine, Benny, and I went to a music instruments store a few yards away from our dwelling and walked away with some stuff. Benny bought his very first guitar and I bought a nice pair of bongo drums. We rock. On our floor there are actually a lot of people who play guitar so Benny thought of this as an opportunity to learn, something he's always wanted to do. I agreed with him and helped him pick out a guitar. The guitar he got was a Hohner which is a german company and it came with a book to learn guitar which teaches in both english and german. It was meant to be. The guitar also came with a harmonica and one of the those things that goes around one's head to hold the harmonica up to the mouth handsfree. It's pretty rad. So I've taken it upon myself to help teach Benny and he's doing very well for owning a guitar for less than a day.

My bongos are sweet. I tend to play a lot of tahitian beats on it but it works and it sounds very cool. Our floor now has plans to play on the streets and get some money. It's gonna happen as soon as my voice comes back. I'm still pretty sick but slowing getting better. A Thai friend gave me some Thai medicine and I think it's working. I think I'll be good in a couple of days.

It's sunny today, btw.

Sickly frustratind day (and its only noon)

I am sick. I think I have one of those sinus headaches or something. It's pretty stuffed up in there. It even hurts if I roll my eyes too far to the left or right. And I'm not sure if I've mentioned that I have a new roommate but yeah, not more privacy. It's okay the guy seems okay. He's from Scotland and sometimes he's hard to understand. Yesterday he was asking me something along the lines of whether it was hard rain coming down or not. He had to rephrase his question a couple of times before I understood. I am sort of sick so I blamed it on that.

So guess what, I outside the place where I'm supposed to show my documents to prove I'm here but they closed at 11 this morning. This is pretty lame. Oh and I had to get my password validated again. It apparently expired yesterday. Luckily I got to the help desk before the rush. It still took like an hour to get it done.

It's sunny today. maybe I'll go and lay in it somewhere. That's what the swedes do but it's only in the mid 60's.

I'm going to start taking more pictures. I hadn't really cause there's a bunch of Asians covering that but I'll post some soon. I promise.

Cloudy times in Jonkoping

So I've been around a bit. I've figured out how to do most everything that I need to. I even got my computer fixed. Yeah, you didn't know? It broke on my way over here. Luckily there's a mac place here in this town that told me how to get it fixed. My hard drive broke some how so I lost all my data, so i had to buy a new hard drive and have that mac store install it. There was a store around the corner to buy a new hard drive so it worked out. I cost me about 1000 kronor which is about $120. Not bad. I also knew someone with Leopard for my OS so I got that rolling now. So I'm typing on my computer which is a lot easier than the weird Swedish ones with extra letters and different spacing.

My schedule is pretty sweet so far. Classes are only on Monday and Tuesday and the rest of the week is free. I'm sure I'll get a lot busier as the year goes on but it's pretty nice not to have anything substantial to do today. It's a good thing too because I, along with most of everyone on my floor, am sick with a bad cold. And on top of that my legs are pretty sore from playing soccer on Monday. I don't play soccer or really run at all and me being American and trying my hardest not to look like a complete fool I ran as hard and long as I could to help my team. My team lost but it was fun. Some of those swedes are really good. Two days later and I still sore. To add a little bit more to that: I did my laundry yesterday. here's the situation. The Delta house is where I live and it is newly renovated office made into student housing. Making an office building into a resident building takes some changing. One of those is the drainage. In the Delta house we have two washers and in the morning when people are showering, others doing their laundry, and everything else, the water can't drain properly so it pools in our laundry room and this happened a few days ago and they shut down our laundry room. Plan B is to do laundry over at an adjacent building's facilities. And this is what I did yesterday but this involves taking the elevator to level 1, walk through their corridor, turn into this green house looking building that connects the two dwellings, head down another set of stairs, down a long hallway to get to the laundry facilities. It takes a bit of time to get there and it really sucks when you have sore legs and coming down with a cold. I found out too that the washing machines take like two hours to complete and they're really small and there a lot of people that want to use them. laundry is not fun here.

At this very moment I'm at school in the business building. I'm here on an errand to show the school that I actually belong here by showing them my transcript, passport and other things. The weird thing is that it is now 3:14 in the afternoon on a Wednesday and I missed the office hours. The office closes at 2:30 and I missed it by 15 minutes. I think this is ridiculous. Every where in this school has very short office hours, like a three hour window. It's hard to get things done here. I'll just come back tomorrow.

So I got a new roommate the other day. I had lived in my room for over a week without a roommate and I was getting pretty used to it. Then one day while riding my bike home I found some of my flat mates who told me that I was no longer alone in my room. I was a little disappointed but it's alright. The guy is named Euene from Scotland. I really haven't talked to him much but he seems alright. He moved in Monday and I don't think he's unpacked yet. I'm sure it'll all work out.

So nothing too exciting, I'm sure this post is rather boring but if you've made it this far, thanks for reading.

I made it!

Okay, ya'll. I made it to Sweden but it was one of the longest, most stressful trips that I have ever taken. Getting to Sweden wasn't bad it was taking the train from Stockholm to Jönköping that was horrible. First of all I brought way too much stuff with me, much more than everyone else from out of the country. This is how it went: I had a big suitcase (70 lbs) that everyone has and a rolling carry on (40 lbs)like a normal person, but I also had a travel backpack (50 lbs) and a bike case for my bike (65 lbs and large and awkward). This is a lot of stuff to be dragging around a big train station. So much in fact that I had to have help from very nice swedish people to take my stuff from one floor to the next because all of my stuff wouldn't fit in the elevator at the same time. And on the trains there isn't really a good place to put all this stuff so they were in the way of most people so I sat and watched my things when I was super tired from traveling and would've just rather've slept. But I made it and have gone through the introductory week which consisted of a lot of partying and boring lectures to get us ready for what is to come. My first class starts tomorrow and it's my only class for the week. I only have'em on mondays and tuesdays. so it should be alright.

Everything moves slow here in sweden in reference to paper work. it's going to take a week for me to open a bank account, and three weeks to reissue my personal number (ss # in the states)They're still doing minor construction in our appartment too that is taking way too long. I still don't have a place to do my laundry yet.

Sweden isn't a bad place. It's been really fun so far but we'll see how things are when classes start.