life: October 2007 Archives

The first period (semesters are split into two periods here, with some courses only lasting for a single period) just ended and I finished up exams, so last night I went out with Heydar to find some fun. We started at his place, making some shish kebabs and rice for dinner. Yum. Then we were talking with other folks in his corridor about going to some place in Medborgarplatsen, but we balked when we learned it'd be 100kr. just for the cover. Everywhere had a cover last night I guess, because it was just payday for nearly everyone in Stockholm. So instead we went to the Lappis pub, a little student pub in his neighborhood that was having a sort of Halloween party, to meet up with Negar.

The pub was not terribly exciting, and everyone seemed to be trying to find somewhere else to go. Heydar and I walked around a little bit, and on the way back in to the pub this girl yelled to us that we shouldn't go in there because it was terribly boring. We started talking to her, and she seemed to have a plan to go some place in the city that was fun. We both are into adventures with new people, so this sounded fun. Negar wanted to stay at the pub to wait for a friend, so Heydar and I followed this girl, Emily, and her friend Heidi. We ended up going to Stureplan, a neighborhood in Stockholm that the rich, famous, and yuppies flock to for drinking on the weekends. Heidi was not stoked about the clubs here, but Emily really wanted to go and Heydar and I were just following along.

We went to several different places and turned back either because the cover was too high or the doormen didn't know us/didn't think we looked rich enough to be let in. I've never before bothered trying to go to places where the people working the door get to decide who comes in. It's stupid. We ended up at a place called Esque, eventually, where one of the doormen did know Emily. It too was too expensive at 150kr. (~$24) with a coat check fee of 30kr. (~$5), but we said to hell with it and went in anyway. The place was packed with attractive people who looked like they had money. The boys were mostly taller and prettier than me, and so were the girls. I liked some of the decor of the place, like the color changing lighting for the downstairs dance floor:

The music was occasionally decent so we danced a little. A lot of it was pretty lame though. We had some unsurprisingly overpriced beer, and I was dumb enough to buy an outrageously expensive mixed drink.

One of the girls we came with, Emily, started making out with some guy not long after we got there, and disappeared. Heydar, Heidi, and I hung out, failing to communicate easily with each other over the music. We took some photos of each other though.

We stuck around for a little while, but it was getting quite late. Heidi seemed to be bored and took off, then Heydar and I did the same shortly after. All in all it was a really expensive evening that was fairly unsatisfying. At least it was weird sometimes, keeping the situation interesting. It seemed like people were just there to spend too much money getting drunk and trying to find someone to take home, which I think is pretty typical of clubs in Sweden (and probably most everywhere in the world). I don't think I need to bother to do that again, though I'm glad I tried one of these places once. I think I'll stick with parties and pubs where I can more easily chat with friends and new people, unless I find some place with good enough music that there's some other attraction besides the meat market.

Next on the agenda: tomorrow I'm off to Poland! Be back on Tuesday with some pictures and news.

So now I'm older. Birthdays don't seem to matter as much as they used to, but it's nice that people treated me extra nice today. I got up early and did a bunch of work on a project for a class that ends next week, then this afternoon I went home and blew off studying for the rest of the day. I'll have to resume it tomorrow for the rest of the weekend, as next week I have a couple of exams.

To celebrate the anniversary of my arriving on this planet, later this evening I went out to eat some Iranian food with Negar in Kista. It was yummy. Then I met up with Heydar and since we didn't have any better ideas, did a little bar hopping around Medborgarplatsen. That place totally seems so much like Pioneer Square in Seattle, only without the crack heads and many of the bad smells. Tons of bars and clubs, tons of wasted people. It turned out to be a chill evening for us involving mostly walking around and chatting over beers, so it was not the most sensible neighborhood to be in for that, but the people watching was amusing.

We found a guy who emailed me the other day named Ben. He's from Seattle, and currently traveling around Europe for six months or something. He found me via the powers of the Internet, from a posting I made about Stockholm on a bike forum back in Seattle that I occasionally still post on and he reads. He seems to be a really nice, cool guy. It was neat to run into him. Hopefully we'll get to hang out again later next week after my exams are done, and before he leaves Sweden for some other exciting lands.

I had a good time, and am now very tired. I'm a little sad it hasn't snowed yet though.

Tonight I was invited to dinner at Stockholm's city hall, or Stadshuset, along with several hundred other international graduate students at KTH and other universities in Stockholm. It was really cool to get to eat dinner in the same place that the Nobel prize winners have their banquet in after the prizes are handed out in December. I posted some photos of the occasion on Flickr. Here are a few:

Several people I was introduced to tonight by friends asked me if I was Swedish. I love that I seem to be mistaken for a Swede rather frequently. A few weeks ago in class a guy came up to me and started asking me a question in Swedish. Even though it's a course taught in English, he apparently assumed I spoke Swedish for some reason. Then, last weekend at an Oktoberfest party held at my school, a Swedish guy even told me that my accent sounded like that of a Swede when I was speaking English to him. It was pretty funny how he didn't believe I was really an American after I had told him I loved cycling, and what I thought of President Bush. I had to show him my California driver's license and answer a question about America's freeway system to convince him. I do have a decent amount of scandinavian blood in me so I guess this shouldn't be too surprising, but I feel that I am much too short to actually look like a Swede, despite my light brown hair and blue eyes. It feels nice for people to think I look like I belong, in any case.

On a similar note, it is interesting to me how surprised just about every person I meet here is when I say I'm an American. I have still only met a grand total of four Americans in Stockholm, three of whom are fellow students, so we are pretty rare. Other international students sometimes try to guess where I'm from, and they never guess the US. I've had people ask me if I was German, British, and Russian (?!) after talking to me, in addition to Swedish. I thought my accent would be a dead giveaway, but I guess not. Determining the source of an accent for a language you are not a native speaker of is probably rather difficult. Many students, especially those from east Asia, are puzzled as to why I'd want to go to Sweden when there are so many great schools in the US. I usually answer that not all the schools are great, the great ones are hard to get into, many schools are really expensive, and KTH also seems to me to be quite good, especially for scientific computing.

Many of these students also comment on how they didn't think any Americans ever wanted to leave their country, because we think it is the greatest place ever or we're afraid of everywhere else. Do we really travel so little compared to the rest of the world? I love to travel, I love to see new places and meet new people! I hope I am helping to break down some stereotypes a little and show other folks that Americans aren't all self-centered, war-mongering xenophobes.

Anyway, I'm really glad I moved here. My school is great, the people I'm meeting are great, Stockholm is great... living abroad seems to be the awesome experience I was hoping for. I do miss friends of mine back in the US though, so come visit some time, and hopefully I'll get back there some time before I graduate.

I spent the weekend in Amsterdam, visiting my friends Damon and Amanda from Seattle, who have been hanging out in Europe for the last month or so. It was a really nice time. It's a quite lovely city. If you are ever there, I highly recommend renting a little motor boat and cruising around the canals if the weather cooperates. It is such a nice way to see Amsterdam. I took a bazillion photos and put some on Flickr. Here are a few of them:

Right off the bat it stood out to me how much English I was hearing. Amsterdam, as you'd probably expect, has a ton of tourism. I heard so many British and American accents, which is really weird after more than a month of living in Sweden. Almost everyone can speak English here, but out in public I hardly ever hear it. Not as many tourists in Stockholm, especially now that it's getting cold. Also it was pretty surprising to see how many Dutch words looked like Swedish and English ones. Hooray for Germanic language similarities. Listening to people speak Dutch was pretty much entirely incomprehensible, though.

The architecture and layout of the city was pretty interesting. Buildings are mostly all really narrow and tall. The apartment my friends had rented had extraordinarily steep and narrow stairways. Most buildings are brick, and the majority of streets seem to be very narrow and paved with bricks or cobblestones. Despite those not being very nice surfaces to cycle on, there are bicycles everywhere, and very little car traffic for such a large city. I would not be surprised if there are more bikes in Amsterdam than people. The city is incredibly flat, and you are never far from a canal. I had no idea there were so many waterways. I definitely want to go back some time.

Unfortunately the return home was not as nice as the rest of the trip. I missed my flight home yesterday, and since I did not have a refundable/changeable ticket I had to buy a new one. This came as a bit of a surprise, as any time I've missed a flight in the US the airline just put me on whatever next flight they had for free or a small fee. Maybe this is a KLM thing, or maybe that's just how it goes in Europe. KLM is otherwise a pretty nice airline though. On the flight down I got free food and beer, which was unexpected for such a short trip. I ended up returning home on SAS, and they give you nothing free. They even charge for a cup of coffee if you're flying within Europe. This was really irritating to me, probably because I had just paid about €170 for this plane ticket and had to wait in Oslo for two hours.

Also, dealing with multiple currencies is really a pain. Yesterday I was trying to think in US dollars, euros, Norwegian kroners, and Swedish kronors. I know it's a complicated issue and all, but it'd be quite convenient if everybody in Europe used euros. It must have really sucked for travelers when every European country had its own currency. It's really easy to pay more than you think you're paying when dealing with an unfamiliar currency. In Oslo, I bought a coffee and pastry at the airport. It was 50 Norwegian kroners, which I only later discovered was about $9.25.

On a random note though, I really want to spend some time in Norway despite my only experiences there being an airport with overpriced food and drinks. In particular, I want to go surfing in the arctic circle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuvgel1wqEI Plus that area of Norway, Lofoten, looks really beautiful.