Peculiar food II

The pictures can stand by themsleves I think...

I have to add that I have actually never tried any of those.

Gamla Stan

Here are some pretty pictures of the old and colorfull city center : Gamla Stan

Summer is over

Depuis à peu près le 14 août c'est plutôt l'automne ici. Avec en plus quelques surprises :
Il y a peu près une semaine au Skansen Museet (a zoo/musée) dans une des îles de la ville.
On sortait de la maison des singes quand il s'est mis à grêler ! Et pendant à peu près dix minutes : le sol était complètement recouvert de grêle ...
( voir la photo pour la taille des grêlons, et je précise que c'est la main de david donc plutôt grande...)

je suis le maître des pâtes

We got to teach some french to our cook at a dinner last week. We were 3 french speaking people trying to teach Hakki, our past cooker and turkish ( I could review the little turkish I learned last year...) how to say :
Je suis le maître des pâtes
Not as easy as you would think...

The other picture is taken at the lappis beach (the beach 5 mn away from my home), but of course you cannot see anything...

Carl Milles

Ce mardi nous sommes allés au Millesgården sur une île de la banlieue de Stockholm.

C'est l'ancien atelier du sculpteur Carl Milles, qui a exposé de nombreuses sculptures (surtout en bronze) dans stockholm et la suède (et parfois d'autres pays).

Rien que le trajet pour y aller est chouette : c'est un vieux train qui longe la côte de l'île qui nous y conduit. Mais le parc d'exposition des sculptures vaut vraiment le coup.


Non seulement les sculptures sont belles, mais l'agencement au bord de l'île avec la vue sur la mer et un ciel dégagé est superbe !
Mais en fait, il faut juste regarder les photos !

Carl Milles

Apocalyptica

A l'occasion du festival de la culture à Stockholm, on a pu aller voir un concert d'Apocalyptica gratuit au centre ville un mercredi soir ! C'est chouette d'habiter dans une capitale !
Pour ce qui ne connaissent pas, c'est un groupe de métal instrumental qui reprend majoritairement d'autres chansons : mais il a la particularité d'être composé de 3 violoncelles (et d'une batterie quand même ) et des violoncellistes qui en joue de façon impressionante, surtout compte de la vitesse d'exécution et du jeu de scène : courir, sauter, faire tourner les cheveux, etc...
Le son était moyen mais le spectacle valait vraiment le coup !

Bon évidement on avait vérifié sur les horaires, les métro tournaient jusqu'à 3h45. Donc pas d'inquiétude sauf que... il faut savoir lire les horaires et les toutes petites lettres... pendant la semaine, ce n'est pas toujours le cas. enfin bref, toujours est-il que l'on s'est retrouvé à 1h du matin au milieu de la ville sans moyens de transport,sans aucune idée de la direction vers laquelle marché, et avec très peu d'argent...
Mais finalement, un taxi très sympa nous a pris quand même malgré que l'on ait pas assez d'argent et il nous a parler des signes chinois ( selon l'année de naissance ) pendant tout le trajet jusqu'à chez nous ! Je ne me souviens pas d'avoir été aussi contente d'arriver dans ma chambre !
Moralité : quand on ne sait pas encore lire le suédois, mieux vaut demander à quelqu'un qui sait !

swedish !

Here is what swedish looks like :

jag heter Diane och jag är från Frankrike.
Jag bor i studentrum i Stockholm. Jag ska studera fysik på KTH i ett år.
Jag trivs mycket bra i Sverige

See what the google translator does with it :
(my swedish is already better than his :)

mon nom est Diane et je suis de la France.
Je vis dans étudiants à Stockholm.
Je vais étudier la physique à KTH en un an.
Je l'aime très bien en Suède.

Shouting on tuesdays

On tuesday night at ten, I was eating in the kitchen when I suddently heard screaming coming from the many lappis buildings. The screams lasted a few minutes !
And our policeman explained : Every tuesday night at ten some people open their windows and shout as loud as they can to relieve stress and anxiety !

Lappis (better picture coming soon)

My room is in lappis, a very big student residence (more than I thousand students I have heard, but I cannot confirm...) 20 minutes away from the university. First I can walk (ten minutes ) or take the bus (which I will do in winter when it will be minus 100° but I suppose it will be very full : even now there are refusing people...). Then I have to take the metro for one stop. It is great !

The lappis place is very nice : a small beach next to it and also a small lake and lots of people to party with. And a small shop less than 5 minutes away.
My room is pretty big and red (well , it is red since I arrived of course) : at least big enough to put all the things I brought. And to fill it with more necessary/almost necessary stuff, I got to visit the great mother of all IKEA, one of the two IKEA in Stockholm, which has a special free bus to get there !

I also have a shared kitchen which is for now more or less clean but apparently I am lucky about that !And it is great for meeting people, even though it is still empty (I know only an girl from germany, a policeman who just finished school, a swedish law student, and a blond swedish guy who will leave soon). Yeah, I realise that in sweden being blond is not really a description but that is all I know about him really.

svenska språkkursen på KTH

Currently I am following swedish classes in the morning at KTH university (which looks just like the picture with red tiles everywhere).

In my swedish class, out of about 25 people , around 8 of them are french : many are from the INPG (grenoble) and two others from the EPFL !
Apart from that it is pretty fun, it reminds me of sixième when I started english : repeating after the teacher and learning irregular verbs ... Written swedish is not so hard, the problem is mostly prononciation. Even with the text in front of me I sometimes do not recognise the words when hearing them. But there is a nice swedish man in my corridor so I might have the occasion to practise.
But I do practise everyday : I say "hej" for hi and "tack" for thanks in every shop I go. And I do my homework (or " läxa "), which is not that easy because we have loads...

And tonight we are going to the Apocalytica free concert in the center !!
(starts at midnight but it will probably be worth it ! except if it is raining)

vasa museet

This is a great museum we visited :
It features a huge wooden warship build in the 1620 asked for by the king of sweden,who wanted a great ship with two rows of cannons.
At that point, Sweden, with little more than million habitants was at war with Poland (but also with Danemark and some other countries).
It set sail in august, but unfortunaltly there was a light wind and the ship sank a few hundred meters away from its starting point !

When you see the ship, you actually understand why it sank : the water level is very low compared with the height of the ship !

So, it sank and then people forgot where (even though it sank in the Stockholm bay !).
300 years later they took it out of the water by digging tunnels under it (took about 2 years) and put it in a museem for us to see.

First picture shows the tunnel digging and the second one is the actual ship you can see at the museum

A weekend in the archipelago

Do you wonder how to say an island in swedish ? Well maybe not but I will tell you anyway :
" ö " wich is prononced "eu" like in "beurre"

An hour by boat from Stockholm there is an island called Vaxholm where we all went campimg for the weekend (my parents, David and me).
We did some canoe the first day (2 persons per boat) and kayak the next (one person per boat). My job on the canoe was almost exclusivelyt give the direction because (as anyone that went kayaking with David before knows) he can never go straight and zizags all the way if left by himself...

And at night we got to eat in a typical swedish restaurant (we tasted herring and salmon and did not regret it)
If Elsa or Gabriel reads this, you have to know that David said it was almost as good as the chinese restaurant in Lausanne ...

And we left my parents for the rest of their trip at that point and came back by boat to Sockholm (which allowed a quite dramatic goodbye with a lot of waving involved)

The picture is of a gas station for boat, I will have better pictures from my dad later on...

Peculiar foods

To the left, a salted dark chocolate from lindt. After living for 2 years in switzerland I thought I knew all the types of chocolate, but no, here is a new one !

On the right, a salad still in its pot. When I bought it in a plastic wrapper, little did I know that it would actually still be in a pot with its roots ! And I have to say, this is a great way to keep it fresh ...

48 hours later ...

After a great party and my new sweden-france game packed with the gigantic rest of my luggage, we set off for sweden with a really full car.

While David actually drove a big part of the time, while my parents and me slept, I still got to drive the coolest part of the trip : We didn't know, but the 01/08 is the swiss national day and for about three quarters of an hour, I drove in the middle of fireworks ! As many as 5 of them at a time, close or much farther away ! Great way to start the trip...

Then it got a little harder, not too much at night but in the morning. While I was driving ealy morning, sleeping David jumped out of his seat beacuse he dreamed that he was falling asleep while driving...

Breakfeast in germany was surprising : sausage was hidden everywhere : with an egg instead of bread, and in a simple croissant ! So this is what we will remenber of germany, since it is (apart from boring highways) all I saw: germany is full of sausage...

After exactly 48 hours
(of course we slept the second night in a coooold camping, as you may imagine, David complained),
I arrived in my home in sweden :
Forskarbacken 07-319
114 15 Stockholm