Just below the arctic circle

Why people need to study basic physics !

2010-04-17T19:44:00.003+02:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3qFdbUEq5s

http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/fail-owned-yahoo-science-mirror-fail1.jp

Skridskor !

2010-03-06T19:51:00.005+01:00

Since we had one of the coldest winter ever : gigantic boats blocked in ice at the entrance of Stokholm's archipelago in march, and temperatures closed to the -17°C where it should be back being positive,

two consequences, besides obvious greatness :

- have been wearing winter boots since january to avoid death on iced sidewalks

-have now covered about 125 km on the iced lakes around Stockholm ! Of course, not in one go...

En dag i Sverige

2010-02-02T00:15:00.003+01:00

Today must have been the day I spoke the most swedish since I got there...

Because it is not quite so easy in a country when some people get confused when you explain that movies and TV -shows are translated into french and not just subtitled : " But why ? It's stupid !"

I woke up at a reasonable time and was happily entering the classroom for my first solid state physics class when something striked me as odd : In this class, there was a incredible percentage of light-haired-young-looking students. And that's when I heard it : A voice explaining crystal symetries in swedish...

Overlooking the fact that I was slightly late, we can jump to the only conclusion there was : my solid state physics class is in swedish : or I should say " fasta tillstånd fysik"!

Well although it was a bit stressing ( 3 labs and exams will be english-less), with the help of my best friend the dictionary I did have fun !

And when I got out, a miracle happened : I thought in swedish, well with many mistakes I am sure but still...

then I had my usual gym class + sauna all in swedish

then I met my tandem partner : a friend with whom we talk one hour in french and then another in swedish !

then I had a random conversation in swedish with a girl at the next table

then I had my usual hours swedish class where I annoy french people by speaking to them in swedish or in english only (well not quite on purpose, but my mind is switched off to english when I learn swedish)

So that was a amazing day, and I can know say for sure that my swedish is better than my spanish has ever been !

Just above the artic circle ....

2010-01-20T11:27:00.001+01:00

Pictures have yet to come, but I will write a post about my amazing trip to the north of sweden !

Snowy Friday

2010-01-20T10:55:00.006+01:00

After exams were almost over, it was time for Ana and me to enjoy our last December day in Stockholm.

As there was a snow storm during most of the week ( which did not stop any bus from running nor made me late for any exams), there was a thick layer of fresh snow on the ground in the forest and on the beach !

(by the way, the first picture is not modified, I just looked up and here it was...beautiful)

You know you are in sweden when...

2010-01-20T10:04:00.005+01:00

There is a free access sauna next to the showers in every gym center ... and always warm during open hours !

I'll be sure to enjoy it ...

Jul i Sverige !

2009-12-03T22:45:00.006+01:00

Well, November was a very gloomy month : only 17,5 hours of visible sun for the whole month, which is in average 35mn a day ...
But it was gloomy only in terms of weather ! The windows are lighting up with candles or lamps and it was the time of house warming and the nutcraker ballet, and especially cosy fika (goûters) with the typical jul godis !

But what are the typical jul godis we might wonder...
Well, first of all there is this absolutly delicious drink : glögg ! (sort of vin chaud, but can also be found alcoholfree)

and then the saffran buns, roasted almonds, ginger cookies (that are sometime eaten with bleu cheese paste !) delicious...

One of the 2 sunny november days ...

a roasted almond stand...

glögg and fika !

A day trip in Uppsala

2009-12-03T22:44:00.024+01:00

In november last year, I visited the lovely town

of uppsala just 40 mn out of Stockholm with Anastasia

To note :

- the gigantic bike parking next to the train station : The story goes that if your bike gets stolen, you can always find it again there someday ...

- The amazing cathedral, where we had the chance to catch a very important religious event with many bishops, and bishops hats (Uppsala is the center of the lutherian church organization )

- The anatomic theater Gustavianum( read : dissection room) build in the 1660's by the professor Rudbeck

- The ugly square pink castle build in 1549 with its canons pointed direclty towards the cathedral : historically a symbol of power over the church

-The expo of Alfred Frigo, artist obsessed somehow by the number six ... and by being remembered : recorded all his dream for 6 years in a huge book (right picture), and took pictures of what he touched with his right hand for 6 something (left picture)... quite fun !

- and of course, by night

The whole and truly true truth on KTH

2009-11-19T18:12:00.011+01:00

Now, let's discuss her university. Its location give it the charm of Poudlard, as it is surrounded by a great forest, but the architect didn't bother too much, did he ? Not even tried to add a window !

For his defense, he didn't forget to build a very convenient torture room (top of the tower to the left)

This following picture wasn't taken in the torture room, as you might think, but in one of the classrooms : at least the physics students have the opportunity to work on the newest machines

As well as the latest publications.

And the most serious magazines (Bellow : Physician reading an issue of Physics and snowboarding).

Elsa

The whole and truly true truth on the residence

2009-11-19T17:45:00.007+01:00

Diane's articles make you dream of Sweden ? Haha ! She is not telling you everything !

First of all, you have to walk past this guy to get into her residence :

Then, you know how she's talking about cooking all the time ? Would you imagine all this time the preparation of these delicious meals was taking place on a ... couch ?

But the worst comes when night falls (at around 4 in the afternoon...) : the poor swedish student actualy have to light themselves with candles !

Elsa

Пиковая дама Queen of spades

2009-11-18T18:28:00.016+01:00

The week I spend with Elsa and Chloé , we went with Anastasia to the Opera in Stockholm.

It was the Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky and it was wonderful!

Well, as only Anastasia has Russian language skills, I did have to read the story on wikipedia but the swedish overhead subtitles did partially help understanding
what was going on...

We are going again this friday,
and the good news is that it's
cheap for students,
and the seats we get are
pretty good !

The place was really beautiful
so i'm putting up a few pictures
from my sister.

Kanebullar !

2009-11-18T17:56:00.014+01:00

One of the best pastries I've ever had ...

It's full of cinnamon and delicious. and it's all over sweden ! They even have a day for it, kanelsbullars dag.

And the best part is that I have learned to make it,
considering they are not that hard to make if someone translates the swedish recipe , hence the many many pictures of it.

Kayaking in Stockholm

2009-11-18T17:20:00.016+01:00

Back then when the night didn't fall at 15:30, I did a really fun activity.
After kayaking in the archipelago during the summer, I kayaked on a windy october day in the center of city!

The red line on the map shows our traveling.(KTH is my school and Lappis is the place I live)

We had to stop when we got in the center because there was so much wind and waves it was not possible to go farther...

It was great fun to kayak in stormy weather and with the city streets and buildings right next to us !

You can see the place we stopped, right next to the Stadshuset (the green and red building), of course not in the same weather ...

A weekend in Tallin II !

2009-10-15T19:05:00.024+02:00

Leaving Stockholm : the archipelago by boat
The whole group ! and as it turned out, most of them were french but we did speak english most of the trip...
Our room and it's great mirror window ! Luckily I was on the top bed so I didn't get crumbs from our dinner on it ...
Tallin !
The old town !
and again !
and again !
Leaving the old town for a Estonien lunch !
Our boat ! kind of a big one, and our room were right under the car deck ... (but cheap)
Leaving Tallin !

A weekend in Tallin !

2009-10-15T19:05:00.023+02:00

Every weekend there are boats going to and back from Tallin, so I thought I would try it out !
I left on a friday and came back on sunday, after a great trip !
It was pretty fun : 2 nights on a boat and one day in Tallin for a short visit.
But I did learn how to say thank you in Estonian ("aitäh") , walked around in the old town, visited the coast and had a great lunch in a delicious cafeteria!

Here are a few pictures !

PQ : The best way to dance

2009-10-01T15:10:00.012+02:00

I followed a friend of mine who wanted compagny to try some dance. Considering my helplessness at reproducing someone's dancing move, I was not really planning to join.

However I had a great surprise and it was well worth going since I have now joined an orchestra !

The trick is that the music the dance group dances to is from an live orchestra ! It is the same band and they work together on mostly jazz music.

And I have to say it works pretty well !

It's the best way to start the flute again as it is run by only student and completly relaxed !

They do play pretty fast and know most of the songs already but I am getting there !

Apparently it is quite common in sweden,
and so we will be meeting other orchestra/dance
group for playing and parties. It's great fun !

Lappis : better pictures have arrived

2009-10-01T14:47:00.011+02:00

Thanks to my parents and to the many dinners
parties, I now have nicer pictures of the place I live in, especially of the shared kithchen :

For cooking new dishes in my kitchen every week for 7,

For study groups at 9:30 on a saturday morning that turn into breakfast,

For cake parties instead of dinner,

For Fika,

For jam and russian cakes,

and For last minuteplans,

I have to say I believe this is a great place to live in !

Lappis shout II

2009-09-15T19:56:00.007+02:00

I have told you about it, now you can hear it !
But of course nothing is worth the real one...

just in case you haven´t read the first article about it, be warned, i might be loud ...

Here is what one of my neighbor told me about it the fist time I heard it in Lappis :

"Every tuesday night at ten some people open their windows and shout as loud as they can to relieve stress and anxiety ! "

Well, i have to say that it is not "some people", but "many many people" and I have to add, it is also for fun !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1xDLbum7ck

excentricity

2009-09-10T00:35:00.013+02:00

On a sunday I visited a peculiar museum with Anastacia : we got lucky with a english guided tour and so got to hear about all the old stories...

The Hallwylska museum is in fact a old house built around 1900 with unlimited budget by a very rich and excentric swedish couple. The woman actually loved to accumulate objets from everywhere : chinese cups, armor, crossbows, teapots, jewelry ( and even a bracelet made with her daughter
babytheeth...) .

She had decided very early on that her house would become a museum ans so she hired 5 people for several years. Their job was to write down a detailed description of every object in the house, from the paintings to the forks... This became 78 volumes of about 7 cm thick...

Very fun "museum" !

On the first picture you can
see our guide in his "disguise"

The second one shows a hole
in the wall close to the
high ceiling.Behind it was
a small room where
a small orchestra
played for the couple
and the woman's lady
companion at dinner.
At least one of them
fainted every time...

Peculiar food II

2009-08-31T20:07:00.004+02:00

The pictures can stand by themsleves I think...

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

Gamla Stan

2009-08-31T19:57:00.007+02:00

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

Summer is over

2009-08-29T20:32:00.004+02:00

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

2009-08-26T19:52:00.007+02:00

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

2009-08-26T18:38:00.003+02:00

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

2009-08-26T18:21:00.014+02:00

Apocalyptica

2009-08-26T18:10:00.004+02:00

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 !

2009-08-13T21:26:00.003+02:00

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

2009-08-13T20:18:00.002+02:00

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)

2009-08-13T18:50:00.007+02:00

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

2009-08-10T21:32:00.007+02:00

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

2009-08-10T21:30:00.003+02:00

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

2009-08-10T21:29:00.003+02:00

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

2009-08-05T23:42:00.004+02:00

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 ...

2009-08-05T23:39:00.006+02:00

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