Well, it has been around a month since I arrived at Lund, Sweden. Time to start blogging! Thanks to the slow diary edrick gave me, i'm able to store my memory somewhere. Ok, here goes Yoi Travels 2008 =)

8th Jan
The 13 hours to Sweden was kinda boring. I guess i'm not used to sitting still in a small space for such a long time. kept wanting to fidget about. Watched kung fu hustle and secret, both of which i've watched before but i wasn't tempted to watch something new. I so miss zhou xin ci's Across the Universe. Think it had started showing in Singapore. Anyway that's beside the point. Nice meals on the plane, and there was blueberry cake which looked like it comprised of 50mm cream and 5mm cake. Well, it was good to fatten up before we got off at Copenhagen where it was cold. We took a 40 minutes straight train to lund and bunked at Marona's for the night. Marona's an Industrial Design student too and her room was not surprisingly artsy. She paints as well~ I liked her lamp, which had lil ancient slides attached to them. had a good rest and marona brought us around lund as well, which was very nice of her~


9th jan :
the worst day i ever had in lund. it was moving-in day. luggage was so horribly heavy and we had to drag it up the stony slope. well, i'm already dreading the day when i have to leave my hostel. Arghz!! Well, i moved into Delfi. Thank God i lived on the 2nd floor and not the 4th. I would have screamed bloody murder.Bought cheap stuff from ikea to make my room look more decent. Anyway the pic here's that of an old cathedral, which was on my way to the AF Building where I ran all my errands and got my allocated housing. i love the aged stone look.

My corridor people are all very nice. It's a Swedish corridor and there are only 2 exchange students there, including me. The other guy is Deb, an exchange student from India, but he's on some programme where he will be going to a few countries to study before heading back home. Lund is his 2nd stop after UK. Steph often comes over to cook with me. Here, electric and induction stoves are used. I haven seen any gas stoves here. I got kinda sick of pasta after the 1st week so i'm back to rice again. Microwaving a lot too. Been eating lots of fruits and yoghurt. Much much more healthier lifestyle than in Singapore. Plus, everyone here walks and cycles more frequently than they take bus since bus rides are very expensive. The people here all look very fit. In fact i don't recall any overweight people in my ID class at all.

Anyway the next few days were spent running errands and going for language classes. Swedish is interesting, but the pronunciations are just as tough as Deutsch. "Hej" (Pronounced as Hey) or "Hejsan" is the easiest and most basic greeting we can get.

Me and steph managed to rent a new bike together. Cycling is really common here. And it's not illegal to cycle when you're drunk. The bike Yanwei left us was terribly tough to cycle with at first, until we realised that it was because of the deflated tyres & went to pump them up. We eventually bought diy cardboard boxes from Ikea to use as makeshift bicycle baskets. Some photos of the town as shown. I particularly liked this street lamp. The colour and shape kinda reminded me of a bee hive. It's cold here, and you have super fat pigeons and ravens here. The toy shops here sell snowboards (it's my first time seeing one) and tons of marbles too~
Got a bank account with Nordea, which was an irritating experience at some points. We did not get our bank account numbers even after waiting for 2 weeks plus ( they promised us 1 week), so we went down to the bank. And we kept missing documents and needing to go back to Delfi retrieve them. Worse it was not a one shot thing, different staffs that we encountered told us that we needed to bring different documents. WTH. Oh well, now we got our account numbers but seems like our ATM card is lost among the post. So the guy told us to ask our neighbours before going down again to get a new card. That'd be the 6th trip to the bank already!
The closest supermarket to Delfi is Willy's, which is approximately an 8 minutes walk, or even faster by bike. Willy's meatballs are much softer and tastier than those in Ikea. Here in Lund, all the post offices are located in supermarkets. It's practically a dead town on Sundays but the display lights in fashion shops are still switched on, which can be kinda misleading. The first time i saw it, i was reminded of manipulated town in House of Wax. A lil spooky. Shops don't open for long hours as well here since the sun sets at around 3pm. it looks like it's 8pm in Singapore when it's only about 4pm here in Lund. Takes some getting used to~

We got a SIM card from the IHO which we topped up at 7-Eleven. I got Skype credits as well to call home at a much cheaper rate. Crystal, who's in Shang Hai doing internship now recommends Pfingo, but i have yet to try that one out.
Went exploring Ikea in Malmo as well . The room displays felt different from those in Singapore. I liked the idea of having a couch beneath a bed. feels so cozy. and the way they hung up the bike looked good too.

Lund's library rocks. We can borrow up to 200 books at one shot, return it 1 month later, and there are tons of CDs and music manuscripts that we can borrow too! If only i could play the piano here! arghz! Their checking out system was cute too. You had to put in a magnetic strip card, key in your pin, feed the book into the machine, and the machine will process and then spit it out. I love the library manz.

ID is located at IKDC in LTH. The building is sponsored by Ikea and the workshop is much larger than the one we have in Singapore. ID here lets us choose our own projects according to our interest. I'll be working on the Ikea Kitchen 2015 project. We had our first presentation on 31st Jan Thursday. It was the research phase and the ones doin the ikea kitchen project split up the workload and research various areas. Me and steph researched on Asian kitchens. Our presentation went pretty well. It was an interesting presentation coz we got to see and learn about kitchens from various parts of the world, ie North & South America, Asia, UK, USA and Africa. I was really amazed by the Africa presentation. The Africans bend 90 degrees and cook like that for an hour. And then they sit 90 degrees, eat and play music through the night. Whew, amazing backs! It's really fun learning about the cultures all over the world.

18th Jan:
Welcome Party for exchange students at Karhuset, LTH. We hung out with the Singapore "gang" , Nikki, Sherman, Hui Yan, Winston & Nicholas. Got to know more people from Hongkong as well (in photo). Didn't really get that high though, but huiyan really could dance =) Hot! Had my first French greeting with the guy from my Swedish lang class. For a moment I was stunned coz i wasn't expecting it lol. Party was nice, my shoes got super soaked coz of the rain and was squeaking as i walked home.

26th Jan:
Corridor Party! Well, i loved it. We had some sort of tour de room thing where we went from one room to another drinking alcoholic drinks that the room owner made. I made Bailey's with hot chocolate, topped with whipped cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon. My corridor mates liked it =) Haha, taiko first try. There were like 30+ rooms and i was already kinda tipsy after the 2nd room coz of a absolut vodka mix. Everybody's room was unique and nicely decorated. Most had candles, which brought a very nice effect =) Mine and Deb's room was quite bare though haha.. Funny incident happened at Deb's. We were gonna take a mass photo and everybody squeezed on his bed and his bed suddenly collapsed. The wood splintered in fact. I was super amused when he just laid there laughing. Alcoholic high! I hope his bed is alright now~ Music and alcohol made me high and I felt pretty knocked out after that, so slept early. The day after the party was big cleaning day, and with everybody helping, the job was done really fast =)

Alright, guess i should stop here for now =) Time for my RTE (ready-to-eat) dinner. More ingestion of microwave particles! wheeeee......