all christmasy pre-Christmas-time :-)

So, even Stockholm is not safe when it comes to Christmas-spirit! These happenings are not all after Helsinki, but I thought it would be nicer to have all the christmas stuff together ;-)

 

For me the Christmas time started off with a "Farewell mingle" organized by the KTH Alumni. They had a few swedish christmas traditions there. One of them is the Lucia fest, also called the light fest. Traditionally it is celebrated on November 13th very early in the morning (later more on that part). It is a tradition, to celebrate the light in this dark time of the year, since it is quite dark up north in winter. There are many party to it, who is interested can read tons on it online, but the best known part is the singing, with candles to celebrate the light and the red belt thing to honour Santa Lucia, who was a martyr. The singing was really pretty :-)

Another thing is the food. On the left you can see "Lussekatter", which are pastries with saffron and raisins. After picking out the raisins I really liked them ;-) On the right you can see "Glögg", which is warm, spiced wine, similar but not equal to the german Glühwein. And you drink it from tiny cups and put nuts and berries/raisins into it.

 

Then I went to a concert of a friend who is in a brass orchestra. It was really nice and as special guests they had two people in traditional costumes playing traditional instruments, one of them (the one the woman is playing) is the violin thingy I talked about in the Uppsala-post.

 

Then, on the 13th, there was a Lucia singing in the library early in the morning (7:30!!!). But to make up for the early time they had free Lussekatter and Coffee/Tee ;-) And the singing was great!

 

Before we went to Helsinki we went to Skansen, the open-air-museum, where they have a christmas market with lots of traditional food and crafts.

 

In the city, in the windows of the most expensive department store in town (probabaly comparable to Harrod's or the KDW in Berlin) they have really cool decorations with christmas stories, one of them of course being Pippi Longstocking backing gingerbread.

 

And here are some more impressions of Stockholm being all christmasy:

Snow!!! :)

So, in the end of december, we had the second real snow!! Actually there was a little bit of snow in the end of october already, but that was just a very little bit and gone the next morning. So, this was really exciting! I looove snow, and even though there was a slightly difficult incident, which I will talk about more later, I still do and I wish there was more snow in the area of Hanover ;-) So I have about a million pictures of snow, but I tried to pick just a few ;-)
The first real snow, on November 29th, view out of my window.


One day later, after it had snowed all day, I took a walk in the snow :)


Anybody care for a swim? ;-)


Another two days later, another walk. And a beautiful sunset :)


I got a link from a friend, where they explained how to make lights into cool shapes, so I had to try that out right away. Here's a car with its lights on:

And lights of the house opposite.


In the beginning of december then there was a pretty bad snowstorm. I was at school that day, and left early because I had a conference call for YFU that evening. So I got on the metro. But when I got to Ropsten, the station where I change to the "Lidingöbanan", which is the lokal train going on my island, I found out, that this train had to stop service due to the snow. Well, that is understandable, considering that about half a meter of snow came down within half a day. But for the same reason, all busses in the city stopped going aswell. So – yay, 20 km from home I was stuck. I did not really want to pay all the money for a taxi and all of them were already taken anyway, so I started walking. It had stopped snowing by then and I was dressed warm and I had Astrid Lindgren-christmas stories, read by herself, with me, so it was not too bad at first. But after about 1,5 hours it did become slightly cold and tiring, with all my school stuff with me. And, lucky me, a nice woman in a car went the same way as me and took me with her for the last half of the way ;-) So I even got home for my conference call in time. Here's a picture of the snowstorm:


And here's the university, all snowed in :-)


Snow with sun:


So, that was the story of the snow. By now there is quite a bit more, of course, and they started taking away some of the snow piles with trucks and big containers, but I still like it!

Helsinki

note: this should be after the snow post, but for some reason it isn't - sorry ;)

So, after exam-week (10.-16.12.) and the after-exam-party on saturday night (which was quite exciting, with two fake firealarms by the way) Ela, Aileen and me went to Helsinki. We had planned this quite a while ago, when SAS (airline) had a really cheap offer. Then, when SAS almost went bankrupt, we were afraid, that we might not be able to go and would have bought the tickets for a flight that will never take off, but luckily they got back up again and did not go bankrupt and so we actually got on the plane, it took off, and we spent some great time in the really cold but beautiful Helsinki! Of course, we still love Stockholm more, but Helsinki sure is really pretty and interesting, with all the russian influences. We stayed in a hostel right in the city center, so we did not get public transport tickets and walked everywhere, we got quite some kilometers down. It was cold, but that way we saw so much more than we would have when taking the metro, and we could appreciate the warmth inside more ;-) Oh, and the snow was really a lot there! Sometimes there was a snow pile on the side of the street and we were not sure whether there was a car underneath or not!
Good for us was, that many signs were both in finnish and in swedish, since finnish is quite a crazy language. I think it consits of barely anything but double consonants, i's and ä's… Anyway, it is completely incomprehensible if you don't know it. But since we know some swedish the second language really helped. But since finnish people don't like swedes too much (Finland was under swedish power until the beginning of the 20's century) we stuck to english when talking (of course we would have, anyways, since our swedish is not that good yet). But that was a good decision, since my landlord, who is finnish, afterwards told me that most finns really don't like swedes ;-)
So, pictures:
Some ball just sitting there – reminded me of "The Bean" in Chicago :-)


Some swimming? I love how all the lifesavers are standing around everywhere. Of course they have to, but they never really stand out in the summer, but when everything is snowy and white… Oh well^^


The beach! :-D It was really recommended for its nice sand and stuff, I guess that's a summer thing, but with all the snow and ice it was still cool – even though it felt like some bodypart would freeze off quite soon, since the wind was really bad – in combination with -10°C that is rather chilly.


I told you about the language – even food has "–it" at the end…


A really cool cafe we went to, since it was recommended on the map we got at the hostel. The guy inside was really cool, the music was good and the coffee and bagels were amazing! Total recommendation!


The National Museum, quite a building!


So, we walked past a garbage can and I was like "Oh, if it had eyes it would totally look like a face!" and the next one we walked by actually had eyes!!! :)


The "Rock Church". It is actually built into solid rock and really pretty. They played christmas music inside and it was great to just sit and listen and look at everything. The snow on the glass on top did look cool, but I can imagine that it is also really beautiful in summer, when the sun is shining through them :)


Walking past a lake. I love the boat and everything!


In the center, the port. This boat actually is a restaurant, so it is not planning to leave anytime soon, on the other hand, I guess it could not leave if it wanted to ;-)


The big market hall. It has all kinds of food and a really nice atmosphere!


The russian orthodox church.


The cathedral with a christmas market in front of it. So pretty :-)

After we got up the stairs I took this picture. I do like it. But after we had someone else take a picture of us (changing the settings on my camera) I turned back around and there it was, the moon right over the tree! But unfortunately, the picture I took got really blurry because of the changed settings… But oh well, now this one must do ;-)

On the third day we went onto the Observatory Hill before we had to leave for the airport. We had a great view from there. All the water you see here was frozen in the morning! But then the big ferry you see there came along and turned right in the port and crushed a lot of it. And I love those small islands with the cute houses on them!


On the way back we came by the St. John's church. I liked it!


So this was Helsinki in a nutshell. We had a great time with lots of walking, looking at cool buildings, churches and lots of snow, and card games and good old german Glühwein in the evenings.
Sadly, one day after we got back, I had to say good bye to some really great people that I met here. That was really sad, but luckily I will see some of them again in February already!!! :-)

Uppsala

Wow, people already mentioned to me, that another blog post is due… I guess I'm getting pretty bad at this. Oh well, no point talking about that, so I'd rather get started! Since there was so much going on lately I will split this post up a little, so it doesn't get too long.

In the middle of November we went to Uppsala, which is a town north of Stockholm, which is known for its big and old university. It is not really a big town, but very pretty and we had a great time! We got on a train early in the morning, walked around the town, saw the cathedral and the university, had lunch in the market hall, went into a museum where they had some wierd instruments that seemed like a mixture of a violin and something with keys like a piano… It's hard to explain ;) A few pictures:

The castle:

 

The cathedral, viewing from the castle. We found it quite amusing, that the guns are pointing right at it – but we did not find out whether that was intended or coincidental.

 

Me on one of the guns, pretending to be Münchhausen, a guy who was famous for telling lies. A famous one is that he flew on a cannon ball.

 

A small church close to the cathedral. With a civil engineer and an architect, of course the newer annex to the building had to be discussed ;-)

 

The cathedral closer up – we actually had a few minutes of sun!

 

Cathedral on the inside

 

The University building on the inside. There was some kind of auction or concert-ticket-sale or whatever going on.

 

The university from the outside

 

An english bookstore – I loved it!