latvija

Wow.
they spoke a lot of Latvian.


more to come...

EuroFather

Well, I hope Dad got into Copenhagen alright this morning. Tomorrow I will meet him at the train station in Lund and we will begin our mini tour of Europe. Lund-Stockholm-Riga-Prague in two weeks, then I will spend some time in a couple metropolitan East Coast areas before hopping to the other side and basking in the California-ness that my fellow students have been longing for. It rubbed off on me.

I am terribly excited to see Dad! Any piece of CA and family will surely make me happy. But unfortunately, it started raining again yesterday, which means it's raining today (though bright). I hope tomorrow the sunniness continues without the rain so Dad and I can ride bikes around town. Bikes are big here.

Packing up also makes me down since the white walls return and my dorm room is a bit more institutional.

back to the future

My time here has recently been spent planning and searching my upcoming weeks- I'm looking for hostel/hotel deals online, arranging visits from friends and affirming plans for my return to SoCal. This week is our last in the program, so we've been getting in a lot of bonding. Last night was another birthday party, and tonight we're returning to one of our favorite haunts, Lunds Nation, a student bar/sometimes restaurant that serves appropriately priced beers.

Mark's friend has left; Patrick's girlfriend has left; Ximena's boyfriend has left. Soon we will leave, too. We're planning a Lund reunion roadtrip for the winter break that starts in the south and picks up people along the way, ending our caravan in San Fransisco for a fun night. We'll see if our plans are birthed into reality- it would be really fun.

I'll miss the awesome greenbelt.

reading and apples

There's not so much to report on now- lots of people have their girlfriends or friends visiting for a little or a lot of time, so we have new people on our floor. (Kansas' girlfriend is staying for almost three weeks! but they're travelling a LOT so she won't be burdensome on our hall)

I've spent a lot of time researching on line and reading (course books on poverty but fiction too- Harry Potter, Margaret Atwood, random stuff left here by former dorm dwellers) and I'm feeling a bit dumb to be so solitarily Lundian.

I may go to the next Malmo football game, tuesday again.

I read one of my friend's blogs today about how she spent an awesome long weekend in Paris and encountered kindness from some other tourists. It was a simple yet touching snippet about the generosity of humanity-- namely, free dinner! And a request to pay it forward someday in the future. Awesome.

Thinking about Latvija and Prague....

stuff about school, since it's halfway

Our first module (first class of the two real classes we're taking, beyond introductory Swedish language and history/politics/culture) has ended today. heck yes, sucker! Too bad, I had a great time in this class, Environmental Governance. Some of the other classes seemed to have severe problems, like a terrible teacher, but we mostly all had a good time. Here's an email I sent to parents, copied here for public viewing as well.


<<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6907177.stm

I wrote a kind of big paper (about chemical regulation, thus the link) over the course of the last four days or so. I also edited someone's paper this morning before I rea through mine one last time- from 430-6 this morning. Then I had time for mine and emailed it in. I feel I did pretty well though and when we had our evaluations and critiques of them in class later today we got a chance to defend them and answer questions from some of our classmates and from our professors. The environmental governance class I've just finished had a Post 2012 Kyoto Protocol role play also, and we had "representatives" from the EU (Sweden, played by an American student), the G77 developing nations group (China), Alliance of Small Island States (Samoa), the USA, and OPEC (Saudi Arabia). Plus the IPCC and Climate Action Network were represented but they don't have voting power. Anyway, I was the Secretariat and a Swedish girl, Sara Bjork Jensen played the chair. That was fun.
I saw my paper on the way out of class today; I got an A-. The other assignments were definitely informative/educational but I really liked our class because it was taught by two main professors, both Swedish, and actually taught by guest lecturers. One of our professors was from Colorado, but the others were various Swedish profs. We mainly learned about policy and US vs EU politics of the environment. I am so glad I'm here. I'm sort of scared for the future, environmentally, but I'm excited to keep learning more about everything I'm on track to learn about, especially back at UCSB. My next class, starting Monday, is Globalization and Poverty. I bet we'll talk about the IMF World Bank WTO and "security issues". This class will be taught by a UCSC prof, so it may not be so thrilling as the last one.

love, maia >>

Hamlet and Castles

Our optional excursion to Fredricksburg Castle on Friday was pretty fun and eventful- we took a train to a ferry to cross the Oresund to Helsingor, then a train to Hillerod where the castle is. The first city is where the ferry left and the second is where the ferry landed and where Hamlet's castle is: Helsingor and Helsingborg . Pictures of Hamlet adverts and the castle:
Tanya and I took too long at the Hamlet city and we missed the group on the train to Fredricksborg Castle, but we were able to figure out where we needed to go and how to get there without contacting anyone from our program- since Tanya's phone mysteriously did not work in Denmark. damn. Why did we take so long? well, after a leisurely lunch we still had about hour before the train left, so she went into a shop to find shoes, and I went into a shop to find jeans. And we succeeded, but late.
Here's my good reason: it was a Sally's, so I had to contribute! (picture will be inserted here)

The castle was gorgeous but the tour was a bit long- Tanya and I made it for the last half hour, but we were not sad to have missed the first 40 minutes or so. Gorgeous interiors:Sweet symmetrical garden behind:View from the gardens:
A bunch of us stopped at the JFK Pub to relax for a bit after the castle tour. Weird little place with a dozen portraits of the president and a giant stuffed eagle- plus one wall is bookshelf. Classy, but strange. We sat outside, as it was a ridiculously sunny and beautiful day.
As usual, we ended up returning through Copenhagen so we got some time to play around there again. We considered seeing the Harry Potter movie but we would have to wait for a long time before it started, so we went to dinner instead. So we saw it the next day, Saturday, instead. It was so good! I recommend it. The pacing was great and the action sequences, despite being all wand based, were pretty gripping. Plus the kiss that was hyped up and I believed to be a nothing kiss, a simple peck, ended up being a substantial half minute scene. Oh Daniel Radcliffe.

We are now at the end of our first module and my final paper is due tomorrow morning, followed by a skim-through of everyone else's papers and a critique-and-defend period in the afternoon. So, obviously, whenever I have work to do I am found online. Shazam. Time to finish my historical perspective and predictions of success for the European Union's new legislation about hazardous chemicals and their management and reduction.

mon weekend a Bruxelles

yum. another good weekend:

--Thursday we left for Brussels (we flew) and checked out the EU Commission (picture of me with Tanya) and two cabinet members of the commissioner from Sweden talked with us for a couple hours. That night was a medieval parade (second picture shown) complete with many guys on stilts who fought each other, trying to knock them over. What a long fall! Some of the stilts were really high. We bought some frites and waffles.
--Friday entailed an inspiring and warped talk at NATO (sorry, the pic below is the closest we could get- no cameras allowed inside!!) complete with free swag (pins, pens, keychains, brochures...) followed by a sleepy talk with Rolf Gustavsson, a journalist/correspondent who answered our questions way too thoroughly and somehow, at the same time, didn't answer them. A walking tour of Brussels, including stops outside the palace, musical instrument museum, "best chocolatier in Belgium" (Pierre Marcolini. The free sample: mini raspberry filled eclair topped with a flake of white chocolate and "sunflower-ginger crunch"-- it was delicious) and some religious sites, brought us back to the city center- Grand Place. The Education Abroad Program took us out to dinner at Chez Leon, where we had a 25 euro limit and beyond that we had to foot the bill. Alcohol not included. This is where one of our members had horse (pictured below and let me tell you, it was pretty good), the vegan in our group ate mussels and the girl who got pasta (very cheap) could fit three people's waffles on her bill. I had a trout specialty that came with fresh pea soup and chocolate mousse.

--Saturday we left for a bus trip to The Hague for wandering and a pretty interesting talk at the International Court Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. We got to debate a human rights problem in a fictional country, representing various nations. Surprise: the vote yielded no result. Then we got to go through the Mauritshuis art museum and see some Vermeers and some other really awesome Dutch and Flemish masters- including the girl with the pearl earring, laughing boy (with brown teeth) and some cool still lifes, especially floral arrangements. When we got back to Brussels we decided to include Homo Erectus into our pub plans-a very gay bar. Only five of us ended up going in (me and four boys).--Sunday we got free time to troll around Brussels and make sure we saw the pissing boy statue and had one last waffle. There are tons of street performers in Europe, but especially in Brussels for some reason. The Grand Place had an old man (looked like Father Christmas) with an acoustic-electric guitar who was making quite a bit of money. During our stay we also saw a bunch of accordion players, a string quartet and a bassoon-oboe combo that was playing opera excerpts extremely well. I gave them the change I had at the time- two and half euro. It's tough to be an artist, probably.
--After a long bus ride and flight and getting really hot on the plane and feeling ultra claustrophobic for the first time in my memory, this picture happened at the Copenhagen airport when we were waiting for the students to buy some food (Burger King, of all places)

It was good to come home/back to Lund.