Hotell Sparta Lund

having finished my papers and exams i flew to sweden to see a friend of mine from australia who was in his last few days on exchange in lund. i spent a few days in lund and a day in copenhagen. in this entry i'll cover sweden, in the next denmark. lund is in the southern part of sweden, so i flew into copenhagen. my day started pretty poorly. i 'woke' up at 4am to get a bus to the airport in order to be 2 hours early for my 7am ...

... the crowd in front of me - the sound was way more loud than the crowd outside my window, and besides, it was coming from the other side of the building, the side that I couldn't see. So of course I rush outside to our rooftop terrace for a better view. And what did my wondering eyes come to see? Well - apparently a large group of people were having a pretty serious looking disagreement of somesort - and were in the process of aggravating the ...

... in a while, I'll go ahead and get that". So a couple days later, after the mad rush of assignments I had due was essentially over, and I had time to waste on roasting root vegetables, I got on google and searched for "vegetable that looks like a purple carrot" so I could find out what it was before I cooked it. And guess what? Those suckers are f*ing purple carrots!!! Have you ever ...

... me borrow their books) Whatever. Online, I discover that the very nice cell phone people were wrong about the documents that I needed to have to get an ID card. Apparently I have to apply for a copy of an official document to bring with me to get the ID, but the website tells me that unfortunately the phone service and website where I can do this are all in Swedish, so I'll need one of my (as yet nonexistant) Swedish friends to be with me when I do ...

... bells were what everyone in town used as a watch. There was consensus that when the bells rang, everyone had fifteen minutes to get to class. So, today Lund Uni. keeps that tradtion - inspite of the fact that modern computer systems cannot deal with scheduling things at a quarter past, and new students are often confused - in fact, even if the teacher comes in before 15 after, they will refuse to start class until ...

... The National Museum wasn't terribly memorable, mostly just a collection of archaeological and historical Danish artifacts. Today was a lot chillier and rainier than yesterday, so I went back to the hostel to pick up a hoodie and an umbrella. I later regretted not changing into pants, too, as it absolutely poured later on. Off to the Thorvaldsen Museum - it houses pretty much all the significant works ...

... of some kind, but all the buildings were relatively new and there were no signs in English to tell us what was going on. After some pictures we looked at a neat church and then wandered over to the little mermaid, but only because we were in the area! First, some background on the little mermaid... When we were on the bike tour in Berlin we spoke with three people from Copenhagen. The first thing they told us was NOT to go see the Little Mermaid. Copenhagen is very fond of its ...

... Churchill Parken, or the Churchill Park, the premises of that military fortification, one of the best preserved in Northern Europe. It is constructed in the form of a pentagram, and its construction was initiated, of course, by who else than Christian the Building Contractor. Christian IV, I meann. Kastellet is nowadays a peaceful, protected area, functioning as a military area, a cultural-historical monument, a museum and a park. Right from Kastellet one can very well ...

... We had to teach our roommate to boil pasta tonight hehe) And that's it for my room, which is way at the end of the hallway. From the hallway you can see the very very nice courtyard attached to our building. Since we are all dumb Americans the biggest rule of living in these apartments is to NEVER EVER enter the courtyard. It's for the nicer people. However we have ...

... in the old port area of Nyhavn. The changing of the guard at the Royal Palace took place precisely at 12:00pm each day, and my neighbor Joan who is from Copenhagen said we absolutely had to see it. Scott toured the Statens art museum and I walked along the Stroget pedestrian shopping street, admiring the blown glass and danish artwork.