Blake is picking up the slack for me

It turns out moving to Sweden hasnt been the vacation I thought it would be. I have had a lot of fun, but this class is super time consuming. And when I have weekends off I like to go explore... which I did last weekend, which left me no time to study for my big test tomorrow until this week, which left me no time to post a blog (which I shouldnt even be doing right now, but here we are, so I might as well keep it going). But the godo news is that after my test tomorrow I am done with this stupid class! Huzzzah!

But anyways, so last Friday Blake and I went on another feildtrip with my class. Blake already wrote about it and I dont have time, so if you are curious, here you go: Landskrona.

Then Friday night we went to our friend Ulrika's cabin in the south which was amazing for several reasons. A) The weather was amazing for a change. B) Ulrika has a Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier. (She has a headlamp on her head because we were about to go out in the dark. She's Swedish, so she is normally quite stylish).

C) Blake, Bjorn and I went swimming in the ocean at 2 am. (We also went to the beach the next day where I was the only brunette out of several 100 people, which is weird, FYI)

Blake is triumphant during the cold walk back to the cabin:
The action doesnt stop there, on Sunday, Blake, and 2 of my friends from my program, Michelle and Astrid, checked out my first European soccer match in Malmo. Blake also documented this and so I'm not going to. Check it out!

There are no words for this.

Ok, maybe there are a few. I have made a few references to the people in my program (most from California). One person you may have heard me mention is Daniel- AKA: Swedish Sapphire. His belt always matches his shoes, which is why I love him. My goal is to get him referenced in a South Park episode. That is all I can say, these videos do the rest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTZZVQk02XU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7EOfGNyP10&feature=related

Hi, My name is...

Clara apparently. So at first I didnt really notice that everytime I would introduce myself, people would repeat, "Cordny?" and I would say, yeah, "Court-ney" I never really realized that they never really got it. (I know I do the same thing when I cant pronounce someones name... we all remember the "what's your name, Coon?" story.) So anyways, someone in my class was complaining about how hard it is to pronounce words in Swedish (because it is!) and our teacher started saying how there are words in English that are hard to say too, like, well, Courtney. I took immediate offense, of course, but then she said, no, say your name. So i did. And she goes, notice how the tn sound is almost swallowed? Sure enough, it is! And so my teacher goes, yeah, we should just call you Clara. And so now she sometimes does.

And now I notice how no non-americans can say my name right. This is going to be a long year....

Best way to spend a Sunday

So as I have told some people, the weather here isnt so great, so we havent had a chance to check out the beach that is pretty close by. But we had a nice day on Sunday (not hot, but not raining, so we will take what we can get) and decided to ride our bikes out to Lomma Beach. It is about 7 km (4.5 miles for you pesky americans out there keeping track. Oh yeah, thats all of you. Oh, and me.) and we didnt really know where we were going, and we were riding into a head wind the whole time, and I saw cute cows and wanted to take a picture and my bike tipped over which was carrying our dinner and I spilled baked beans all over the place, and then Blake so kindly cleaned them up while I got this picture:
But after some confusion and a hard bike ride, we finally got there with most of our dinner intact, and it was gorgeous:So we have this gorgeous beach, some amazing food, a "En Gångs Grill" (One-time grill), the sun is shining, and, oh- the wind is blowing like crazy. No really, it was hard to walk in it was blowing so hard. Not wanting to ruin our chicken, we found the ugliest place on the beach and fought some swedish hobos for the spot:
(I'm just kidding about the hobos, although if I were a hobo and wanted to get out of the wind, this is where I would go.)

At least the Swedes, being pretty environmental and all (except for the one-use grills, which I am sure are terrible for the environment) use all this excecss wind for a good purpose- there are windmills everywhere here:

We got some pretty nice shots of the beautiful countryside and the beach that you should check out....right... wait for it...here.

Old houses and Rocks

This last Saturday, my program arranged another pretty good feild trip (hey- it is better than class!) and we first went to Glimmingehus (see the picture above where I am checking out the safety precautions - you can never be too sure around moats.) Glimmingehus is Scandinavia's best preserved medieval fortress. It was built in 1499 by a knight who was obsessed with protection. Here is Blake looking out for peasant uprisings (per usual):
After a tour, we headed to the southern coast to check out Ale Stanar in Kåseberga. Ales Stenar is like a mini-stonehedge with 59 rocks, sorry, I mean stones, that are in the shape of a ship. No one knows how old they are, or why they are there, and since we werent going to be able to solve this unsolved mystery on an empty stomach, we spent most of our there time eating delicious smoked salmon. Yummy. After lunch (which really was the best part of the day) we headed up to see the stones:

After getting bored relatively quickly we started playing around the cliffs. And then I fell:
To see how this adventure ends (oh no! The suspense!)- check out the rest of the pics.

Best Picture Ever

At my going away party in Seattle we tried a Bacon-Chocolate Martini (my group of friends in Seattle are obsessed with bacon so much that they entered a road rally and dedicated their car to bacon) and in case you wonder what that tastes like, I think Grant sums it up best with this blog post:

CLICK ON ME TO CHECK OUT BACON-TINI!!!!

Good times at Carlsberg Brewery

So on Sunday, we decided to venture out to Denmark again and check out Carlsberg brewery, which is the equivalent of Buweiser here in Europe (except better tasting, which is suprising, because most Swedish beer is terrible, but I digress.)

It was about a mile walk to the brewery from the subway stop, but the entire area had a lot of cool details, like these elephants:
It was a self-guided tour which we unfortunately cut short because a) the beer tasting was closing at 4 and we got there a little late (too many elephant pics!) and b) the other patrons checking out the museum had the worst B.O. that I have ever smelled in my life and I couldnt stand to be around them any longer.

Here I am enjoying some of the good stuff:

There were a bunch of empty glasses which I couldnt resist taking a picture of:
Flashback to my 24th birthday (thanks to Blake for putting together the collage of the 7 pictures of beer glasses I took that night):
After the brewery we met up with Charlotte and Oli who live in Copenhagen, and they gave us a little tour of the city. If you are bored at work, or if you are genuinley curious- the rest of our pics from the day are here.