So the time came for my air traffic controller buddy to move. To Arvidsjaur. So me and another friend decided to go with him, since we hadn't really been that far up in Sweden before. Off we went. We first took the train from Lund to a town called Halmstad, where we picked the movee up. Then onto Gothenburg and the night train that would take us up north proper. 20 hours later, we arrived in Jörn. What's Jörn, you ask? I honestly couldn't tell you, apart from the fact that they have an evangelical church there.
Anywho, we then got on the bus. And an hour later we had arrived. The entire journey took 24 freaking hours. Arvidsjaur is a small town by my standards, pretty large by local ones. 4000 inhabitants, it's also where the Germans come to flip cars in the snow. And there was snow. I'd been told that the snow wouldn't come until much later in the year. Apparently, anything below two feet is not proper snow. Last year they had a total of 20 feet of snow fall during the winter. I wasn't impressed until I realized that in contrast to my neck of the woods, the snow doesn't melt within a couple of day. Luckily I'd brought my big coat, so I didn't freeze. Had to buy new footwear though. Hiking-boot-like-very-grippy sort of thing.
And yeah. The Holy-Jesus-sonofabitch-bastard thing. It was so fricking cold! My beard froze. I actually had ice in my beard! And the locals would laugh to themselves at the southerners who didn't wear long-johns. One man looked at us and said that we looked as if we were going on a polar expedition. I wanted to smack him and point out that we were already on said expedition, but I kept my mouth shut. They're all hunters, you see. They have guns.
Anyway, it wasn't too bad, I had a good time and learned many a new thing about this long country. For example everyone has floodlights on their cars. And there are plug-ins at every parking space so you can heat up the engine. And mailboxes are all mounted on wooden stands that can be placed on top of all the snow. And of course the guns. And the snowmobiles. It was all very different.
Anywho, I came back home last week, longing for the damp, windy, and chilly fall of Skåne. And I was not dissapointed. Upon leaving the trainstation, it started raining.
Here's the kicker. We'd been going on about how the north was weird, with snow in November. Last Friday, it started snowing like hell down here. I slipped outside my building and ripped a pair of pants beyond repair. It sucks. The normal order has been restored now though.
Which brings me back to school. I'm gonna play the sonofabitch-bastard card again. They're working my ass of here. Right after arriving back in the land of the living, I decided to head to school instead of going home to get some sleeping. And yay, what followed in school was one of the most taxing assignments yet.
You see, we had what they call a "crisis-exercise" in which we were handed over to a team of people from various branches of government. They told us that Belarus had invaded Latvia, and that NATO and Sweden were going over there to help them. Our job was to act like a newsroom and write and edit articles on the subject, all while new "news" emerged on a regular basis. We had six hours, and the stories kept coming up until the very end of the exercise. Very stressful.
Then on monday this week it was time for the next assignment. The teachers assigned each of us 25 articles to write in four days. And I'm just now getting finished. I'm tired as hell. They do work us really hard, but you know what? I don't really mind. Sure, sometimes I'd like nothing better than to hear that the teachers had accidentally all impaled themselves on pitchforks, but on the whole, I'm pretty comfortable here.
And I haven't even considered that I might be in the wrong place, which is usually my natural reaction to stress... So I guess I'm actually in the right place, for once...
Following are some photos I took while in Arvidsjaur:
Origin and destination of the journey marked by arrows, and the route.
Me at around 2:30 PM. Snow. Lots of snow...
