easter break - riga, tallinn, helsinki

during the easter break we (kathi and her friends from austria tina, simone and babsi, and andreas and daniel from the kth) did a trip to the baltics. first we took the overnight ferry to riga, the capitol city of latvia. riga is a very nice city which has a beautiful city center with lots of small streets and churches. but it is also worth to go a little bit ouside of the town. then you can see the other side of riga; old and rotten buildings and people which are very poor and live a hard life with hardly beeing recognised by the leading class.


only daniel, andreas and me went further to the next capital city, tallinn of estonia. tallinn is much bigger and livelier than riga. you can find many more tourists and more shops. but youcan also find medieval parts of the city, like the old city walls and defending towers.

the last city i´ve visited was helsinki, the capital of helsinki.
at the seafortress suomelinna

AK1210 - swedish society, culture and industry in a historical perspective

this is another course i am participating in. it is divided into 3 main themes:
* politics, culture and society
* science, technology and industry
* swedish architecture and city planning

for each of this sections there are two or three lectures and additional to that they show us a film or we make an excursion to a museum or to a specific part of the city.
we also have to work in small seminar groups and discuss about one given question regarding to those three topics.
a multiple choice test is also done.

so far we´ve been in the nobel museum, the national museum of science and history and we did a tour around the main campus. next time we are walking through the city center, gamla stan, as well as through a suburb of stockholm named alby or through vällingby.
another excursion will lead us to skansen which is a outdoor museum.

election

this weekend there are local elections in my homecounty, lower austria. therefore i received my ballo paper, but i had to build up my own polling booth all by myself. but for me as an politically interessted and dutifully person that was no problem.

utö

last week one of my austrian friends visited me for a couple of days. i tried to show him stockholm and the crazy stockholm nightlife as well as some nice places outside of town.
on a rainy day on grinda (die insel hatte auf alle fälle einen passenden namen für das wetter *gg*)
the old harbour of vaxholm
here, on utö, we had much better weather while we (nina, smutty, alois and i) were walking around.
yeah,... that´s smutty
nina, smutty and alois

livemusic in a small bar named klubb kingkong. can you see all of the 13 members of the band?

jukkasjärvi

some pictures from the icehotel. there we met two german students who are also studying in stockholm, laura and nina.



and this is how it looks outside of jukkasjärvi (on this day we had -only- neg. 15°C / + 5°F, which is way too warm for this time)
the main road of jukkasjärvi.

borlänge, lappland, narvik

in the last weeks i did some trips to various parts of sweden. borlänge and falun, lappland (kiruna, jukkasjärvi and narvik on the nowegian side) and some more islands in the east of stockholm (runmarö, grinda, utö);marie, julia and kathi in a small cafe in borlänge. we also went to the lake siljan, to the towns mora, where we did a dog sledge tour, and falun, with the falun mine which is a unesco heritage and further to sälen, a skiing area.

in lappland, in the very north of sweden we visited the icehotel in jukkasjärvi, we did a 2 days tour with another dog sledge and stayed overnight at a traditional sami hut and did a one day trip to norway, to narvik.
at the camp where we stayed overnight
this was the place where we got our trinking water
on the way into the sunset with our dog sledge
this is sara, a girl i met on kho tao in the south of thailand where i did my diving course a couple of months ago. she and some other friends are from kiruna and it was very nice to see her again. unfortunatley i could not meet the other girls (elin and ida), because they are still travelling.

during the train journey to narvik we passed the border to norway and saw a fjord just some 300meters beneath the railroad. the weather was not the best during this day, so we could not see so far to the lofotes but still we could slightly see them.