Archive for April, 2013

Spring in Paris and Berlin

Over spring break I decided I would hop over to continental Europe to see Paris and Berlin. After spending 12 days in Stockholm, I thought it would give me a great opportunity to compare 3 very different cities. It’s interesting how cities have a character. Each city certainly feels different, but it’s sort of hard […]

A week with my family in Småland

Over spring break, some of us took the opportunity to reconnect with home again, through a trip back home or spending the week with family and friends.  I chose to spend my spring break with my cousins here.  My cousin Ingela and her husband Lars live on a farm near the small town Ljungby in […]

Got Land? I did during Spring Break

As loyal readers already know for spring break I traveled with Devon to Visby on Gotland, an Island off the southeastern coast of Sweden. Visby is an extremely well-preserved medieval town, and was a member of the Hanseatic League, a group of predominantly German towns specializing in trade on the Baltic and North Seas. At the local museum, Devon and […]

In Europe’s Greenest City

We arrived in Växjö on Tuesday, April 16th. For the next five days we all got to live with Swedish host families; some of us in the group were in pairs and others were alone. Kallie and I stayed with Magnus and Katarina and their four children, Aaron, Salomon, Miriam, and Efraim. (They also have […]

A Bit More of Stockholm

Stockholm is one of those cities with a name that makes you think of certain images or ideas. Beautiful people. Waterways and islands. Old pastel-colored buildings. Often, visiting an actual city shows you that the idea you have of it is actually inaccurate. In Stockholm, the stereotypes are true. The level of fashion here is […]

A Day in Gamla Uppsala

Our time in Uppsala was brief but very packed full of class and field trips. Monday through Friday we had class for eight hours where we learned about chemistry. I’ll be honest, none of were really looking forward to this science class but we got our general education requirement taken care of and compared to […]

A Week of Science in Uppsala

This post is just going to be a really long recap of the science topics we covered during our week in Uppsala. This portion of the course is an extension of our natural science-oriented excursions in Mora, by bringing chemistry topics into focus, as well as giving us an overview of the history of science […]

The Family Comes to Sweden

For our spring break, my parents, brother, and grandmother came to Sweden to see this wonderful country and to try to dig into our family history.  Our spring break was very interesting and filled with many “I can’t believe this moments.”  We had the start of our trip in Stockholm.  We spent 3 nights in […]

The Siljan Ring and Another Lovely Day With Kjell

(Wednesday, March 13) Today, we had another adventure with Kjell Westerdahl, this time to the Naturum Dalarna museum and Lake Siljan. Lake Siljan is part of the Siljan Ring or Siljansringen, formed when a meteorite hit what is now Lake Siljan 360 billion years ago.  The recoil from the meteorite impact formed a granite dome […]

To “The Crook State” and Back: Bulgarian Adventures

  In order to describe the following events, I have to back up a few months to this past summer. I worked at a resort called Madden’s in Brainerd as a server in the Lodge, one of Madden’s five restaurants. Since Brainerd is not a very diverse place, international workers were recruited from all over […]