I am feeling all settled into life at Uppsala, classes are going well and I am even getting better at Swedish! It has been a VERY exciting last couple of weeks though! The most awesome week of my life started with the International Gasque on a Friday night, we left for Kiruna, Sweden on Saturday, came home on Wednesday and left for a weekend of singing with the choir on Saturday morning. Here are the highlights:
This is a picture of the crowd: there were over 400 guests at this event! It was awesome!
Mike Green from Manchester, England was my date. It is really fun, because seats are randomly assigned so I sat by all people I had never met before.
We took flowers off of the tables... oops. These are some of the girls I hang out with most often here. From left to right they are Alison, Lauren, Elyse, me, and Dawn. Before this gasque we all got ready together at another friends apartment!
This is a picture from choir weekend! It was such a blast. We spent the weekend- on an island outside of Stockholm- singing, hanging out, and of course partying as the Swedes do. The theme was Olympics, I am a "fotboll" player, and my date for this dinner, Tomas, is a figure skater. Just like the gasque, there was a fancy dinner, but this one had much much more singing. In fact, our director was right there partying along with us, directing songs in 4-part harmony all night long. I have been having so much fun in the choir! It has definitely been a highlight of my experience so far!
This is our group of travelers to Kiruna! From left to right: Anna, Joanna, Maggie, me, Dawn. Together we took overnight trains there and back, went snowmobiling and dogsledding, played in the snow, hung out in the sauna, went to the Ice Hotel and saw the Northern Lights!
We spend 5 hours snowmobiling across this frozen lake and through the woods. It was awesome!
We had to stop to share the path with a group of dog sledders. We drove the snowmobiles through these trees. Straight out of a fairytale!
We had to stop to have a lunch of reindeer and potatoes. The man next to Dawn is Tomas, our host for the weekend.
Just hanging out at the Ice Hotel! From our cabin, we walked for about 20 minutes across the frozen lake to get to the Ice Hotel.
This was my favorite room at the hotel, it was called "Frigid Air". There are 20 rooms in the Hotel that are "Art Suites". Each year hundreds of people present their ideas, and 20 are chosen to create their room entirely out of ice and snow. The only things in the entire hotel that aren't are the lights and the mattresses. There are more pictures of the other rooms on my facebook!
Getting ready to go dogsledding! There were 12 dogs pulling 6 people... needless to say, we didn't move very fast, but it was amazing none the less. At the end of the trip, our guide let me help drive the sled!
Best part of staying at the Ice Hotel? The AWESOME snowsuits we got to wear!
Here we are drinking our drinks at the Absolut Ice Bar. Even the glasses are made of ice! Mine was pear, Dawn had peach, and Anna was drinking Lingonberry. They was a dance floor and great music playing, so we ended up just hanging out for almost 2 hours.
This is Dawn in our room, getting ready to go to bed. We stayed surprisingly warm all night long!
WE DID IT! This is after our 8am wake up call with hot lingonberry juice. I only got about an hour of sleep that night because I was just too darn excited to sleep, but it was so worth it!
Now it is back to reality... my class is winding down which means I need to actually be a student and get a paper and some studying done. I am looking forward to my family being here in a few weeks! They arrive on the 26th, and we are going to be doing some traveling in Southern Sweden.
More to come!
