I should follow a workshop that teaches me how to come up with cool blog titles.
Anyway.
Three weeks have past since my last blog post and I really have to fresh up my memory. This might become my shortest blog post so far. I'm curious.
The week of October 1st, well, I don't have anything special to tell about that week. I nearly died from exam preparations. We had 230 practice questions to answer and I teamed up with one guy from my class and some others from the Swedish Peace and Conflict class and we tried to answer them all. Nearly worked. We got the missing answers from the Facebook group my class made. It was pretty stressful and you don't learn that much, because you have to divide the questions, otherwise you didn't have time to answer them all. Would've been more effective for your own brain to answer them all yourself. We finished the questions two days before the exam and then we had one day to study all those 230 answers... Amazing. Let me just not recall that dreadful week. Surprisingly the exam itself wasn't as hard as we expected it to be. They gave us 3 hours for 16 questions. Sixteen questions. Three hours. OH. MY. GOD. I have never ever been so relaxed during an exam when it comes to the amount of time we're given. I'm pretty slow when it comes to exams and I can recall many exams which I couldn't finish because I was too slow. I just cannot understand why they give us 3 hours for 16 questions. In the Netherlands you'll get 3 hours for about 60 questions.
Oh, wait, something special did happen that week! After going to a café to celebrate the end of our first exam, I went to the central station to head off to my mum's place. It was a lovely weekend and it made me find out that Swedish trains are a bit.. odd. They're all so different. One train makes so much noise and moves so much you think you're in a truck. On the way back I was supposed to wait for a train for one hour. I found out that evening. If I had known about that, I would've picked a different train. But luck was on my side when I arrived at the station and there was a train going to Malmö which got delayed! It was a different train company though. And a totally different time. And my ticket says everything in detail. I pretty much felt like a criminal and was extremely pleased by the fact that no one asked for my ticket during that 1.5 hour ride :)
Oh, wait, something else happened that week. Despite my study stress, I awarded myself something nice. I went to a film screening of the Arab Film Festival with some people. It was a film about the Arab Spring in Egypt and it was really interesting. So, yeah, just wanted to proof that week wasn't actually so extremely dull focused around studying.
I actually think the next week wasn't so enervating as the exam week. I can remember I went to the events of the political student union and I bought some low energy lamps. I felt so grown up after buying those lamps. Buying food is something I have to do so often, that it doesn't feel that special. But low energy lamps!? No, I had never bought those in my entire life. My mum always took care of that and it wasn't like when she'd buy food and ask me: ''What do you want to have?''. Why should you ask such a question about low energy lamps? ''Well, I'd like the ones with the really nice shape''. And I had really planned this low energy lamp-trip, because the Lidl had an offer for them on Thursday. Yeah, I read all the advertising brochures :) And so I spend some free time before school at the Lidl to buy low energy lamps. I didn't have any lamps at home, so.. where would I be without them? I dressed too warm for the bike trip though (gloves and thick shawl while it was really sunny), so by the time I arrived at school I was extremely sweaty. Just a little detail.
I think I shall move on to this week, since I cannot think of anything else that happened last week...
Free diner on Tuesday, organized by school! Yes, the university really loves to give us all kinds of free stuff, including food. This diner was organized for the students of Peace and Conflict, both the English and Swedish program. There was another class as well, but we still don't know which program they were in... Seems really anti-social when I think back about it. We could've just asked :) Before the diner I spend the whole afternoon in the city library. I hadn't been there before and totally loved it. And it's so huge! The only other library I've ever been to was the one in my hometown in the Netherlands, which is really small. Oh, and the one in the town I lived in in Finland, which is twice as big, but still very small compared to the one here in Malmö. I got two books, as if I don't have enough to read for school already... But I can keep them for 4 weeks, so I hope to find some time. I did end up with an immense headache, so that wasn't the most delightful thing to have during a diner. But we had some really nice food and an ''interesting'' quiz, so I forgot about the headache from time to time. At the end of the evening, when I told someone I ''just had a headache'', it spread more quickly than I had expected and I ended up borrowing a beanie from someone because he pretty much forced me and eventually took the bus home, because another person pretty much forced me to use his card (mines was at home) and he biked home on my bike. Made me feel more piteous than I wanted to, haha.
Oh, this week me and Swedish bureaucracy met again. I don't even know if I want to use my lovely spare time describing this mind-boggling frustration that goes by the name ''Swedbank''. Short: they told me I can't have a bank account without a Swedish ID-card. Then I met this guy from my class who doesn't even have a personnummer, let alone a Swedish ID-card, and he has an account at Swedbank. When I went back the next day, it turned out I could have an account without Swedish ID (okay, makes sense......), BUT! It turns out they don't offer internet banking to foreign students. Right, let's say I don't want to live in the 7th century. What am I supposed to do without internet banking!? Go to the bank everytime I want to transfer money and pay an extra fee because an actual person has to transfer it instead of a computer!? Well, no, thanks. I told the woman that even my mum, who doesn't have a personnummer and wasn't even living in Sweden at the time she got the account, has internet banking. I think things are just more flexible at banks that lie in the middle of nowhere inbetween trees. At some point, the woman at Swedbank started to talk softer and then said: ''I'm not allowed to tell you this, but.. if I were you, I'd just try your mum's bank first.'' The fact she said that just made my day, because at least she has some feelings. The woman that helped me before didn't have any at all.
Why did I just write such an immense text about.. well, something I didn't want to spend so much time on? Hmmm...... Something tells me this won't become my shortest blog post so far :)
One ''adventure'' that already started last week, but didn't end until Thursday, was the hairdresser. I had anticipated the visit since Sunday, but they don't have any opening times on display and I think they just open whenever they feel like it, because they have been open at Sunday sometimes. Funny thing is that, when I finally got the haircut, I forgot to ask about their opening times... Pure brilliance. Imagine: I walked past them multiple times and someone even send me a text message when he saw they were open (I was at the city library though, so bad timing, pretty much) and still I didn't ask them about their opening times...
Anyway. Thursday. When I went up there the first time, the light was on but there was no one there. Oh, please... So I went for some grocery shopping and when I returned and ran into a girl I know, we walked past and they were finally there and the girl was like: ''I think it's men only''. Well, only men inside doesn't convince me of the shop being ''men only'' since I rarely see women getting a haircut in Rosengård. After putting my newly bought yoghurt inside my fridge (yeah, this was very important to me) I went down there and it turned out to be men only. The hairdresser was really like: ''No, I don't cut females'' and I was really like: ''What!? Come on! You cannot even say I have female hair!''. There were some guys just hanging around (I thought they all needed a cut but they were.. just there) and they all pretty much pressured him to cut my hair. So when he agreed to cut my hair, I wasn't sure if he was happy about it, haha. But he turned out to be fine and even though he doesn't speak much English and I don't speak much Swedish and Arabic, he kept talking from time to time which was a nice change from the woman who cut me the last time. She was more than plain. This guy just kept on asking random things of which I couldn't understand half. The other guys spoke English though, and after the usual question of ''where are you from?'' someone asked if I came from Breda. Breda, right. Of all places in the Netherlands... But hey, the cut turned out just as well as last time (when I paid 150 SEK, about 18 euro. this time I paid only 50 SEK, about 6 euro)! And it turned out I was the first female he ever cut in his entire life, so it was a good experience for both of us, haha. He told me I should return to him the next time I need a cut. It's not even a one minute walk from my apartment and it can't get any cheaper!
What else? Well, procrastination is prevailing and this means I have only read one chapter of our entire reading list from this module. I feel so bad. My motivation is just really low at the moment and everytime I'm planning a super-duper study weekend, I get ill. Last weekend I got some kind of flu, this weekend it's exactly the same. Great timing. I hope tomorrow all will be well again. I was supposed to go to a brunch on Sunday, but decided not to because I really need the whole day for studying... Today I took a walk in an attempt to get rid of my flu. Worked in some way. I went to Östra kyrkogården, which is a sub-neighbourhood of Rosengård and literally means ''Eastern graveyard''. So, yeah... It's the biggest graveyard of Malmö (it's huge) and it's really nice, I'm not exaggerating. It's a park, pretty much, so it's not all about dead people. Some areas really reminded me of a place close to my hometown in the Netherlands. The weather was lovely. Pretty warm and the sun was shining. Couldn't be better!
Next week! Of course the highlight of next week is my birthday, October 28! Not planning anything special though, because I just don't like big parties. At least my mum is coming over for the weekend and apart from that.. I'll just go with the flow :) I'm sure many more things will happen, so I won't only be talking about my birthday next time. But I can ramble on about pretty much every little detail. Did I actually ever mention the weird Swedish guy who came up to me at ''the immense supermarket'' the first few days I was here? He was really poetic and couldn't stop telling me how beautiful I am and how great the colours circulating around me are and whatnot. Something like that. It's been over 2 months now.
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