Sunbathing and Turpentine

Jochen has left me once more for South Africa to enjoy warm stormy weather, poo, beetles, giraffes, a swimming pool and most importantly....gin!

Well I can also have mini adventures of my own!
Last weekend we (Sam, Cinzia and myself) went on a girly road trip to Helsingborg which is about 40 minutes north of Lund by the coast and only 4 km across the water to Denmark. One of the main attractions of the town is the Kärnen (tower) which overlooks Helsingborg and the Baltic Sea. It is part of the remains from a Danish fortress (from when Skåne-the southern region, was part of Denmark) and was built in the 1310's. The view from the top of the tower is apparently amazing (we'd spent too much time eating to make it there before closing) but the view from the second level of the town or the bottom of the tower is also quite stunning. We happened to be up there at sunset which was pretty spectacular.


As you all know the Swedish winter is long, cold and in the south it is also windy. This leads to depression, alcoholism, hermitism, lack of fun-ism, and general complaining about how long and cold the winter is, followed by complaining of only one week of warm summer then back to winter. Therefore it is important to enjoy every ray of sunshine when it appears. The Swedes are professional sunbathers. There are usually benches in sunny spots along the bike paths and benches attached to the sides of buildings which when weather permits they are filled with Swedes basking in the sun and warming their backs upon the warm bricks. So when we saw sun bathing chairs in Helsingborg by the water we had to try them out. It's pretty funny to be sitting in the sun wrapped up in all the layers of woolies you can find and the temperature is definitely below zero. The rest of our adventure was spent wandering around the town, buying yummy chocolates, eating yummy food and being silly. Overall a lovely girly adventure was had.

Hopefully we will have more adventures like this as the weather gets warmer. Spring seems like it's just around the corner as it hasn't snowed for weeks and there are buds on the trees. One can only hope!

As for life in general I am still pondering the purpose of my life but I'm a happy little vegemite since I have found an art shop in Lund. Paint brushes and kanelbulle (cinnamon buns) what more could a girl want? Turpentine! That's right, good ol' turps. It appears that you cannot buy this harmful toxin in your normal supermarket but you can by acetone, what the? There is a double standards for your favourite poison. Acetone can be bought in supermarkets because you can remove your nail polish with it, but only real men buy turps! So after searching every supermarket I was given a tip (thanks Cinzia) that there was some kind of paint shop in Lund. This was a delightful surprise of it being an art supplies shop, now I really need a job to fund my habit. I mean my art habit not my turps habit, although this craving was also satiated.

So I leave you to reflect on how easy it is to obtain poisons in Australia. Please don't ingest!

(Click on photos in left side bar to see the album as usual)

January.....and it's still cold!

February already, and it seems my January news didn't even make it onto the blog. This was supposed to be the Germany post, however I am having some technical difficulties with the photos but hopefully I can post them soon.

January started off with recovering from New Year's and sleeping for a week after returning from Germany. Since then, we have been back to school/work and trying to think of new year's resolutions. For the last few years I have tried to pick resolutions that are actually achievable such as:

2008 - Learn to bake bread!
I achieved this, however I was stuck eating very dense bread for a year.

2009 - Eat more fish!
I achieved this also, but it meant I had to get over my fear of fish shops. So I found a fish shop where all the fish with pleading dead eyes were at one end and all the nice properly dead fillets of fish were at the other end. All I had to do was not turn left!

2010 - Get off your arse and move overseas!
Big tick for me. This was one of those resolutions that is like that yummy plate of left overs in the fridge. It tasted yummy the first time and you can't wait to go back and eat the rest but then it starts to go off. You think you'll eventually get around to eating it but you forget about it and slowly it grows legs and the giant furry greeny-browny-white fuzzy thing takes over your entire fridge and decides "Fuck this, if you're not going, I will!" So it packs you in it's sandwich bag and takes you to see the big wide world.

So after such a big change, traveling around with a fuzzy smelly green thing (although luckily not the original Green Thing), I decided to go back to something achievable........

2011 - Floss teeth more!
I'll let you know if I achieve this next year. Ummm, maybe I should have started with restocking my floss supplies.

We had a small science excursion to Borås which is about 60km east of Göteborg to test some fancy lights on bumblebees. The experiments were a success and we had some very happy biologists in the car. If you check out the photos you will see the frozen sea near Varberg (I think). It was another first for me, actually standing on the sea instead of in it and holding chunks of sea in my hands, weird and awesome!

My beloved Sambo (which is the Swedish way of saying "partner") has recently had a birthday. It is with lots of love I wish him a happy birthday and hope he has a wonderful year. We had a party with the coolest of cool friends, there was cake, there was dancing, there was beer, there was a Darth Vader Piñata, what more could a boy want? Lego! There was also lego.

We also spent part of January making and then waiting eagerly for home brew beer! All we need now is for the bubbles to appear inside the bottle.

Check out the photos, they are mostly silly party photos, comment if you feel like it and stay warm!