Swedes like Sweets

Swedes like Sweets
Originally uploaded by gopherpl.

This is a typical coffee-shop counter. It reflects the observation that Swedes take their sweets seriously. In the end, though, it's actually a net positive since they seem to be more selective in their desserts, more sugar and eggs and less partially-gelatinated-non-dairy-gumbased dessert product.
The same can't be said about their candy, though. Even though the intensity of candy interest is just as high, Swedish taste in candy sucks. When you go to the grocery store, the long-rows of sefl-serve candy bins with accompanying shovels and bags host the most action in the store, but most of the chocolate covers some corn-syrup based middle, and the other candy is similar and similarly unappetizing to the marshmallow eggs from Easter that I always find in my aunt's cookie jar the next February.
It cuts both ways but in the end I've decided that Swedes probably consciously eat more sugar than Americans, but we eat more overall sugar due to our bad soda and diet habits and hidden things snuck into our Kraft BaKon Cheddar Poppable Blasters and high-fructose corn syrup yogurt, etc...

Generic

I suppose it's high time I wrote something. A couple of months ago, I realized this semester had gone by pretty easy. Some of that's because apparently universities like to make study-abroad programs easy so we'll enjoy it more, but it has the mixed result of us coming back with good tales of the country we've come from and the arrogant attitude that our home country university's are much more strenous. I got the easy time, and I got the attitude, but now I'm on a recovery. The first step is awareness. I think the second is relapse. So someone tell me something really stressful about UT, stat.
The other part's 'cause i'm not doing anything in the sciences right now, and here in Europe liberal arts courses are independent-reading focused, with little class time. I'd assume that would get tiring after awhile, but it's been a nice-change up for me and I really hadn't felt this little overall stress since I was 14.
In any case, I decided to stay in Sweden another semester, till June. Part of it is 'cause of the people. The style of my corridor really is like one of those bad sitcoms where you just slide into your corridor-mate's room and slyly insult them as you sit down on their couch while opening a beer. Some other people have usually come in just before, so there's also a laugh-track. The setup-up is a hallway with six rooms on each side (personal bathroom included) , with a common living area and kitchen at the end. It's the ideal mix of dorm and apartment life, and what I imagined living in a dorm was going to be like but wasn't when I lived at Jester. The other reason was all the immigration and finances and housing and those other dry matters have come together. The last reason was that I have it on authority from Johnny and Kelley that Austin has officially suck-ified. Duylinh and I have naturally concluded that it can't survive without our hot asses. I'll miss everyone so don't move or join a cult by the time I get back, and then when I get back I'll feel like my previous absence was negligible. The very last reason was the weather and Swedish culture, which I'll get into another time. For now, suffice it to say that the people are friendly and the snow fluffy. But you know how they talk about the land of the midnight sun? Well it's partially a scam, as they don't talk about the land of the early-afternoon nightfall.

Something creepy's gonna happen

Something creepy's gonna happen
Originally uploaded by gopherpl.

You just know somebody's gonna get eaten by something. Turns out though, and this is the part 20 minutes into the horror movie where the scary part's climax is actually mundane, that it was only blueberries, eaten by us. We were walking to scoop up the ground, to dig only one meter in, and find the peat bog from 2000 years ago. The Baltic Sea used to be at the spot where we dug up. We found some muck but no Jesus.