The last weekend of orientation: Comfort Food and Clothesline

Well, orientation has officially ended here at Lulea University of Technology and the semester has begun. Not a whole lot of new things to report on over here for us so I thought I'd just give a quick run-down of our weekend and post a few pictures. So here's our weekend in a nutshell...

Friday:

Slept in late, like usual. Ryan had his verbal exam for his Intro to Swedish course. (I had mine on Thursday, so I didn't have to do anything productive. Yay!)

We headed downtown after his class to run a few errands and to meet up with our Nebraska friends for dinner. We ate at a sports bar downtown and watched the Twins game. It was nice.

The restaurant was like a mix between Applebees and Champs. The food was mostly very American, but the prices were a little steep. I guess it's the price you pay to get a little Comfort Food from home overseas.

Shannon and I each tried a daiquiri and we shared a HUGE appetizer platter full of chips, cheese, guacamole, salsa, sourcream, quesadillas, wings, and ribs. It was a lot of food.

After dinner we took a stroll down to the Baltic Sea and attempted to watch the sunset, but it was a little cloudy. We did find this really awesome deck with some comfortable chairs to watch the cloudy sunset though.

The waterfront reminded Ryan and I both of  Duluth's Canal Park. It made us feel right at home.

This is Tyler. He's one of the grad students we met from Nebraska. He's pretty okay I guess. :)

And this is Shannon and Brett. They are the other two graduate students from Nebraska. They're both pretty okay too. :)

Even with the clouds, I think the sunset still turned out really nice.

 Although, after it went down, the temperature dropped a good fifteen degrees. Since none of us were prepared for that, we had to stop enjoying the beautiful scenery and head back to our warm apartments.





Saturday:

We didn't do much of anything Saturday during the day. Outdoor "Beer Games" were the scheduled orientation activity for Saturday at 5pm. We decided not to head out until around 6:30pm in order to have enough time to eat dinner and to cut down the amount of time we spent outside so we didn't freeze. Ryan and I and our Nebraska Friends were really excited to play some outdoor beer pong or witness some drunken three-legged-races, but there wasn't a whole lot of "Beer Games" going on by the time we showed up. And we missed the three-legged-races! All the fun appeared to have fizzled out, and all that was left was a bunch of college kids drinking in a field.

To pass the time, we checked out this cool old car that our Phosare, Niklas, owned and waited for the next round of games to begin.

But, unfortunately, the only thing that transpired during the two hours we sat outside in this field was a game of "Clothesline".

For those of you back home who have never heard of this game, it's really rather simple... You split up into groups and see whose group can make the longest line with the clothes they were previously wearing. Needless to say, this was yet another European drinking game that we didn't partake in. But I did get some pretty good pictures of the dedicated Frenchmen.

Now you may be asking yourself... "How can you tell from across the field who's French and who isn't?" And my reply to that is... "They're the only ones brave/drunk/stupid enough to get completely naked when it's only 40 degrees outside." And that's a proven fact. The only ones who took off every single piece of clothing they were wearing were French men.



Sunday:
Sunday we literally didn't leave our apartment. It was our day of rest after these last two weeks of orientation to prepare for the semester and our Swedish exam that we had today. After staying out at the nightclub until almost 3am, it was definitely needed.


Well, that about wraps it up. Hope you all enjoyed reading about and seeing the pictures from arguably the craziest school-sponsored orientation ever. Tomorrow marks the beginning of a new adventure for us in Sweden: school.