Malmö Update - What I've gotten up to so far!!

I thought it was about time I posted another update from Malmö. So it is Saturday afternoon here, I've spent the morning doing my homework and am now just chilling out!

So on Monday my classes started. For all those studying at university you will be able to appreciated (well maybe be a little jealous also) that my course only has maximum 6hrs of classes a week. And at Malmö Högskola, they only like you to take one course at a time (a course is like our subject)!!! So my life, at least until March, is pretty chilled. I have a 4 day weekend with class only occurring on Tuesdays and Thursdays so this means I have lots of travel opportunities which suits me just fine. I already have a few trips I'm hoping to take but I'll fill you in on those a little later.

My course, Children's Literature from a Global Perspective is really good. We have to read a bunch of different children's books. I've just finished reading Pinocchio and still have Anne Frank, The Little Prince, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, just to mention a few, still to read before the end of March. We watched a Japanese anime movie the other day called Spirited Away (recommend seeing it if you can get your hands on a copy). So we read or watch these texts and then discuss them in class and have to answer a bunch of questions as our response to the text. Pretty easy if you ask me. We also have a major project which involves me writing my own picture story books, which should also be fun. I have already written the story and now just need to find someone artistic to help me with the illustrations and then just plan the layout of the book and put it all together. We will also be required to do an author presentation and a book presentation but that also should be interesting and rather fun to do.

...So overall, loving my course!! It should be quite an interesting couple of months. Then in April I begin a new course - Sports Psychology! As of yet I don't know much about it but will find out soon enough. It also sounds like it will be pretty relaxed and hopefully interesting and fun also.

Anyway, I will stop boring you about my course now and tell you about some of the goings on that have happened over the last couple of weeks.

Last weekend, as part of our introduction program, we had a trip to Lund. Unfortunately the day as extremely cold and windy so walking around outside didn't really happen. We did have a tour of a place called Kulturen. If anyone ever travels to Sweden and visits Lund, this place is worth a visit and I'm hoping to go back in Spring when the weather is nicer and more bearable. Anyway this place is an outdoor museum which has a wide variety of houses which were collected by a Swede, take down, transported to this place in Lund, and then reconstructed in the same way as before. There are a wide variety of houses from all different classes of society covering a range of different periods in history. There's a lovely little church from the 1800's, which even today is still being used for weddings and baptisms. We had a tour guide who showed us a few of the house and gave us a brief look into the history of Sweden and how people of the different classes lived back then.

Once the tour was finished, most of us were frozen to the bone and so during our free time opted for the warmth of a cafe to spend our time in. I did manage to get some shopping in!! I am looking forward to going back and having a proper look at Lund later in the year and will give you more details when I do.

Apart from that, I've spent my time hanging out with the exchange students, going to the movies or movie nights in people's rooms here at Sommarstaden, attended Swedish classes, university classes and a couple of lectures included in the introduction program, visited some pubs, been to a party at Rönnen (there has been a party there every week since we got here!!), celebrate some birthdays and tonight am heading to Celciusgården for a Casino Royale themed party!! Then this weekend coming I plan on hitting the night scene here in Malmö. Fredde Le Grande will be in town next week at the biggest nightclub in Scandinavia, which so happens is located here in Malmö, so am going to see if I can get a ticket as I think many of the exchange students will be attending.

So that's about all that's been happening with me over the past couple of weeks. Now I am in the process of research a couple of trips that I'm hoping to go on. One is visiting the Ice Hotel up in the very north of Sweden, another is an orgainsed trip to Helsinki, Moscow and St. Petersberg over Easter, then there's possibly a trip to Berlin to stay with one of the girls on exchange here for the weekend and finally, possibly a trip to Vienna to visit two girls also here on exchange but who are heading home in April. There's few other places on my wish list but will see how the money holds out as well as the spare time.

Now that you're up to date I think I'm going to go and add a few more photos and then maybe relax by watching a movie before heading out for tonight's party!

Hope you are all well back home. Feel free to flick me an email so I can keep up with what you're doing at home!! Other than that...till next time...

Puss och kram
Alice
xoxo