M & D’s Blog

I have been in Lund for over 1.5 month now, and I think I’m liking more and more, as the weather has been kind to me, and I’m slowly finding my ways around town.

Nevertheless, the purpose of this blog is to complain about the University. I have this Corporate Governance class (I know, it sounds extremely boring, and indeed it is) and it only meets once a week for 2 hours. For the whole semester, we only meet about 9 times, but I have already missed class twice. Not because I purposely ditched, but the class time could differ every week, and I always forget to check, resulting my absence in class. For example, the first class met at 12pm on a Friday, but the second class met at 10am the next Friday. This week, I missed class again, because class was on Wednesday instead of Friday.

Maybe it’s just me being whining and annoying (as I usually am), but seriously folks, they don’t have a system at all!!!!! Grrrr….Arrgghhhhh

Ah…Berkeley, I miss you much!

A while ago, my father was helping my grandfather clean out his garage. They came across a box of journals, which my grandfather’s grandfather had written, from 1981 - 1986. He was born in 1888 and passed away in 1990, at the age of 102. The journals are pretty interesting, and while it would be a huge task to digitize all of them, I spent the time to scan in the front page of all the journals. On most of them, he sketched a small picture, about various things. Some are about his ideas of how the universe works, others are sketches of things currently happening around him.

You can see all the journals here. After you click on a thumbnail, you’ll get a medium sized image. If you want to see a larger version, look at the bottom of each image for a link like “large.jpg”. If you want to see the full sized scan, you can click “huge.jpg”, but this will take a while to load.

All the images are named by the year & month it was started. (except for the first one, I don’t know when he wrote it, but it talks about his childhood years, and he labeled it Janurary, 1890).

The journals aren’t in the greatest condition, and when I get a chance, I’ll probably adjust the color & brightness on the images to make them easier to read.

http://blog.rorexrobots.com/pics/journals

It is a very small island situated to the northwest of Lund, in between Denmark and Sweden. We took the train from Lund to Landskrona, then from Landskrona we took the ferry to the island. The island is quite small, about 11.7 km in circumference, so biking around the island is manageable.

Just like most of all the people who got off the ferry boat, we rented bikes and started to explore around the island. Note, when I say “explore”, I really mean “don’t know where we are heading to, and eventually don’t know where we ended up at“. When I was at the island, it reminded me very much of Catalina, but not as touristy. On Ven, there are only a few houses, couple cafes, farm lands, trees, beaches, and more trees and beaches.

The beaches on Ven, on a beautiful day like that, are simply fantastic. We regret very much that we didn’t bring swimsuits when we saw how gorgeous they are. Since we couldn’t go into the water, we just sat around on the beach in the sun, trying to submerge ourselves in nature’s tranquility.

Besides sitting around, we also did some physical labor-biking!!! We biked to all places on the island, and it took us approx. 4 or 5 hours. After that day, I truly felt that I had my yearly exercise done. After some strenuous exercise, we ate hamburgers and fries to make up for it. =)

There is a beach that is only 15 min (by bus) west of Lund, called Lomma Beach. When we first got there, we thought we were at the wrong place. At first sight, we saw some ugly giant construction sites (look in the background), and some industrial areas with factories at a distance. A little disappointed, we still decided to take a stroll down the beach, hoping there are some nicer parts of the beach waiting to be discovered. There were no surprises. The beach was extremely quite, with barely anyone insight and too many flies like insects flying around. The water is pretty shallow and we saw someone riding a horse in the water.

At some point, we decided to turn back because Elize told me that if we continue on, we will eventually reach the nude beach. We weren’t counting on sight seeing any hot Swedes, so we went back. It was definitely a very relaxing Sunday afternoon.

The other day, we make some yummy Thai food at my friend’s place.

Today, the UC Study center organized a trip to the Original Ikea in Almhult. The inside of this Ikea just looked like all other Ikeas I’ve seen in California. What made the Ikea trip more interesting was that we visited the Ikea Museum. There were show rooms for all the popular furnitures in Sweden during different periods of time.

After the trip to Ikea, we went to a town named Wanas, and got dropped off at this big open area/exhibition place/park. The area is very green, just like most of Sweden. Behind the Castle, there is a very pretty lake on the property. Surrounding the lake is a foresty area, where most of the sculptures are located. There is a barn next to the Castle, where creepy art works are housed. There are about 4 stories inside this barn, and each floor has two rooms to displace the art works. The rooms are very dark, basically pitch black, I had to use flash on the camera to get anything on picture. Right across the barn, there is a tunnel which leads an upside down room. The artworks are nice, but I thought the environment and the view of the property was more worthy.

When I look back at my so called “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, it seems somewhat kiddish now. They are indeed pretty crappy, but really nothing major. Shit happens, and I just have to deal with it and stop complaining. I think I am able to say this because I got over most of it, I just can’t image myself saying this when I was trying to deal with all those problems in this past week. I’m writing this down, so when shit happens again, I can look at this and remind myself that I can deal with it!

Lesson #1: Shit happens, just deal with it, stop whining and grow up!

Also, much thanks and appreciation to David, who has helped, comforted and supported me all the way. I feel bad for him since he is always the person I go to when I want to complain, and the person I snapped at way too much. Yet, you have been so patient and kind to me. Thank you for being there for me when I needed you the most…

9/6/05, a very unfortunate date for me, and I don’t believe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. The following content mainly consists of complaints, readers beware!

1) found out our tickets from Paris to Cairo was cancelled due to “non-payment”
2) called back and forth 10 gazillion times between the Paris STA travel agency and my credit card company to find out what happened ( I had to call back and forth because they both claimed that they were not “able” to make calls to each other)
3) yes, at that point, I was stucked with a charge that went somewhere, and no tickets to Cairo
4) tried to pay David’s ticket which we put a hold on, but London STA won’t sell it to us due to various kind of regulations.
5) needed to unlock my cellphone, got scammed by this Gapal Ramesh guy
6) lost my bike lock key
7) dropped my cellphone in the sink, cellphone not working now

Ok…so we finally bought our trip tickets. We tried really hard to go to Cairo as well to visit Alyssa, but it was too expensive, and when we did find some cheap tickets and bought them, they called back and said “Sorry, we canceled your tickets…now they cost 3x as much if you want them.”
Me & Michelle will meet in London on Dec 28th, and we are flying back to SFO on Jan 13th. What we do between there isn’t 100% set yet, but the current plan is to visit both Paris and Brussels by train. (I think we can get train tickets for $50 each time, which isn’t too bad)

We’ve probably spent about 100 man hours between us trying to plan, find tickets, find prices, calling travel agencies, going to travel agencies. Our tickets were $70 for michelle from sweden->london, $370 for michelle from london->sfo, and $720 for me for round trip from sfo<->london.

Make sure to check the pictures link over to the right…michelle adds new pictures often and doesn’t post about all of them on the front page.

Last Saturday, my friends and I went to this 2nd hand market in Lund. The size of the market was very impressive, as there were about 300 stands all lined up down the street, selling what most people sell in a yard sale. I bought two sweaters, only 60 skr (less than $8). For lunch, we had falafel, which is something that I’ve been eating almost everyday for the goodness of its price, and somewhat its taste as well. Then we just kinda sat around in downtown Lund. It was a relaxing afternoon, and I think we’re getting better and better at wasting time.