Scanian Tales

I’m home in Sweden and it feels great!

Since I haven’t been home in a year, a lot of stuff have changed. But also a lot of stuff haven’t.

I came home, the day afterwards I was at a BBQ party at a friends place, it felt like it was only a week ago I saw them! Though, soon the summer is over and a lot of people are going back to their studies.

I’m applying for jobs as much as I can, when I’m not working (I have a small temporary contract), as well as applying for apartments in Ängelholm. I think I’ll stay here for a while, for now!

The local newspaper was interviewing me the other day too, so I hit the local news. Use google translate for a “better-than-nothing”-translation to English.

The Scanian (and Swedish spirit) is everywhere, I love it! And in a week I’ll meet Emmie again, she’s back from USA! yay!

And yes, I have been eating Swedish Meatballs since I got home!

hey there!

Last week after Klein flew home I completed the STCW ’95 course. A basic course for seafarers, covering stuff like Personal Safety and Social Responsibilies, Survival Techniques, Basic Firefighting and Elementary First Aid. Even if one wouldn’t work on boats, it’s (almost) worth the money and really interesting.

Right after I was done with the course, Emmie showed up from North Carolina. Me and Klein did such a big impression over there apparently (I know she is reading this hehe), that she decided to come down to Florida and visit me, which turned out to be quite a good decision!

Unfortunately my visa is expiring and after a lot of research it seems like going home is the only option. It’s sad in one way now that I actually done the course, but I also feel really glad about coming home, so it feels like a good decision.

I’m actually already flying tomorrow from Miami via Düsseldorf towards Copenhagen, which feels like my home airport. Total travel time is 30 hours, so I need to find something to keep myself busy!

Catch ya on the flip side (Sweden that is!).

Right now me and Klein is chilling on South Beach in Miami.

Miami is exactly like one would predict, probably just more awesome.

This morning when I went for breakfast I saw 2 Lamborghinis, a few Corvettes, a Ferrari and a lot of other nice cars. There’s girls walking around topless on the beach, it’s hot and the police don’t really care apparently if you drink in public.

I would recommend everybody going here. Or just play “GTA Vice City”, because it totally look likes that too.

We’re staying at a youth hostel 2 blocks from the beach and just minutes away from the nightclubs so there’s nothing really to complain about.

We took a flight from North Carolina from Kleins lovely female friend, which hosted us for a few days. Or last experience with Greyhound wasn’t too pleasant, so we decided to just put in 30 dollar extra each, to take a flight and thus reducing travel time from 1 day and 1 hour to 2 hours.

In North Carolina we were mostly just chilling out, which we sort of needed. Not that we’re doing anything different in Miami, but it’s been quite intense travel earlier.

Tomorrow Klein is flying home and I’m going to Fort Lauderdale to go a course so that I can start working on boats. Let’s hope it all goes well!

Ta ta!

whoa!

a lot of stuff happen since the last time. Since we crossed the border from Quebec, we have intensily traveled through the major American cities along the US eastcoast, so that we’re going to be in Miami in time!

We started off in Boston to look at the major and famous Universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard.

We also saw one of the flagship stores of Apple. Karl who is a pro-Mac activist, tried to explain the benefits of buying a Mac computer, instead of a PC. This was of course after I got a bluescreen on my PC.

Boston is quite a nice town, and it seems a lot wealthier than other cities because of it’s overflow of universities and high education.

After Boston we went to New York for a few days. We saw Statue of Liberty, Ground Zero (World Trade Center), Madison Square Garden, NYC Main Post Office, Empire State Building, Ellis Island (Immigration office in the 1920′s), Times Square (both night and day), a view of the town from Rockefeller Plaza, Central Park, United Nations World Headquarters, Wall Street, New York Stock Exchange etc etc. Most of it we saw from a double decker, a proper tourist bus with a fun multilingual tour guide that explain everything from Carrie Broadshaw’s apartment to that there exists 367 Starbucks in NYC (167 on Manhattan) and New York has 12181 taxi’s. Yes, it’s completely overflowed with taxi’s, and nighttime there is nothing else to be seen.

We also went to Pachas, a worldwide franchise of nightclubs. When we were there we saw world famous DJ’s such as Laidback Luke and Erick Morillo.

Celebrating 4th of July, Independence day was not that special. They had 30 minutes of fireworks, really spectacular actually, but that was pretty much it. We compared it to the Swedish Midsummer, and after discussing it a bit we decided to do it our way. It ended up being fun for only 2 out of 3 of us, the third got a little bit too much. So the rest of us went partying with some Russian girls in the hostel, drinking right next to the one passed out. It was quite a funny sight. Talking about the hostel, it happened to be located in the gay district, which was a bit unappetizing night time, due to the fetish/leather clubs on the street.

After NYC we went to see Philadelphia. Not too much to offer, so we entered to only German bar in town to see the German game against Spain. We had German beer, German smoked sausage, German Döner Kebab, German Strammer Max and German atmosphere. It was great. It was basically being back in Austria, and I loved every moment of it.

Leaving “Philly” early, we went to Washington D.C. to say hi to Barrack Obama. He wasn’t available at the moment, so we explored “the Mall” ourselves. It’s a part of town where they have all the monuments, the White House and 19 museums. The museums are called Smithsonians, and it is the ones that you see in “Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian”, in case you’ve seen the movie. We also saw the buildings of Pentagon, the World Bank HQ, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) HQ.

In Washington there was also some dramatic change to our team. We found out that our car couldn’t be sold in America, Andreas money is running out and Karl has been longing back to Quebec every since he left it (he met a woman). So in Washington we split up, Karl went back to Quebec to met up with his woman and to sell the car, me and Klein is on our way to Miami by Greyhound bus. Right now we’re in North Carolina visiting a friend of Klein, and in Miami I’m going out on a hunt for a job on boats, and Klein is going home. It’s for the best for us all, simply.

So.. Miami here we come!

after a bit of delayment in the US customs, we arrived safely and tired in Boston.

Yesterday we were celebrating Canaday Day in Quebec City, which wasn’t very spectacular. Quebec has a lot of people that believe in separatism, so there wasn’t much to see and do. Quebec itself looks like Europe, as it is one of the oldest cities in Northern America. The old part of the town makes you wanna sit down and have a cup of coffee actually, it really has it’s charm. The real party of Quebec was actually a few days earlier, on the 24th of June, when they celebrated Quebec day (which we did when we were in Montreal). In Quebec they have a cool nightly projected show on the silos in the port, about the Canadian history, which is mostly from a Quebec perspective.

But since there wasn’t much else to do in Quebec City, we celebrated it in our own way, so we went to the biggest club to listen to Benny Benassi, a famous Italian DJ that is mostly famous for the hit “Satisfaction”. The club itself was quite exotic, almost bizarre and there was a taste for everybody. So to speak…

We decided to drive right away to Boston after the club night, to be able to say hi to Dave, a relative of mine before the took of with a flight. Because of this, right now we’ve been more or less awake for 30 hours. God Bless Red Bull!

We’re leaving tomorrow for New York City where we’re going to celebrate the 4th of July, the National Holiday of the United States.

We also have pulled over for a few days in a small french-only speaking town called Trois-Rivières between Montreal and Quebec to visit some people we got to know in Banff. There actually happen to be a festival while we were visiting, so now we’ve been introduced to French-Canadian music! Oui!