Studies over updates

Sheesh y’all, a week (written:071010) have already passed by and I haven’t been able to glue the recent photos and text scraps into the journal due to heavy studies, a cherished visit from back home and illness.
I think I’ll just recap you with the latest stuff in one massive wall of text, even if I know putting things separately will make you read it with a bit more joy (am I not correct?), it’s a pain in the ass to organise all the posts.

EDIT; I’ll divide them after all – have a look above:

Structure through chaos

Today we schooled in for the winter semester.
The truth is that I kind of longed for this day for quite some time now. I was curious to see how the tutors were like and, since we haven’t met them all yet, still are. I began the day with anatomy and was looking forward to have a lesson with Dr. Snajdr, a teacher that already introduced himself at the day of introduction. To my surprise, as well as disappointment, another tutor entered the practice room and introduced himself in rather poor English. My guess is that he is a teacher from the Czech branch of our Faculty and is about to have his first international group of students. Good thing anatomy mostly consists of Latin and Greece and is rather easy to understand as well as study on your own.

By his side stood a younger girl, I guess she’s in the last year or so, and she introduced herself in fluent English which kind of balanced my approach to the whole situation.

Later on they both, regardless the poor English which I got used to really quickly, proved their selves to be great teachers!
The lesson was very well structured and I found the time well worth spent and the whole situation just made me really happy.
At first we went through different axis of the body in order to be able to locate and distinguish different parts. Our first parts of the body to get to know were the parts of the upper limb; upper arm, forearm and shoulders. The teacher and his assistant went brought in a big box filled of bones – authentic bones that is. It was a strange feeling to have five different bones obviously from five different individuals – strange but exciting.

I never thought that one single bone could have so many different parts. Just the five bones in the upper limb (the lower is added next week) contains of approximately 50 parts with different names. I need to force them all into my head over the next week – there’s a test on the next Friday continuing as a weekly routine; almost one test every two weeks. I believe that it’s pretty good to have them; I prefer to have something that triggers one to study rather than to sit with it all right before the final exam.
There will be many late evenings under the feeble reading light and a great many visits at the Anatomy study room (aka. “The Graveyard”) where one can borrow bones to practice at.

The day went on with both Histology and Cytology lectures as well as Biophysics lectures, both of them rather long and boring. Tonight I’ve been going over the upper bones of the limb, trying to sort out all the nomenclature and terminology.

It is tough – but far from impossible...

Come join the feast

We hosted a great feast.
Thanks for a delicious meal, girls!

I’m all settled

After a long day of putting the furniture together I’m settled in my room, at last. Finally my own bed, a desk for the studies, a big wardrobe, reading chairs and some plants to break the white solid atmosphere. Hope you like it – it might be the best roomed I’ve ever had.

Cook-a-long

We try to cook while we have the time! :D It's pretty hard without enough kitchen equipment thou...

Pre-Party @ our crib

Here are some pictures from our pre-party for the Freshmen Badge party arranged by MedSoc (kind of the University Student Community).  I had a lot of fun, partially because “drinking as much as you can” for 120,- SEK is a good deal and partially because meeting all the people from the Uni. again was great. I got to give credit to Oliver and the other students in charge of the event.

Cheers!

I finally got my stuff

My parents arrived earlier than I thought they would. The car was brimful of my stuff and it took us quite a while before we were done carrying all my furniture, electronics and clothes. In no time my room floor went from completely empty to being all covered by the big pile of equipment.

I brought my parents a couple of beer and showed them around the flat.
They also brought a lot of food, food that you can’t find in Prague, such as home made blackberry jam, honey, cheese (I went all ‘wtf when I found out there’s no regular cheese – no cheese for three months - ouch), taco ingredients, dried mushrooms, spices, pickled herring and Swedish mustard etc.
Another sweet thing was that now I got all my clothes and can finally put on some nice, clean shirts and pants – after all I’ve been living off my suitcase with two set of clothes only.

Tomorrow is IKEA-time and we'll go there to raid the place once again, this time for my room and I'll try to get some spare things that we need in the common rooms as well.
Since there’s going to be a Freshmen Badge party tonight we’ve invited some friends over for a pre-party. There will be twister, drinking games and a lot of JS drama.

Ps. “JS drama” since Jean and Jax have been watching Jersey Shore a LOT lately and have made me get all into it as well. I usually don’t like series like that but this one is somehow different – great characters, big drama and no fuckin’ competition or rules. Ds.

Enrolment!

Today was the day of the great enrolment. A great day indeed, I must say. I went to the main building of the Foreign Student Department together with Jackie and Jean with a bit of nervousness. Well, nervousness isn’t the right word, you know, more like the feeling of butterflies in your stomach – like when you’re in love – that’s right, I’m in love with the fact that I’m going to Uni.
The first thing we did was to enter a big ensemble hall brimful of students from all different years of the education. I was amazed and utterly happy to finally get into a place in Prague filled with complaisant and smiling people – something that’s not too common by the locals.
We were shown to a wall containing lists of freshmen groups, each of them assigned different “guides”. Our Swedish “group” got divided into different groups, obviously in order to force us to talk to other people, but I didn’t mind that. Sabrina, our group guide, is a third year student with a lot of good information to share. She showed us around campus and told us about the first year randomly interrupted by our questions.

After the 1½ hour walk we went back to the registration room to get some food, more information as well as buying hoodies with the University logo.
We’d been told that the registration process was going to be everlasting and boring, indeed it was but at the same time fun as hell because of the many new faces I could talk to.
I started to talk to one guy especially, Seung Kim from Korea and he seemed to be a really nice guy.
Getting to know new people is going to be a great deal of fun and that’s one of the reasons why I in the end choose to get in a different study group than the other guys from Sweden. No hard feelings mates.

I was the last one to sign in and after this day all my worries sort of disappeared. When I finally got home I was tired from all the information gathering and all the new impressions that I had to take in so I just went to Alex Bistro along with Jax and Jean in order to relax with my PC and a cold dark beer.
Tomorrow I’ll go for a run in the morning and then we’re supposed to be at the ensemble hall again at 10am to hear out the teachers.

In the meantime; cheers!

Twist-earrrrh!

Yesterday night we just went crazy at the twister dots. Well, Christian was Game(Gay)-Master and forced us into impossible positions, totally awesome!

Beware of the Land Mines!

Yesterday started off great, I forced myself out of the bed and dressed up for running. I haven't brought any training cloths yet so a well used tank top and my only hoodie (quite cold outside I must admit) as well as my shorts had to do.
I ran up to the University area, or rather the hospital complex of castles and ancient buildings, and found myself folded in two over one of the many benches on the height. The small road up to the height, with a good view over the city, contained a lot of stairs, steep asphalt and after that a great many more of the stairs.
Being totally pinned down by the stairs on one of the  greatest views in Prague wasn't all that bad though. Eventually it also led me to one of my aims this Sunday; to find the hotel where my parents are staying when they arrive at Friday next week.

After forty minutes of sweating, five minutes of cold showering and another five for breakfast on the go I went down to Alex's Bistro, that is sort of becoming my favourite place - nor for the included Wi-Fi, nor for the beer, but for the good food they serve.
Since I was full from the bread, that I bought earlier when I got back from my sprint in the University Park, I just had a beer and got connected to the Internet. The manager, Alex I assume, came with the beer and had a chat with me paying a lot of interest and spending time to actually talk (English!) to the customers - something I find rather exclusive here.

After an hour and a half I met up with Jean and Jax at the apartment and we went up to Václavscé Námêstí which is the big avenue at the National Museum. There we looked for a sushi place and found one in the backstreet of one of the greatest back alleys I've ever seen. The prices were obviously set according to the location and we decided that paying 120,- CZK for one piece of nori maki (though it was made really fancy, nothing like I've ever seen on a sushi plate) and for the 8 piece menu charging 380,- CZK was a bit too much and my crave for sushi pretty much oozed off.

Instead we walked around, found some interesting shops and ended up at a small Chinese restaurant a bit off the square. The prices here were really good and so was the food, even if they actually used the frozen packs of vegetables in my fried rice with chicken (double plate á 400g, YAY!).
Jackie's and Jean's plates were also overloaded with food - hence the swollen stomachs and the kind of long wait after we'd finished almost everything.


To keep it short we got home, got ourselves ready (after Jeanine's splendid gift of persuasion) for pre party at the guys apartments, aka. the Bachelor Attic, went there and had a blast introducing them to the drinking game Land Mines.
Land Mines, for you that haven't came across Dave's game of beer drinking madness, should know that in this game you need to be good at three things: spinning coins, force beer down your throat and at last to come up with a good landmine tactic during the first round.

I took the liberty to invite two other Swedish students over, that went to the PreMed course before ours, and they seemed to be relieved to talk to other Swedes. We had a good time and the ladies wanted to go to a Jazz club they had been to the other day. I don't say no to Jazz and we got going there. It happened to be that they lived close to both of our apartments, at Zitná Street just around the corner from us. Unfortunately it was Sunday and I think we have to be prepared that people in Prague are doing the complete opposite of working these days.

The Jazz club was closed so we called it a day and me and Jackie went home and the guys still had some party mood going and went further into the night.


Today's a new day and since I'm not hung over at all, thanks to drinking a lot of water, I'll go out for another battle with the stairs at the University Park.


Spin it carefully my friend; there are Land Mines all over the table...

Filling up the freezer

Went down to one of the many Potraviny's, aka. small shops on the corners, to get some food. Found a Jack Daniels coke, how awesome is that?

I left my keys upon the table

“Learn from your mistakes” – that’s what the wise man use to say and I can for sure second that. Our friends Fredrik, Victor and Christian arrived to Prague yesterday and they invited us over to a pre-party. We got ready to go and Jeanine reminded me to bring the key to the flat before we went. I did take one of three key rings, took my shoes on and walked out the door firmly closing it after me.
Then it hit me. I have the wrong key ring in my left pocket. FIRETRUCK!!!

Our apartment have five different keys; one for the main entrance, two for the first door (the one I closed) and two for the second entrance. The key ring I had taken with me contained all the keys except the one that opens the first door.
Now you might ask yourself why I panicked and just didn’t open the door again?
You see, the door is equipped with a self locking mechanism so once you close it from the outside it locks itself.
Why didn’t I just use the second door?
Well, let me tell you about “learning from your mistakes”. Before I went I locked the second door from the inside, put the locking chain in the door and left the keys in the lock. That means that I couldn’t get my key in the lock from the outside to unlock it and even if I could the chain would prevent me from open the door enough.

What a dilemma. I can tell you this: the feeling of being so close to your home not being able to enter it, just having a wooden door in between a cold night in Prague and a warm bed, is rather annoying. We even considered climbing “the pigeon tomb” in order to get in through the bathroom or the hall window.

So there we stood and the party mood we gained during the last hour just disappeared in thin air. I cursed a couple of times and considered to smash the door open. We realised that the best thing we could do was to wait for tomorrow to call the house manager and pray that the devil would be nice enough to have left a back up key for him.

We bunkered up some more beers and went to the guys place. It was so nice to see them again after the summer and we had a lot of catching up to do. Somewhere around 1 ó clock we finally went out to roam the streets of Prague for a place to go. We had been talking about going to Hot Peppers and that’s where Fredrik steered the vessel since he’d been there before and knew the way.
If you’re on your way to google “hot peppers” by now, just before you do, let me say that:
“yes, we had a pretty ‘interesting’ night”
and:
“no, I didn’t even think about the fact that we were locked out – I had my focus on other things...”.

I woke up with a minor hangover in Fredrik, Victor and Christians Bachelor attic – surprisingly light considering the amount of beer I had yesterday. The key problem still bugged me and I also remembered that we got a delivery from IKEA to meet up at 10 ó clock.
We tried to call for the manager guy but didn’t get through. No luck there and my mood started to drop.
The delivery guys from IKEA called and we had to sprint back home and meet them up. Unfortunately, and yes we did ask them, neither of them were any good at picking locks.

Still banned from a comfortable bed, a warm bath and a toothbrush we went to our Italian restaurant to get something to eat and to find a number to a locksmith at their included Wi-Fi. Finally we actually had some luck, if you can call paying 1800CZK (720SEK) luck that is, and got in touch with a locksmith that could help us in. The manager of the house called right after we got the locksmith but it wouldn’t matter much since he didn’t have any extra keys.

Our adventure finally came to an end and when you look in the mirror it was pretty obvious that it would’ve happened sooner or later and that the experiences only makes you wiser.The first thing I did when we came home was to remove the chain and the key in the second door and to sort out the keys.

I want to learn how to pick locks...

My neighbour

There's a cat living next door...
 ...and the real neighbours next door they smoke in the entrance to our apartment - the smoke get into our hall. I'll put up a sign to tick them off....

See the photo of the cat's latest visit here...

Dealing with things that doesn’t work, and things that does

I slowly began to wake up after a good night sleep and found myself covered in a bright white light. My window is right opposite to the wall where my bed is going to be (where my madras is at the moment) and that gave me a nice surprise.

 The sun entered my room as in a serene and graceful dance and an oasis of tranquillity settled in amidst the bustling city (hate to admit it but; thanks Apple and thanks Jackie for that expression). I don’t know if it’s the atmosphere, the season or just my windows but I’ve never experienced such a blue-ish white light emitted from the sun. It made me smile and infused me with the strength to get up and start the day.

My second surprise this morning was that Jeanine and Jackie were already up. Both of them had got wrong or too little parts in their IKEA delivery and had to call for a refund. We ate breakfast and while they went to IKEA to get the stuff right I took a walk around the University campus in order to find a wireless internet connection. I did and sat down on a bench outside the Faculty of Anatomy. My mission was to see if I could find the different internet providers in Czech Republic and to compare them.

As we all know internet providers as well as all mobile companies are almost always horrific when it comes to customer service and are often sneaky with their offers. I can ensure that CZ Rep. isn’t an exception to the rule. This I dare to say without even contacting them. All I found, in English, was a website that gathered the different providers and enabled customers to both rate and leave comments. The result was indeed horrific and I’m starting to wonder how I’m going to find a decent provider in Czech Republic when I had a major problem as it was in Sweden(?).

When I got back from my long walk, brimful of thai-takeaway from the place down the street, Jean and Jax were back ready to set the furniture together. Jeanine didn’t stay for long – her mum and her mum’s boyfriend are only staying until tomorrow so she went out with them to see a bit of the city while there’re still here. Jackie and I began dealing with the things that didn’t work; such as the dishwasher, the stove and the elements. The stove seemed to work but didn’t ignite so I looked for the gas tap and after a couple of minutes of searching under the sink I found the right one and the stove went up running really good.

Jackie got to be the best dishwasher technician out there. After filling the machine with 1kg of salt (had no idea you had to do that to new machines) and turning the tap under the sink we, or yeah mostly she, managed to get it to work. We also eliminated all the paper covers from the IKEA stuff – a bum would kill to get hold of all those boxes – and then we just crashed down in Jean’s sofa and had some beers that we recently bought: 12 Staropramen for 52 SEK á 0,5 litres – that my friends, is 9 SEK per litre!

Now I'm off to an Italian restaurant with free Wi-Fi in order to publish this - Cheers mates!

Raiding, rumble and refreshening

After I threw my pillow at the window in order to get rid of the sadistic pigeons (read yesterday’s post) I got up and prepared breakfast. Today Jackie and I planned to go to IKEA to get some stuff for her room and for common parts of the apartment. I’ve decided to wait until my parents get here to see what space i got left after bringing my stuff from back home.

Still, after almost 4 hours of IKEA raiding for epic loot, resulting in two trolleys brimful of stuff, it didn’t exceed 5600CZK. We settled some colour schemes for the bathroom and the kitchen as well for ourselves. I’ll go with a white/black and wooden look with forest green dots.

If everything goes as planned we’ll have a beach/ocean theme in the kitchen. Making plans for the flat is really funny – even though it’s also exhausting, I barely ate anything yesterday because of all the running around.

Jeanine’s furniture that she bought yesterday was delivered to the flat and she, her mum and her boyfriend did a lot of building – only to find out that one piece of the bed was missing which meant that Jeanine had to sleep on the floor for one more night.

But with a little piece of furniture the apartment starts to feel alive. It’s not just an empty shell anymore, a great empty shell as it is, but yet, comfy and a bit more inviting.

Now I’ll go to bed while Jeanine is still fixing with her stuff and Jackie is watching a movie also trying to sleep. I moved my madras into my room and with only my suitcase hand luggage it sure looks gigantic.

Space, spice and sirens!

I woke up pretty early on my blow up madras after a night of rather good sleep. After all this is the first time I sleep in the busy part of a big city – I’ll explain more down below.

Yesterday’s flight went surprisingly good, our flight Captain Linda took us both up and down safety. Flying with City Airlines was pretty much more convenient due to the fact that that’s the only company that have a direct flight from Gothenburg to Prague. I paid 1200SEK which is fairly good – “fairly” because I could’ve got the ticket for 800SEK if I’d booked it a month earlier.

I arrived at 2:20pm and went to grab my suitcase. Then I was about 10 minutes late and knew that Jackie was supposed to arrive at 2:00pm. Even if I was late Jackie’s flight got delayed almost 20 minutes and we found ourselves randomly looking at each other while we grabbed our luggage – now that saved us a ring.

We got into town to try to locate Jeanine who was waiting at a hotel, pretty close to the apartment, together with her mom and dad. They planned to go on a shopping spree at IKEA right away but first off we had to meet Jiri, our broker, at the office for contract signing and payments. So after a minor discussion we took a cab there, which was the right decision to make, both because the rain was pouring down on us and it only cost 136CZK which is approximately equal to 54SEK, hence our surprised faces when we saw the recite and Jeanine was planning on giving the cab driver a 2000CZK bill.

After almost 2 hours at the office – and for crying out loud don’t ask what took them so long, most of the time we just sat waiting for papers (I guess the copy machine, computers AND the printer was slow as hell) we finally signed the contract and handed over the first rent deposition of 36 360CZK. Quite a lot you might say, and yes indeed, counting up that amount in cash was rather odd, still this covered the first half month, the next rent as well as the so called “safety deposit” that we’ll get back in the end of the contract.

Jeanine went to IKEA to meet up with her parents while Jackie and I fetched the keys to the flat and took the tram there. After too long of a tram ride, due to heavy afternoon traffic and major construction work, we finally got off at what I thought was the right stop. By now we were starving and stopped on the way, by writing “on the way” take in consideration that Jackie thought we were lost and my awesome navigation powers brought us to a noodle bar, to have some noodles.

We also stopped to get some beer, for the take away noodles, and entered the flat. Gosh it’s empty – almost creepily empty. With no chairs to sit on we just crashed down on the floor in the kitchen, exhausted and starving, and began to eat the delicious but oh-so-hot-and-throat-burning noodles.

The rest of that evening we just sat there waiting for Jeanine to get back, drinking a couple of beer, chatting and listening to music – which echoed pretty sweet in the hollow acoustics of the empty flat.

Once Jeanine got back we began to clean the floor, the toilet and the bathroom from the construction dust left after the renovation. Then we crashed down, watched Grown Ups and went to “bed”.

Lipova 18 isn’t the best place for an untrained “city-sleeper” like me. The street outside is a pretty small one, but oh so busy. Since it’s just next to the biggest hospital complex of Prague the ambulances and emergency vehicles are dashing by at the street below and they haven’t exactly turned their sirens on silent mode. I guess we’ll get used to that and I must say that it’s kind of a good reminder of where I am and what I am about to do in the future as well contributes to the atmosphere of this neighbourhood (though, if people would get sick once every hour instead of once every tenth minute I’d sleep a lot better tomorrow).

And yeah, speaking of sleeping distractions, there’s two pigeons cultivating the art of bird intercourse right outside the window, smashing their nibs and wingtips at the glass 7:40am...

Emigration

Today's the day. The day I spread my wings and lift off the ground. Wish I could take all of you with me, but hey, missing people and missing habits just makes them more wonderful once they return.

"Wherever we've travelled in this great land of ours, we've found that people everywhere are about 90% water" - David Letterman

Cleaning up and packing my stuff

The one way flight to Prague is just around the corner so today I began to pack my stuff.

The limit of 20 kilos + regular size hand baggage makes things a bit difficult but thanks to my parents, who's coming down by car next week, I'll be able to bring almost everything. They're going to bring my wardrobe, some basic furnitures and my electronics as well as tools for setting up the apartment.
  In order to survive in a completely empty flat the first week I'll bring a blow up madras, a set of clothes - you know, the necessary gear - thou, I bet we'll go on a shopping spree right away.

Yesterday's night out at Henriksberg in Gothenburg, where 047 played live, was amazing! Good friends all over the place, great music and rather interesting conversations just made my last party night in Sweden (at least for a while) worth a spot in the memory box.

I also just found out that Sam Tsui and Kurt Schneider just released (a downloadable) mashup of song. I usually don't listen to stuff like this but with Tsui doing the vocals, it can't be bad... Check it out:

A Breif Summary

Now where shall I begin...
A lot happened since the last time I wrote so let’s just begin in a chronological manner, shall we?

Right after I passed the test in Stockholm and got accepted to the first faculty of Charles University in Prague we had a major graduation party. We celebrated all night long and the day after that, with a head heavier than one of the great rocks of the Stonehenge, I began my trip back home to my parents house.
One good thing often brings a bad thing with it – so it seems. Me and Caroline decided to walk separated paths. The fact of me leaving and spending so much time away finally wore us down. Sad as it is, we get along really well and in this very instant as I write this summary I’m actually travelling to her place in Finspång to see her before I leave Sweden.
With that said I can continue with the story. The (new) Harbour Captain down at the docks wanted me to work for yet another summer and I gladly accepted. I spent a great deal of time there but with all the perks, such as meeting new people, speaking both English and German as well as being out in the sun all day long, the time summer seems to fly by in an instant.
Simultaneously along with work, sunbathing, scuba diving, cold beer, BBQ and jet ski madness, I slowly began to plan the autumn and the continuation of my upcoming adventure – and believe me – there are a great number of things needed to be sorted out. Of course you can just leave things to chance and hope the problems get solved once they appear but hey, that’s not how I do things.
I believe that being properly prepared and thoroughly “self-scheduled” saves you a great deal of effort, stress and energy as well as time and money. I, Jackie and Jeanine already had plans to move in together in Prague.

Jackie and her fiancé Kristian was about to make a Eurotrip through Germany, Czech Republic and Poland with a planned stop in Prague. I booked a flight to Prague via Frankfurt in order to join them and look for apartments. During the first day, alone as I was waiting for Jackie and Kristian, I roamed the streets of Prague and was absolutely amazed by the old buildings with its facades and gargoyles as well as its radiation of almost ancient atmosphere. Just take a look at this building that in fact is the Centre of Gynaecology of the 1st Faculty.

Here's a bunch of other photos I took. Enjoy!

Worth mentioning is that this was my first visit in Prague and after some trouble I managed to get a pretty good grip of the city map. The public transportations are also really smooth, the tram runs at all time and with short intervals.
The trip lasted for about a week, unfortunately Jeanine was busy working back home in Oslo, but with her assurance and belief in us finding the right place to live we managed to find a flat – and not just any flat – probably the best flat in Prague. Cheers to that!

Our criteria were absolute; three separate bedrooms, good location to the school and centre along with a nice and comfy first impression.

Of the ten apartments we found at the Czech website homesweethome[dot]cz we were shown four different apartments around Prague that was available by a broker, that in fact was a really nice chap. Saying the others weren’t available is a lie, it seemed as if the landlords and landladies of some of the apartments, which would suit us really good, had bad experiences with students in the past hence the low number of flats “available” for us.

The one we decided to rent was a really bright and spacious flat close to 100sqm. It was recently completely renovated and the layout was really great – maybe not fantastic by itself – but rather so, compared with the other apartments we were shown.

The rent is 18000CZK which is pretty close to 7800SEK. Divided among the three of us we’ll pay a monthly rent of 2800SEK each which I guess is really good for a flat this spacious.
Though, it’s unfurnished, compared to the other apartments that we looked at, the location of this one is just splendid. It’s actually on the same street as the University reception. Since it’s so close to other areas such as the campus, the gym and even the centre of old Prague we can save a lot of time that we otherwise had to spend on the go. Instead that precious time can be used for studying.

I really do believe that this is going to be quite an adventure – an adventure that I’m looking forward to accomplish, so make sure to stay tuned...