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Core course week (and other fun things!)

September 30, 2022

Hello! So sorry! I’ve been busy. Lots of traveling, lots of class, little bit of work :D.

The week of Monday, 9/12 was Core Course week for my Sustainable Environments in Scandinavia class. During this week, we traveled to southern Sweden (by train) for 3 days to visit the cities of Lund and Malmö, learning about numerous bits of sustainable infrastructure including a prototype electric road, a wastewater treatment plant, and a district heating/cooling plant.

Lund!

Lund is the home of Lund University, one of the largest universities in Northern Europe with over 33,000 undergraduate students. Lund definitely felt like a college town, with tons of beautiful stone buildings and mossy cobblestone streets. Quite small, quite cozy, definitely the kind of place that I’d want to live when I’m an empty nester in my 50s/60s.

DIS covered some of our meals on this trip, including an absolutely phenomenal dinner at a crepe place the first day that we got there. Literally one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever had. Seriously.

Malmö

We also spent a day exploring Malmö, which was about 20 minutes further south by train from Lund (in the direction of Copenhagen!). While Lund was cute and old and cozy, Malmö was incredibly new and modern and sustainable and felt like a completely different world. It was definitely the newest and most modern city I’d ever been in, with so many fascinating housing developments which we learned about as we were lead around on a “sustainability tour”. As we later learned, much of the part of the city that we were exploring was built on reclaimed land, which would explain the modernity of it.

Copenhagen

Malmö is actually close enough to Copenhagen that we could see it from the shoreline, so I knew I had to check it out since I was so close! Tickets were only $10 dollars each way and it took roughly 30 minutes to get there – well worth it! I didn’t want to invest in a public transit pass so I only walked around the city, but it was a fun time! Phone battery was dwindling and I was worried about it dying while I was literally a country away from my hotel so I didn’t stay super long, but I’m happy with what I saw.

I saw more bikers in Copenhagen than I have anywhere else in Europe which was super cool, but I wish that I’d had one so I could see more of the city… I got traditional Danish smørrebrød for dinner per a recommendation from a friend doing DIS Copenhagen, which was interesting. Painfully expensive, but hey, it’s about the experience.

I ate my dinner in a cute park surrounding a small castle (which I didn’t realize was housing the crown jewels, which would explain the armed guards patrolling), and then headed for home!

We left for Stockholm Wednesday evening, where we then spent our final two days doing more study tours in the city and giving a culminating presentation about what we’d learned over the course of the week. Great experience.

Half Marathon

On the Saturday of this week, the time had come for the Stockholm Half Marathon! I had signed up to run it with a friend from my building (who will likely be making frequent appearances on this blog) who is also an avid runner, and it was such a cool experience! There were over 10,000 participants which made this run the largest continuous sporting event I’d ever participated in (while the Birkie technically has more overall participants in the entire weekend, this was a single race). The course snaked through some of the main city areas and many of the larger islands, and it was oh so much fun!

I managed to hit a new PB of 1:33:40 which was amazing, and Eva also did incredibly well despite being remarkably sick morning-of. Some of our friends from our building also came out to cheer, which made the experience all that much better.

Örebro

Literally as soon as I crossed the finish line of the race, Spencer Anish and I had to hurry home in order to make it to the train station that evening! My friend Niklas’s dad has a summer cabin outside Örebro, a city roughly 2 hours train ride straight west of Stockholm. Here we were treated to an absolutely delightful 24 hours of wine and cheese, outdoor padel, moose meatballs, hanging out on a boat, Kubb, and beer tasting!

This weekend was one of the best that I’ve had yet, and I’m so incredibly thankful that Niklas’s dad was willing to be such a gracious host for us. On to the next adventure!