Now it’s the day before Midsommar and I’m going to celebrate Midsommar in the mountains in the far north of Sweden together with Sofia and Johan. We are leaving with the overnight train to Kiruna later today, and are going hiking around Kebnekaise, the highest moundtain (2104 m, so not really that high) in Sweden, for about 6 days. If the weather is good and there’s not too much snow, we will probably try to climb it. It will definitely be a lot of fun and hopefully we can manage to get some really nice photographs.

It’s interesting that in Swedish, the swedish (and norwegian) mountains are called “fjäll” and not “berg” that is the normal word for “mountain”. To my knowledge, these are the only mountains called “fjäll”, but I have no idea why. I will find out.

Autumn colours in a maple tree.

So I’ve been back in Sweden for about 2 weeks now. I would have thought it would feel a bit strange, but it feels just the way it did before I left for Japan. It’s kind of nice to have gotten rid of all the people, never ending train riding and all the noise. Tokyo can be a very tiring place.

Not very much has happened since I got back, but some things have. I don’t have access to my new apartment in Linköping yet, so I’ve been staying on the sofa of my friend Daniel for two weeks now. Very nice of him to put up with having me for such a long time. Nothing bad about his sofa, but I really want to get into my new place. Just a few more days now (I’ll get the keys on Wednesday).

Other than that I’ve been pretty busy catching up with the three weeks of work I missed in school when I couldn’t get a plane ticket back in time for the start of the semester. It’s not too much work, but there are some labs that take some time to complete.

Also this week I got my credits from Japan transferred. Yay! I got all of the courses I took in Japan transferred and they amounted up to 62.5 Swedish credits (60 credits is a year of studies), so I’m happy with that. It also means that I can continue to get student aid, which I really need since I spent all my money in Japan.

Finally I have another photo from an autumny Sweden. Apples. This week has seen great weather with temperatures of up to 17 degrees I believe. Last week was not so good, 10-12 degrees. It’s nice to not have to sweat so much when you go outside, Tokyo was so hot and humid in the summer. When I left, it was 29 degrees. Quite a difference.

Apples basking in the morning sun.

Last night we had a sort of going away party for me, but as always I was late at inviting people, so not many people came. For the after party we met up with Antti (he was having the same kind of party) and stayed out all night in Shibuya. However, we didn’t go to any club or anything, instead we did something very un-Japanese. We sat down on the street and drank and talked all night until the first trains started running again. It was good fun.

Anyway, I have done a lot of things since my last post and I will start to do some back-posting soon. I’m also gonna update the look of this blog, the theme is nice, but it doesn’t really fit with my content. Also, there have been many new releases of the blogging platform, so I should upgrade.

I also got a good shot of the Umegaoka sky line.

Takao-san is only about 600 meters high and is probably the most crowded mountain in Japan. We took the toughest, steep course up, but even then we had to queue almost all the way up. I brought my GPS logger, but I forgot to turn it on until we had actually climbed Takao and were continuing on to another mountain. Here is a map of our route from that point anyway:

View Larger Map

After Takao-san and Shiroyama, we hiked down to Sagamiko lake. It was a nice place, but it was getting dark and the weather was turning worse.

It was a good day. Afterwards I was really tired, so I went home and then me, Kasimir and Nobuya went to a super sento for a hot bath. I slept like a baby that night, until ten o’clock Monday morning.

A few days ago one of the Korean guys was cooking some food in the middle of the night (around 1.30 maybe) and managed to burn it so bad that the fire alarm went off, waking everyone in the dorm up. He was a bit embarrassed afterwards… lol.

The other week we also had a party on the roof. It was Chris’ birthday so we also had some fireworks. Apparently it was too much for the neighbouring people since the police came and told us to be quiet. Now they have Viktor’s telephone number. Denton made a film of the party. Apparently, they started really early. I came later so I’m not in it, and there’s no footage of the police because Denton ran away from them.

In the real world, I had my first presentation at the lab seminar this Monday. Of course, since I wasn’t nearly finished with my thing, it was just crap. Me being tired, having a headache and not having had any lunch (the presentation was at 18.30) might also have had something to do with the crapiness of it.

Saturday I went drinking with some Japanese friends that were on exchange in Linköping a few years ago. They all work now, but they brought some students from their old uni who are going on exchange to Linköping in August, so that was a lot of fun. Hopefully, we’ll have some more time to hang out back in Sweden. It feels like it’s a lot easier to make new Japanese friends in Sweden than here in Japan, since they’re a lot more open when they’re over there. Here, people are just so busy all the time.

I spent my Saturday with Natsu. We were going to visit her family in the afternoon, but before that, we managed to do some shopping. Her family (mother, father and younger sister) lives all the way out in Tokorozawa in Saitama. It’s about 45 minutes west-northwest of Ikebukuro, which means it’s about two hours away from my place - good thing Natsu lives just 10 min away from Ikebukuro. Close by their place there is a factory outlet mall, so we decided to go there for some shopping before continuing on to her family’s place.

Since we both are going to climb Fuji-san, we needed some good shoes, so that was our main priority and that’s about what we had time for. I managed to find a pair of shoes that fit my big feet so I was happy. They seem to be quite nice shoes, made from leather and with calf skin lining and was 23,000 yen (about SEK 1,400), which isn’t too expensive I think. I am thinking about doing some more mountain climbing when I have some free time in August, as well as later back home in Sweden. Hopefully these boots will carry me for a while.

Dinner was good. We had temaki-sushi which means something like “roll in your hand sushi”. As usual when the Japanese have guests over for dinner, there was an abundance of food and we couldn’t finish it all. She has nice and relaxed parents and it was nice to meet her sister.

When we went back to Tokyo, I joined my exchange student friends for clubbing until morning in Shibuya. The weather was terrible.

This was also an excellent opportunity for me to try out my new toy. I bought an GPS logger about a week ago. What it does is that it logs the position every x (according to the settings) seconds by GPS sattelites. Later, I can download this data to my computer and correlate the times with my digital photos to geotag them, or visualise a route onto a map so I can see where I have been. For example, this is how we got around Enoshima:

View Larger Map

Of course, the data is dependent on the signal strength for accuracy and as you can see it’s not always very accurate, but it’s good enough to get a general picture. Especially if you are staying in the same place for a while there seem to be some discrepancies, and it might also be true when being around tall buildings, but that’s just my initial observation. I geotagged the photos in my computer too, but apparently my software doesn’t support this when uploading to Flickr, so if you look at my map on Flickr, they won’t show up. I’ll have to put in a request for that feature in Digikam.

On this hill, at Lovers’ Bell, with a view out over the never ending Pacific Ocean, people come from all over to seal their love with a lock in the fence. There are literally thousands of them. Some of them are so old that they’ve fallen down and that’s a little bit depressing.

The Japanese claim to love nature and live in harmony with it. I highly doubt that. Here’s a bridge to a cave, so that they don’t have to walk on the actual nature. Looks so funny, but I suppose it is so that they can reach the cave even during high tide.

The rainy season is here now. Good thing I have so much to do at the lab that I hardly notice it, except the humidity. You can’t escape that anywhere. I haven’t really done much lately outside of the lab and the weekends are usually spent with my girlfriend. Oh yeah, in the beginning of May (yes I know it’s over a month ago) the Japanese have some consecutive holidays, so we went to Mie-ken, a prefecture to the south of Nagoya. It’s a nice and pretty quiet place in the country side famous for their good seafood, especially oysters and a lobster they call ise-ebi. I have some photos from there that I will upload later. I took them with a film camera, but the quality of the scans are not very good in normal stores. I don’t understand why they can’t just scan them at a higher resolution than 300 dpi. If anyone knows a place where you can get scans good for large printing, do tell!

The Euro 2008 has started too. They only show a few of the matches at the TV in the dorm, so I have to go to bars to watch the other ones. I stayed out all night in Roppongi to watch Sweden’s first match against Greece. Good result, but Spain will be harder. Spain played a great game against Russia. I’m not used to seeing Russians, but I think that was the most Russians I’ve ever seen in the same place. Lots of tall slim girls. Rumour has it they were models, but what do I know, I just wanted to see the matches.

Hopefully there won’t be such a long delay until my next post. Take care!