One thing I forgot to tell you guys about Week 3, was that we didn’t go to work on Friday. It was midsummer weekend (midsummer being on Saturday), a nationwide celebration here in Sweden. As I have learned through conversations with Swedish natives, midsummer is a celebration of the fertility summer brings. On Midsummer, it is a tradition to have a gathering around a maypole that is raised in honor of the celebration. Afterwards, people would make circles around the maypole and dance to the “little frog” song or Små grodorna. I wish I was there to observe it, but as a group, we decided to take advantage of the long weekend and go to Copenhagen.
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(picture credit: Carolina Romare/imagebank.sweden.se)
On Saturday morning we hopped on a bus early in the morning and left for Copenhagen. It was a pretty long bus ride, and I am glad I was able to squeeze a nap in. We arrived at around noon and walked to our hostel. Along the way, we stopped at an Indian restaurant to grab lunch. I had lamb curry and it was really good even though it was a little spicy. Once we checked in at the hosel, we left to explore the city. We walked to Christiana, freetown in the middle of Copenhagen. I didn’t quite know what it was at first; I thought that it was like a skatepark of some sort. But as we wandered in more and more, I came to the realization that Christiana was actually the underground market for Cannabis. Moments later, there was a raid by the police, and POOF all the sellers were gone in a matter of seconds. With the police all around, we left Christiana and wandered around the city.
I find Copenhagen to be a very beautiful city with a body of water resembling a river running through the center of it, and canals dispersed throughout. In that sense, it is very similar to Bangkok, my hometown.
Soon, it was time for dinner. Scott’s O-Week mom suggested we go to Reffen, a street food market by the water. I was not disappointed. The place was filled with some of the best street food from around the world: Mexican, Singaporian, Thai, American, Italian, you name it. Because I kinda miss Thai food at the time, I went for the pad thai. It was on par with some of the best pad thais I have ever had. I, was happy.
That night, some of us went clubbing late into the night, but I chose to sleep early so that I could wake up in the morning and see what Copenhagen was like at sunrise. Boy was it beautiful! I think the picture can speak for itself.
Later that day we took the bus back to Gothenburg. Because we arrived quite late, I had to rush to do my Week 3 blog, and try to get as much sleep as possible, which was still not enough as it turned out.
The next few days were really tough. We are asked to wake up at 6am every morning, then work a very physically demanding job all day, then go back at around 7pm, then cook dinner, eat dinner, shower, take classes from 8:30-10pm, do some homework, and by the time we are done, it was already midnight and I could manage 6 hours of sleep max when I am used to sleeping 10:30hr per night. We did this days and days on end. It was one of the most physically and mentally exhausting things I have ever experienced in my life. It left me on the verge of a mental breakdown Thursday evening. Without the safety net of a support system like the RCC because we are not on campus, it could have gone horribly wrong as you might have imagined. This is something that really has to change if there were to be future iterations of this program.
I know in a few months, I know I will have forgotten about these bad aspects and only remember the good ones. Hence, I have to put my struggles out there in writing, hoping that no one else will have to experience what I had to go through.
Fast forward, it is now Friday afternoon and we are about to wrap up iSEED 2019, but all I could think about was the sleep I was about to get that night. The strain we had to endure throughout the whole week ruined what would have been a beautiful moment. I wish it wasn’t like this, but it is the way it is unfortunately…