A broken computer

I have no idea what happened, the screen just didn’t want to cooperate so I had to send it in to the shop to get it fixed. Unfortunately they couldn’t recreated the faults so they just kept it for three days and now I have it back, all fixed (except lots of virus or something, but I can’t install Windows 10 yet, I have to wait a few days or weeks….).

I haven’t updated since Marseille, so I can first tell you about my last day there. It was beautiful weather, we got up early in the morning to spend three hours by the ocean, catching the last rays of sun. We sat by the cliffs by the entrance to the harbor and the water was so warm and nice. Then we spent three hours at the airport and I slept most of the way home.

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And since then I have worked four days, three extremely long days so those four days summed up to a full normal work week. I was exhausted. Right after work on Sunday I went to the preparty to the last Bunny Party of the year. I didn’t drink anything, but had a great time with my colleagues anyway. I didn’t stay too late since I had a German test the day after.

IMG_20150814_142008 In one of the gondolas at Lisebergshjulet.IMG_20150814_204059The sunsets behind Lisebergshjulet can be really really beautiful!

At 1pm on Monday I had the German test. I was prepared to spend at least two hours on it, but I was done after 40 minutes. It was a diagnostic test to see if I was good enough to get accepted to the German course at Gothenburg University. I don’t have any grades from Sweden and they didn’t think I had taken enough in the US. Honestly, the test didn’t go that well. Mostly because my vocabulary isn’t big enough. I was really good at the grammar part, but the words failed me. We will see. If I don’t get accepted there I can always take the English course or just stick with the Solar Systems course I also got accepted to.

Jesper and I sat down by the canal in downtown and had ice cream in the beautiful summer weather. At 4pm we borrowed mom’s car and drove out to Gråbo where we drove to his friend and swam in a lake for a while before going to his mom and had dinner with all of his siblings. It was a nice evening. The lake was 22C and it was so nice. We played games in the evening and it was just nice.

IMG_20150817_185642A small Swedish lake in the woods outside of Gothenburg.

On Tuesday Berget had its annual Crawfish party. I had half a bottle of wine before realizing for sure this time that alcohol is not for me anymore. I just can’t drink it. But I had fun anyway. I left pretty early once again because I had a job interview at 9 am the morning after. On the way home I stopped by Nordstan to hang out with Jesper for an hour, he was working night as a security guard there.

IMG_20150818_191718Crawfish party with the best people!

So yesterday I didn’t know what to expect. I had been in contact with this lady for a while, and she asked me to stop by. Not saying if it was an interview or not. But once I got there it was oretty much just to meet and talk and book a course in working at a cash register and book two introduction days for next week. So from now on I have two jobs, one as an attraction operator at Liseberg and one as a Receptionist at Gothenburg’s Sports utilities.

After that meeting I went home to Jesper and went back to bed. He just got home from his night shift so we slept until 2pm and then went out to pick up my computer, eat lunch/early dinner and then the whole evening we sat and tried to figure out what we are gonna do. Our plan A is to move to California next fall to go to school. But if that doesn’t work out we will probably try to do something here. We will see. We are gonna look more at it tonight.

 

Now I am going to work, only 6 hours today, that will be chill in this beautiful summer weather! I hope this will last so Kelsey will see how nice the Swedish summer can be! I am seriously so excited for her to get here on August 31!!!

Study at the library

This post used to contain pictures, but due to new storage limitations from WordPress, I had to fix the problem and decided to create a new blog that works as an archive for all the posts from my two years in California. This full post can be found here.

I don’t know if you guys know this, but I am not very fond of the library. I don’t know why, but I guess I like my own room better even if there are more distractions here. But today I had too much that needed to be done so I spent four hours there with Matt. I actually got a lot of stuff done. First I looked at what my partner had written for the report that is due tomorrow afternoon. It looked good, so I finished the reading for the Urban Planning quiz (we have one quiz before every class (twice a week)) and then did the quiz. 97%, not too bad. Then I wrote down ten German verbs and conjugated all of them. We have a quiz tomorrow on the prepositions and ten verbs. I hope that will go well. I feel like I know it all, but I am not good at forming sentences. Cross your fingers for me!

At 11 I felt that I was done, so I went out in the cold and headed home. Here I have watched funny cat videos and put together several different potential schedules for next quarter. I am waiting for responses from several people about different classes. But I have all my options saved so when February 10th comes, I will be ready to enroll. I am hoping for CRP 214 – Land Use and Transportation Studies, ENVE 331 – Introduction to Environmental Engineering, GER 103 – Elementary German III, and CRP 409 – Planning Internship. I am also considering KINE 181 – First Aid/CPR/AED on top of all of those to renew my certification. But I am not sure about that yet (it is two extra hours every week). The Environmental Planning Methods that I wanted to take only covers the California laws when it comes to planning, so it might not benefit be at all if I don’t end up here. And that one was also early mornings and 4 hours each time, so I want to take the Land Use class instead. Better times and seems better suited for me no matter where I end up. I hope I can take the Environmental Engineering class too, but that is completely up to my advisor at Chalmers. I think that environmental engineering is definitely good for all types of engineers. But I am patiently waiting for my advisor’s email reply. If it is not okay, then I will just take a class called CE 421 – Traffic Engineering and have three out of five very early mornings, and also have class on Friday’s. Let’s cross all your fingers again for this NOT to happen! I also want to take the Planning Internship class which will give me at least 60 hours of work experience in planning, and also 2 units to my transcript. But it might be too late to find a company to work for even if I got a thumbs-up from my advisors here at Cal Poly regarding my visa status. If I get that internship, it could be my way in to stay permanently in California. But if I don’t, it just means that I have to contact companies directly and apply for a real job directly instead. Probably more work, but since I really want this, I am ready to put the effort into it.

I’ve been very productive today, and I will end this long day with the latest episode of The Flash and then prepare for a long long day tomorrow (Thursday’s are the worst, 6 hours of consecutive lectures, no breaks, and all in different parts of campus of course).

German quiz 2 This is my German quiz #2. Don’t mind all the errors. But read the questions. My German teacher is the best! Today in class he had brought a light saber and a sonic screwdriver, he also went on an on about a guy’s feral cat invasion in his house and joked about it. I have never laughed in class as much as I do in his class (he is a good teacher too and teach us so much). Heil Edler Graf von Anderson!California sunsetI can’t get enough of beautiful sunsets and they seem to be endless here. I love it! They make me happy.

Week 2 = studying?

Today has been all about studying. And I wonder why, this is beginning of week 2, there shouldn’t be anything to study this early! I have seriously been studying non-stop since I got out of class today at 3pm and I just stopped. I took an hour break when I had dinner, but that was it. I had stuff to do in all of my three classes, I had a lot of reading (which took like two hours today since I was super tired and couldn’t really focus) and a quiz which I then summarized in my “questions” document in Urban Planning. Then I had a huge German homework where I first conjugated ten verbs and then tried to find ten sentences on Bild.de and change them into both future tense and past tense. Toby (my German friend who is super bored right now and helps me correct my homeworks) told me that was a very difficult homework. It took a long time too. In the middle of it we were forced to take a break because the stupid fire alarm went off. I never saw any notes in the building about a drill, but when we got out, the police officer told us about important stuff when the alarm goes off and no fire truck came. This fire alarm is the worst ever, it is super loud and actually hurts my ears.

I had mushroom soup for dinner and watched an episode of The 100 and then started working on my Public Transportation presentation/report. I wrote a whole page, which is basically all I have to do. Tomorrow I am meeting up with one of my group members to go through our part of the presentation which is the future of San Diego’s public transit. It’s pretty interesting.

Even if I am not super into going to school, being here at Cal Poly is really something I needed. I see connections in all my classes here (maybe not German). I never did that in Sweden so this last year actually feels meaningful. And it is a bit funny that the one class I like most is the one not counting towards my major, the German class. I really like it and I already feel like I know more than I did a week ago. This week we’ve been learning about the past and the future, I have never learned that before. Progress!