Desert Safari and kitten

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 travels. This full post can be found here.

Our last day in Dubai was amazing and was over so fast. We started the day at Kite Beach. It was a beautiful and warm day, we spent some time in the water and it was just awesome! We got back to the hotel at 1pm and we actually had time to take a taxi to Deira City Center and crossed our fingers that that Max hadn’t closed down as well. And it hadn’t. We ordered a normal Frisco meal with fries. They said they had Crispy Fries but it was not the same as in Sweden. The Burger wasn’t the same either. But it was still worth it.

We got back to the hotel and had time to pack everything before we got picked up for the desert safari. A humongous Toyota Land Cruiser. It was the two of us and another Indian family of four. The first stop was at a Dune Buggy place, it wasn’t included in the package and none of us went. Then we went straight out in the desert, the road just ended and there were so many cars! We all went in a long line and it was a bumpy ride. I guess I should have known, but I was surprised at how bumpy it was, I felt sick. We then stopped for some pictures in the desert, the sun was setting and it was beautiful. It was windy and we had sand everywhere, but it was nice. We then took normal roads (and at the end in the dunes) to reach a camp that was set up in the desert. It looked like a small small circular city where there were small stalls where we could pick up starters, coffe, tea, sodas and then later a buffet table. The food was okay and I guess the closest to the Arabian culture. We sat on pillows on the ground and in the middle of the whole camp was a stage where people danced. Right outside of the camp there were two camels that we could ride as well. That was scary, especially when it rose and lied down.

We got back to the hotel at around 9:30 pm and the taxi came and picked us up at 11pm to go to the airport. The flight would take off at 2 am, but it was delayed and we didn’t take off until 3am. And also because of winds the plane had to take a detour over Poland and make a landing to refuel. And that meant that we lost a lot of time and therefore missed our connection flight in Stockholm. We landed when it took off at 8:30am. The next Norwegian flight that we didn’t have to pay anything for was at 5:45 pm. We could book with SAS, but that would have been expensive, so we stayed at the airport the whole day instead of being home with Cleo and chilling. In total we stayed up for 40 hours with a few hours of bad sleep in the plane from Dubai to Stockholm. It was brutal. I am still tired, even if I got a good amount of sleep last night. I guess it can also be because I spent two hours this morning playing beach volleyball. We were only 4 people there so it was a lot of practice time. I was dead afterward.

I am still not 100% recovered, but I have a full day of just doing nothing at home tomorrow which is good, but then on Monday, school starts again.

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Today was a big day. After practice I met up with Jesper downtown and we picked up the scratch map we left for framing before we left, we then bought a frame for the pictures we bought in Dubai, and our last stop was Webhallen where I bought a new eReader. My old one was drenched when my water bottle leaked last Thursday on my way to practice. Too bad, that was a good eReader and they are not sold anymore. So instead of a Sony, I now have a Kobo Glo HD which has light in the screen which is a huge plus! It actually seems like a really cool eReader and much more complex than my old one. I think I will like it.

And then we made an even bigger purchase, we got Cleo a Friend! He looks almost exactly like her, but he is fluffier and a boy and 1.5 months younger. He is adorable, and didn’t complain at all when we drove him home. He was curious and then fell asleep. When we got home Cleo was super curious about this new little guy. But she is very rough with him, playing all the time, refusing to leave him alone and he is much smaller than she and can’t defend himself. I guess she is making sure that he knows that she is in charge here, but she is kinda overdoing it. I know that she is very playful, but I hope she will calm down and not be so rough with him, he is just a baby! But I guess in a month or so he will be as big and will be able to hit her back. They have slept together twice, but as soon as nap time is over they are fighting again. I really hope this will calm down soon and that Cleo won’t hate us because we brought a smaller cat here. All of last week she was with mom and her two cats and apparently she was all over them there. She would never leave the two oldies alone so we thought a friend for her at home would be nice too. But I don’t think she realizes that the cat she played with most at mom’s was 8kg, while she was only 1.7kg and this new one can’t be more than 1.2kg. We will let the small one sleep with us tonight with a closed door and Cleo on her climbing tree and hope she will behave better tomorrow.

We don’t have a name yet, so if you have any suggestions for a fluffy red boy, let me know.

IMG_20160123_084335 It is so beautiful in Gothenburg right now! It is kinda sad that we missed this last week when it was this much snow. Unfortunately tomorrow it will be above freezing and therefore everything will melt…IMG_20160123_202715 IMG_20160123_154332 On our way to Orust through Winter Wonderland to get our new family member.20160123_160720 And here he is!IMG_20160123_161427 20160123_171819 IMG_20160123_172848 At first she followed him around like an extra tail.IMG_20160123_173506 IMG_20160123_182218 IMG_20160123_182238 IMG_20160123_182938 And then she started to get rough and play with him.IMG_20160123_192222 IMG_20160123_204006 IMG_20160123_200624 One nap was okay and they were like siblings lying there. And then there was some more fighting…IMG_20160123_212153 And another nap, closer this time! And then some more fighting.20160123_224346And lastly before they went their seperate ways to sleep in different locations, Cleo washed him. Cute! I think this will work out, we just have to give them time (especially for him to grow more).

Graduation

Today is the day when I finally, after a very long time, finished school. For the past five years my occupation has been student, as of 2:15pm today, I am unemployed. Two years at Chalmers, two years break, and one year at Cal Poly. It’s crazy. I postponed my graduation day by moving to San Diego for a year to work as an au pair, I didn’t feel like I was ready to start being an adult with a full time job, and I still don’t honestly. But here I am, a supposed-to-be-adult. It feels great, even if I am not sure what I want to do, it feels so good to be free and have a whole new phase of my life ahead of me. It’s exciting and I look forward to see what my future brings me. If everything goes according to my dream plans, I will spend the next six months in Sweden, working at Liseberg and study German at Gothenburg University for a semester, celebrate Christmas back home with family for the first time since 2012, and then move to Australia for an undetermined amount of time and then travel around in Southeast Asia for a bit. If all of this happen, I won’t be too sad about leaving California. But I will. Today is my last day in San Luis Obispo. I would have liked to have a whole weekend here without anything to worry about, but at the same time, everyone is so stressed about finals and packing. And it wouldn’t be fun to miss the weekend in San Diego.

So today I had two finals. First Digital Cities, a very easy one. The second one, Land Use and Transportation Studies wasn’t as easy but I answered all the questions and will definitely pass, probably get a B even. Now I just finished laundry so I guess I will have to pack those “clean” clothes in my suitcases and be completely done with all of that tonight so I can just leave tomorrow morning.

The rest of this week has been crazy. I had the German final on Monday which was very hard, but it was only a small portion of our grade, so it wasn’t too bad and I still got an A, so that’s good. I found out that I was on the Dean’s List last quarter. You are on the Dean’s List when you have a GPA of 3.5 (max is 4) or higher. I feel proud of myself honestly! I went to TRX Monday and Tuesday as usual, and just because it was the last week, the instructor Sophie tried to kill us. Monday was Filthy Fifty. Ten different exercises, 50 repetitions of each. We ended with 50 burpees and I thought I was gonna die. I have been so sore and it just got worse after Wednesday. I walk like an old lady right now, haha. On Wednesday we did something similar, but we rotated more. Six different pairs of exercises and switched between the two until you were done with the 30 repetitions (first five, then ten, then fifteen). Then you moved on to the next pair and did that for the whole workout session. Kinda a little bit like Dirty Thirty. I didn’t have time for the last 15 back lunges with a medicine ball. But I wasn’t too sad about that. Sophie was so funny with the medicine balls, we had to run around with them to the different stations, she called the balls our babies, we could never leave them behind, never. And if we did we had to do five burpees, we could also not switch babies. Haha. She’s funny!

I think I need to get back to packing before people start coming over to say goodbye.

It feels kinda unreal, am I really done with college?

The Princess Bride

I have overcome my fear and watched this movie for the first time since I was like 8. At that time I had crazy and horrible nightmares about this movie, the Rodents of Unusual Size especially. Can’t really say that I remembered anything else. But today, 15 years later, I saw it again. I’ve been meaning to for a very long time, but we are watching it in German right now, without subtitles and I can’t understand it, so I watched it tonight in English so I hopefully will understand more tomorrow.

Nothing really has happened since last time I updated, which was, wow, a week ago. I apologize. The weather last week was bad, not more than 15C and cloudy and I didn’t really have anything I could do. Not too much in school, so most nights I played a lot of Guild Wars 2. I kinda just wanna go home now, and have been withdrawing from my friends. I don’t know why, it would make more sense that I would wanna hang out with them as much as possible. But everyone is so stressed out about deadweek (this week) and finals week next week. Everyone will relax and leave when I am leaving. It is a weird thing leaving a place after a long time. I know that I only have 11 more days here in SLO, but having a set date when I am leaving and know that I have a lot to do before then just makes me wanna skip that hard part with packing, preparing for departure and saying goodbye to friends. Also, I am not super happy about my living situation, but I won’t go into details about that. It has been hard having roommates, and I am happy to go back to not have that. And living with mom is not gonna be the same. I know that it is nice living with her.

This weekend was sunny and really nice for the first time in a very long time! It was about 24C and sunny three days in a row. On Friday I was at the pool with Aidan for many hours. I spent all of Saturday at Avila Beach. I spent the whole time studying and preparing for the presentation I have either tomorrow or Thursday. Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon at the pool reading. I have come a long way in Sea of Sorrows (the third Guild Wars book). All of them were really good!

Today beachvolleyball was canceled but I went to TRX and that almost killed me. I don’t know if it was because I didn’t work out at all last week, it was hot today, or because I just finished taking antibiotics. It wasn’t that hard of a workout, so I don’t know what happened, but I saw stars after and almost passed out. Scary.

An hour break before German where we watched the first 30 minutes of Die Braut des Prinzen.

I went home after that, took a shower and then went back to campus to let Rosie take portrait pictures of me in the studio. Judging from the camera screen they turned out really well. The black background, my blond hair, tan skin. It all looked very good! I am very excited to see the final results this weekend. When I was leaving the studio there were a couple of guys there who started talking to us. They were lab technicians, and one of them saw the video of me and said when I came out that he recognized me and told me what an interesting person I am and so on. Haha, I am famous! So on Wednesday I am gonna hang out with Rosie in the studio and talk to this man who wants to know more about my fascinating life. Haha!

The last thing I wanna write tonight, is that when did it become June 1st?? It is June today. CRAZY!

César Chávez Day

I have never heard of this dude, but he was apparently a civil rights activist among farm workers. And because of this, we didn’t have any classes today. It was perfect with 20 minute class on Monday and then nothing on Tuesday, a soft start on the quarter.

On this day you are supposed to hang out on the beach, but I was planning on going to the beach volleyball lesson at 3pm and since I don’t have a car and wouldn’t wanna make another person drive me back just for that. So I stayed home, but the lesson was canceled so I hung out at the pool for an hour and a half before Rachel and I went to buy food.

Last night we were a bunch of people going out in downtown SLO because it was Ciara’s 21st birthday. I had a great time and felt a little hungover today to be honest, but it wasn’t too bad.

During the day I had my first class of the quarter, German. We were only in class for like 20 minutes talking about the syllabus. It was a pretty sweet first day. Before that I went to the gym for two hours. First one hour of beach volleyball practice and then one hour of TRX. I took it very easy with the TRX since I haven’t really worked out in a long time. It was mostly just to go through the postures and how this works, so it was only like 15 minutes of actual workout. That was enough for me. I hope we will gradually make it harder in the classes. The next one is tomorrow. It feels really good to get back to working out, I have missed it. Let’s just hope I stay healthy this quarter! I don’t wanna get sick again.

Hello gym, long time no see

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.

This morning I went to the gym for the first time in a very long time. I hated being sick last quarter when I couldn’t work out more than three times before I got one of the worst (longest) colds I’ve ever had. Hopefully that won’t happen this quarter, I have high hopes. This is finally the year when I will get back into shape again! I never set any New Year’s resolutions this year, but I will do my best to stay away from candy. And of course work out more. After not eating any candy at all for 12 days and after today’s hour and a half long workout, I feel great! I am ready to lose those last 10 pounds now.

I started this second week of school with an hour of yoga and then an intense 30 min core workout. It was rough, but I don’t feel anything yet, so I might be good. I sure hope so, because at 9 am tomorrow Toby and I will go for a run. That will be fun!

California DL On Thursday this thing was finally in my mailbox! It only took three months (well, technically I have been waiting since March 2013).Avila Pier On Friday Toby, Lauren, Rachel, and I went to Avila Beach and out to the pier. I had no idea you could walk under it, it was cool!Avila Pier And on top of the pier was this pelican, just chilling.

Serenity Swing hike

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.

Yesterday I started my day by discussing a project with Johanna and Courtney in our Sustainable Environments class. We are gonna put together a project proposal for a future project here in SLO. Courtney told us that after each school year and everyone has to move out of their places, everyone just throws everything away. They throw away stuff that new students will buy just a few months later. So we are gonna propose that a club will be started which will take care of this big waste of functioning things. In June, when school ends all of the things the students don’t want anymore will be picked up and stored during the summer for the new students to buy for a reasonable price when school starts up again for a month and then the leftovers will be donated to other organizations and the rest thrown away.

After that I was very restless so Kelsey suggested that I would go for a run. Why not? So I put on my workout clothes which has just been laying around for way too long and then decided to run to Serenity Swing and back. I actually walked most of the way up to the swing. I can’t run uphill with these stupid calves. And it was way too steep to run anyway. It was a real hike at the end. I was all alone up there, took a lot of beautiful pictures, rested for a while and then started walking back. But as soon as the steepest part was over I ran. And I kept running, all the way home. It felt good! But today it does not feel as good, I am so sore, especially my calves and hips. I walk like an old lady.

Serenity Swing SLO in the background.View from Serenity Swing over SLO 360 degree Serenity Swing

Then it was time to start studying. I have so much to do the next couple of weeks. So this upcoming week is Thanksgiving and we have a break from Tuesday. I am going with Kelsey to LA to hang out with her aunt and cousin for a few days. We are leaving on Tuesday and I will take the train back on Friday so I have the weekend in SLO. Because on Monday the week after (Dec 1st) I have a homework due, I am also meeting up with two different project groups that day so all my research for that has to be done. On Tuesday (Dec 2nd) I have a midterm, and on Wednesday one of the projects are due. On Thursday the other project is due and we are also presenting it at that time and in the afternoon I have a final. And in the upcoming week after that I have two more finals. But as soon as I am done with that I am off to the Caribbean for 23 days! I seriously can’t wait. But at the same time it sucks because that means that Kelsey is leaving and that is gonna be so sad…

I studied and pregamed at the same time which was a good combination. I actually got one of the projects almost done. Then Lauren, Kelsey, Ciara, and I went to a frat party with a Geek/Jock theme. One of the guys in our building invited us and we had a great time. I was a jock because I didn’t have any geeky clothes. And I am glad I went as a jock, everyone at the party was geeks. I got a lot of questions if I was on the basketball team, haha. That was funny. Ciara and Lauren left early so it was just me and Kelsey at the end. We walked home later and it was so much fun. We walked into a random house to use the bathroom and we took a break on the sidewalk. Fun times. When we came home, a lot of other guys stopped by and Kelsey and I cooked for all of us, haha. Scrambled eggs, bacon, bratwursts, and cornbread. A real feast at 3am.

Geek-Jock frat party Me ZBT partyThe black light was really cool! My hair and my nails were shining like crazy.

I don’t know if anything is happening tonight, but I wouldn’t say no if something came up. I have been studying today and I did some errands so I wouldn’t feel too bad about it.

Today I slept until noon and when I woke up my whole body was sore. I wasn’t that hungover, but my body hurt! My poor calves, hips and calves… But it was totally worth it! Lauren, Kelsey, and I (Rachel is in LA this whole weekend) went to Target where I bought hygiene products (small bottles of schampo, conditioner, soap, sun screen, and toothpaste and then a couple of extra empty bottles) for my trip. I am not bringing a check-in bag to that trip so I need to bring small things of everything, and pack smart. That will be a challenge. But I think I will make it. We had lunch, all of us from different restaurants, Lauren form Panera Bread, Kelsey McDonalds and I Panda Express. It felt great eating something unhealthy, and the Coke was the best part! Coke is the best drink for hangovers.

Mini things for my vacation

I got a package today and I think it is my Patagonia jacket (that was way fast) and I ordered a GoPro floaty so my GoPro doesn’t sink if I lose it in the water. It will definitely be worth $11.

Now I should go back to studying, I had a long enough break.