kareina

Life in Luleå continues to be wonderful; the winter weather I love so much continues. There was a brief flirtation with temps just above zero early in the week which, sadly, caused all of the pretty snow and ice crystals which had been clothing the trees to melt away, but the snow cover on the ground and roves survived just fine, and the world is still, mostly, white and wonderful. They are certainly well equipped to handle snow here. Not only are all the streets plowed promptly after each snowfall, but the walk ways are, too. From the neighbourhood in which I am living it is a very nice 10 to 15 minute walk along a path through a small strand of trees to get to the university and closest grocery store (range in time depends upon which building on campus is the final destination). This pathway is wide enough for regular snow plows to clear it, but it is dedicated to people-powered only. Some of us walk, some are being pulled behind their adults upon little sleds, many people ride their bicycles (some of them are carrying skiis on their backs--a truly interesting look), others are pushing the sorts of sleds with runners and handle bars reachable by a standing person.

The only part of winter I've never cared for is that time that is known in Alaska as "break-up", when the snow and ice melt and the ice that has covered the rivers all winter "breaks up" and starts to be carried down stream. Part of what I don't like about it is all of the wet and slush that is generated by a winter's worth of snow melting in only a couple of weeks. However, I don't think it will be as much of a concern in this neighbourhood as it was in Anchorage. They actually haul away a fair bit of the snow here. Today there were people shovelling off the roof of the apartment building, and a small truck plowing away the snow pack that accumulated next to the building as a result. There is now less snow outside of our door than there was before they cleared the roof! This means that when melting time comes there will be less wet and ick to deal with. (However, I am content for spring to delay as long as it will--it will take more than several months for me to become tired of the cold and snow after missing it for so very long!)

Today was my second to last Swedish class for the term (8 classes total!?) so we were working more on review of what we already have been given and listened to the tapes that accompany the text book. This evening archinonlive and I continued reading aloud in the current children's book, and I'm making some progress on my pronouncation. Since the sounds I am most apt to get wrong are the vowels we've written all 8 of them (A, E, I, O, U, Y, Å, Ä, & Ö) onto a piece of paper and spent some time just saying those sounds, and my attempting to point to the correct one when he said it. This is harder than it sounds. (For those of you who wish to hear it for yourself, the Swedish Alphabet is available to listen to on line here.)

In the early evening we finally did a scouting mission to check out the climbing wall on campus (about five minute walk from here). It turns out that one can buy a day pass for 80SEK (roughly 8€), so we did. The wall is a smallish one in the corner of a gym--it has four ropes, two of which are sloped so that one climbs either slightly inverted the whole way, or more inverted before rounding an edge to a vertical wall again, and a bouldering wall which has a pronounced underhang available for one to climb under/around. This wall won't let people belay without having taken/passed a small course, so rather than climbing with one another archinonlive and I had to take turns being belayed by one of the girls there. The first route I did was up the gently undersloping wall (the other ropes being engaged just then), and I found it easy--my belayer commented that it looked too easy for me unless I opt to limit myself by using only holds of a certain colour. The second route I did was the much more steeply undercut route (the others being engaged by then). I was pleased to manage getting around that corner and back onto a vertical part of the wall, though I felt like I totally cheated--my belayer didn't leave me any slack, so while on the hard part some portion of my weight was on the harness, rather than my arms and legs. I'm not certain I would have managed that climb without that "cheat" though. In between the two ropes I also played a bit on the bouldering wall, but after the second rope the climbing period on the wall was up and we had to head home. This is probably a good thing--by not being tempted to over do it my arms will still love me tomorrow.

Today's progress report for uni: some uni work in the morning before Swedish class resulted in an e-mail & pdf being sent to my (erstwhile?) boss, and more this evening between climbing and reading aloud resulted in another. The list of things that have to be done before I can really start writing is getting smaller. This month's average hours/week of uni work is looking *much* better than January. But then, there never really was any hope for January getting a decent average hours worked, since I started the month with two weeks of holiday. This month is doing much better, though a good chunk of that is Swedish study rather than work on finishing up the geology research. Still, learning counts!