Umeå

Umeå, Sweden, is a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down)






As mentioned before, more pix in the gallery.

Key Facts about Umeå:

• Beaches to Birches: From Sydney, the city of beaches, to Umeå, known as "the city of birches", having more 3000 of these noble silvery trees lining its every street. Did you know: For a brief period in the late 19th century, it was also known as "the city of devastating city-wide infernos"!
• Young at heart: There are 100,000 residents of Umeå, including 30,000 university students. The average age is 37. It is said that there are enough pubs in Umeå that a quarter of its population could go to the pub simultaneously and have somewhere to sit.
• Egalitarian: Strangely, every key in the department is the same. So, for example, my key opens the Director's office. All the offices have those little whiteboards out the front for people to leave messages. I enjoy writing such messages as "The tests came back positive, why won't you return my calls?"
• Yummy: Swedes are very conscious of the benefits of insulation, and there seems to be a policy here of fattening everyone up before winter. That means: lots of free cakes at office morning teas!
• Multicultural: Whilst Sweden as a whole (and even Umeå) is nowhere near as multicultural as Sydney, the control group here has two Swedes, two Russians, a Bolivian, and a German, and now an Aussie!
  

Anyway, that's enough of that. Everyone here is very friendly, and I'm settling in quite nicely. Umeå actually reminds me quite a lot of Princeton (lived there with the fam for a year when I was about 12-13). Small leafy university town, big wooden houses, cold weather (tho it will get much colder here than it did there). It's a lot more like Princeton than Sydney, anyway.

The Bolivian took me out on the town last night, he's a kool dude, and he seems to have the whole town wrapped around his little finger. He has kerazy friends, including two Swedes with perfect English accents, one London, and one Liverpool. The father of the first is actually a Londoner, but the faux-liverpudlian seems to have derived his english entirely from Beatles records, and he worships John Lennon.

True to the scandinavian way, we had a couple of beers (not aquavits) at a guy's house before heading out, as a cheap and dirty beer will cost about 10 aussie bucks at a pub. The german was supposed to join us, but called us up, and this was on speakerphone, and said (thick bouncy german accent):

I do not think I can come. I am now lying on ze bed, it is because I ate so much and now I cannot move.

I am not making that up!

Just spoke to Soelvi and Kjetil on the electronic telephone machine. Looks like I will spend Christmas with Soelvi's family in Bergen, on the west coast of Norway:

and then we might have a sort of Aussie/Norwegian reunion somewhere for NYE, with S, Kjetil, Guro and Ingvild (if they come up this way) and the Divin' Eivins (at least Oyvind, maybe not Eivind as he lives in BF Idaho). Awesome!
There's a big music festival on in Trondheim at the moment, which I might try to duck over for a bit of, depending on various factors.

Tomorrow I'm heading back to London to grab my work and residence permits (finally!!) then its all official, and I can get bank accounts and blah de blah.

That's all for now!
xo