Saket Vora

Wow what an awesome night. It’s 1am now on September 1st actually, but I just got back from the lounge. I went in the lounge at around 8:30pm. This is fairly typical. After getting my bike fixed, I came back at around 4pm and worked through some pages in my digital communications book. Lishuang and her Chinese friend were cooking dinner. I went to the lounge cause it’s nicer to work there…more windows + big table. At around 6:30pm I started to make bhatata and vatananu shak (potatoes and peas). It actually turned out VERY close to something my mom would cook! I’ve never made it before but I followed the steps she described and it worked out! Put some oil in a pot, then when hot put in some onion. Then I added two chopped tomatoes and four small chopped potatoes (which I let soak in warm water for 2 hours). I then added water and put in cumin, corriander, chili powder, and salt. Then I just let it cook, adding water when it was boiled off too much. After a while I added some frozen peas. I let it cook until the potatoes were soft. Instead of rotli I had to use tortillas instead, but it was ok. Pretty good! The chili powder here sucks though. I buy ‘extra hot chili’ from an Asian supermarket and it barely does anything. But yeah, it turned out a LOT better than my chana masala. Christian had some too and liked it.

Meanwhile I let Laure use my Internet cause she had to order books and her internet doesn’t work yet. After being back in my room for only 30 minutes, Frieder messaged me saying that Eddy and his French friends are in the kitchen making crepes. So I joined them and we spent the next two hours in the kitchen talking and taking turns making French crepes. We were flipping them out of the pan and over like pancakes too…Christian got really good at it by the end. It’s really like making dosas, only faster. I was pretty good at it. I have dosa mix that I will make one time. The flour was bread flour instead of pastry flour, so the consistency wasn’t perfect but they still tasted great.

After a while the conversation turned to cards, and Frieder explained to me a german game called Skat. I’ve always thought Bridge was the most complicated card game I knew, but now Skat is. Wow. Talk about a thinking game. It was crazy. There are elements like Bridge but the way you get points is totally different. After we played one round I showed them how bridge works, and we played one round of that. Then Marion (oh that’s right, we got our last room filled in the corridor: Marion from France. The French are taking over ) and her boyfriend explained Texas Hold’Em poker and we played one round of that. It was really great just sitting, talking, and learning new card games.

Anyway, must go to bed now. I’m meeting my engineering advisor EARLY tomorrow, then getting an ID, then going to my digital communication lecture in English, thankfully.

Over the past two days I have been trying to follow as best I can the developing situation that is going on in New Orleans and Biloxi. I have no TV coverage, just Internet. The damage that this hurricane has caused is simply staggering. I have always known that New Orleans has been a highly susceptible city, and now it is experiencing what many have thought of as a “worst case scenario”. I’m sure there will be plenty of finger pointing going on soon.

This damage has affected hundreds of thousands of lives not just in New Orleans and Biloxi, but family members and even businesses for these cities are industrial and commericial centers. It could take maybe two months before even rebuilding is possible, and surely years before the area has recovered.

In the short term, the region is turning into a humanitarian crisis. Lack of water, food, electricity; increase of illnesses and disease due to standing swamp water; and sadly looting by despicable people who shame the very idea of ‘citizen’. There is a special place in hell waiting for those who would use this terrible event to engage in criminal acts for mere personal material gain.

Even though I am far away now, my thoughts are on those who have suffered and those who are trying to help tackle to this incalculable catastrophe.

Over the weekend I went out biking around Lund with my camera. Found a nice city park with a fountain and lake in the middle. During my travels I discovered a true Indian restaurant and on the way back to the city center I came across a ‘garage sale’ that was setup on a three or four block stretch of sidewalk. I walked through the stalls which sort of looked the same but were selling some interesting items. Later I met up with Andreas and visited Spoletorpe, which is by the train station. We looked at some of his pictures and talked about cameras, then went to their basement and played table tennis. Afterwards we went out biking around Lund taking photos. Upon coming back to the dorm at around 6 or 7pm, I was delighted to find my internet working. The next three hours were spent catching up on things, Skyping with Nader and the family. I was planning on cooking chana masala that night, but got delayed and instead baked a ready-made pizza. It was quite good though. Afterwards I got with Frieder and his friend Paul and played Battlefield 1942, a co-op game. Great fun! On Sunday I took it easy in the morning, then went to Malmo with Andreas at 2pm to see the America’s Cup race. They had a great pavilion setup with a huge TV to follow the ships, but we wanted to see the ships ourselves but they were too far out at sea to really get a good look. We met up with Laure there but it started to get stormy and rainy so we headed back to Lund. This was the night I tried the chana masala. The spices were from a mix, not the raw ones, and so it wasn’t quite right. The pot was too tall and not wide enough. It didn’t really look like the chana masala Mom makes, but it sort of tasted like it. The biggest problem was the lack of chili powder. I bought some today as well as separate grounded coriander and cumin, so the next round will be better. Tonight I’ll use some tortellini pasta I’ve had for a while and I think it’ll go bad soon. On Wednesday I’ll try making bhatata and vatana shak.

I bought an iron today (dry iron, $35, ugh) cause the driers here wrinkles my pants really bad. I also bought my digital communications book. Funny thing is that the lectures for that course are all in Swedish, but the prof will hold 1 hour a week in English for us exchange students. The exercise sessions are in English though.

Now that much of the basic info has been noted, these journal entries will be considerably shorter. No luck on the internet for my room yet, the office closes too early and I am at other required meetings. I was able to use the hotspots in the AF building and Kårhuset, so at least the email backlog was taken care of. After the meeting I walked home and then took my bike to the supermarket and dropped 280 kr on groceries. I got vegetables and snacks, and I will be making pizza for the corridor dinner we will be having tomorrow evening. Oh yes, and today we had a mini Christmas in the kitchen today. We discovered two Ikea Starter Kits and tableware in our kitchen, and we opened them to find a whole array of vital essentials. We have plates, glasses, flatware, frying pans, pots, containers, mixing bowls, spatulas, etc. etc. It is great! We arranged the kitchen, and Yoko had three of her Japanese friends and they tried cooking some Japanese food. I also learned that ‘yaki’ means fried, so Yaki Soba is fried noodles! While I am here I will try to learn some basics in French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. Mind you, this is basics as in ‘hello’, ‘thank you’, ‘excuse me’, ‘bye’, ‘please’, and some simple phrases. We were all going to go to a welcome party at the AF building for exchange students and had a pre-party in the kitchen. We waited an hour to get into the party ($10 entrance fee) and the cheapest beer at the bar was 48 kr. The music was typical dance-hip-hop, and it was very crowded. I bounced out after two hours, and walked back to the dorm with Nick.

The Swedish course today went a little strange today. Our usual teacher was sick and the professor we got after an hour never spoke a single word of English to us. He would explain the meaning of Swedish words using examples in Swedish. There were many moments where we all just stared at each other, wondering whether he was asking us a question, what the question was, and how we could ever hope to answer it.

The long corridor dinners continue to be the norm. Yuko has her Japanese friends over quite often because their kitchen pales in comparison to ours. One time she brought in a Canadian guy named Lloyd who was cool to talk with. He’s a math major, and he’s also a vegetarian because of environmental reasons. Frieder and Lloyd and I also began talking about the Millenium Problems in mathematics.

It rained for the first time yesterday, and while it is partly cloudy today the weather is getting colder now. I’m watching football now (ahem, soccer) and this is a Champions League qualifying match. It’s really exciting. Tonight there is another big welcome party at the Kårhuset for international students. $10 entrance fee, and that doesn’t get you any food or alcohol. Seems kind of silly. It’s a moot point anyway, because I could not even get a ticket to it due to a long meeting with my engineering advisor when I learned that I did not get into an engineering course I had requested. Oh well. I’ll call up Andreas and maybe head over to Spoletorpe tonight. Later.

I went into Malmö today, and was pleased to find that the Malmö Festival was in full swing. They had taken over the two large squares in central Malmö and setup an enormous stage there. There was live music, rides, and over hundred food and wares stands all along the streets. I had a $3 falafel that was great. I was going to go with Phillip and Helene, but Helene went on an excursion in the morning and Philip did not wake up until 12. After exploring the festival for two hours, I took a bus to the IKEA store. It was amazing. It is an enormous store, bigger than most anchor stores in malls. They had everything you could need for your home there, and it is ALL made by IKEA. I bought a floormat (should have gotten two), blanket cover, kitchen gloves, hand towels, and batteries. While riding the bus back to central Malmö, I spotted a Vodaphone store and walked out of there 30 minutes later with my Swedish cell phone. That’s one big thing checked off on my to-do list. My number is 0709-31 29 38. The phone itself costs $80. It is locked for use only with Swedish Vodaphone SIM cards, but maybe you can hack it to unlock it. Hopefully I can sell it back to someone going to Sweden in the spring.

After arriving back in Lund, I went over the kitchen at around 7pm to begin cooking for our big corridor dinner. It turned out to be a tremendous time. Christian and I first tackled the dough for the pizza, while Laure began her Greek salad and Eddy started his pasta sauce. At first we were just going to have salad, pasta, and pizza but Lishuang came and started some Chinese meatballs, Yuko and her three Japanese friends came and made some ginger pork, and Pablo made a Spanish potato omlette. We also had chips and salsa and Frieder made some French fries. Along with a bottle of red wine and some beer, it was quite a feast! The food was overall quite good, except the oven shut off halfway through Christian’s pepperoni pizza and so it was a little strange.

The best part was the company. Having German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Greek, and American people all around the dinner table talking is very enjoyable. The common language for everyone is English, and I am the only one to have it a primary tongue. Many times I was asked for the correct word or way to say something. We exchanged ways to say common phrases in all the different languages. I discovered that there might be a Bridge club here in Lund, and while none of my corridor mates knows Bridge, I hope to teach them! After the long dinner winded down, Christian brought his stereo system and Powerbook in and started some music going. He can actually DJ, but alas his mixing tables are in Germany.

We finally got around to the Swedish verbs in the language class. Quite strange…there are no conjugations. Afterward the class I went and got my internet form and did some grocery shopping for the general corridor. Everyone chipped in 20 kr and I got essentials like flour, oils, spices, aluminum foil, etc. The International Housing Office, which has to stamp my internet form before I can enter the long queue of people waiting to get internet, has irritatingly short office hours. They are open on three days a week, and only from 10am to 2pm. When you consider that on August 17 over 1,000 international students arrived in Lund (and who all have to complete this paperwork), having office hours like these is borderline insanity if the end goal is to run an efficient timely program. Last Friday some people waited in line at the housing office for two hours waiting to get their form stamped. It will be late September before I get internet access in my dorm room.

Except for this internet hassle, everything else is going great. I have found hotspots that are only a five minute bike ride from my dorm. The weather has been unusually wonderful – everyone says that it should be rainy and stormy but for the past 6 days we have had clear skies, warm temperatures, and a breeze. We might get some rain on Thursday, but only temporary.

The vice chancellor of Lund gave a welcome talk to the international students today. The Lund male choir performed at the talk and were very nice, singing songs in German, Swedish, and Finnish. Afterward I met the vice chancellor and talked with him for a while.

Corridor life continues to be extremely pleasurable. On Sunday and today, when I went in to cook dinner, I did not leave the kitchen/lounge area until 12:30 or 1am, but people sit and they talk for hours about all sorts of things. One funny thing that happened was that Lishuang heard some Chinese that drifted up through the open window while cooking and went to the window and started talking to two Chinese students below. She came back five minutes later noticeably more excited, because she must have been quite pleased to finally hear a familiar tongue!

Tomorrow does not look to be very eventful. I will go to Vodaphone or Telia and buy a phonecard so I can call home. I received two calls from home but did not answer them because my phone was silent during the chancellor’s talk. I called collect but they were not home. As the conversation tonight shifted to credit cards, I suddenly realized like a slap in the face that I really need to check my credit card bill. All the commotion and the lack of handy internet access has taken it’s toll. I will check it first thing tomorrow. The wireless router at the AF building had its DHCP shot, so hopefully they have fixed it now.