Saket Vora

Short post today. This morning I went for the first time in a couple of weeks to the morning problem session for Digital Communication — and realized I should have been going to more of these. I actually was able to learn a bit, and Frederick is turning out to be tremendously helpful. I forgot about signing up for a lab so I did it today…from 6 to 9pm. It was actually scheduled for 4 hours, but I got done in 3 hours. The lab was pretty good — helpful but long. Frederick was great in explaining the concepts and going over things. I had to skip the latter half of my Swedish language course to go to the lab, but it’s ok.

Tomorrow I’m taking a trip with my Scandinavian Culture class ‘around the Sound’. We travel north to the Swedish town of Helsingborg, then across the sound to the Danish city of Helsinore, famous for the Kronberg Castle, which Shakespeare used as the setting for the famous Hamlet. Hopefully, nothing will be rotten in the state of Denmark tomorrow (I’m hoping it doesn’t rain anyway). Afterward we travel south down the Danish coast to Copenhagen, where we will probably visit some museums. We end the trip by crossing back over to Sweden via the Øresund Bridge. That is a shot of the bridge from Lund…which is about 12 miles northeast of it. It’s the longest single bridge carrying both cars and trains. It’s almost 10 miles long and marks the first physical connection between Sweden and Denmark in 7,000 years (when there was an ice bridge). It was built in just 2.5 years too. Impressive!

I’ll post pictures and write about the trip tomorrow. For now, goodnight!

Sunday went ok. Terrible weekend for football (both NCSU and Panthers lost). I woke up earlier and tidied up the room more. I also read more of the book Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, which is our primary book for the Role of Religion in the Middle East class. I’ve read 150 pages so far and it’s fascinating reading. Really really good stuff about the development of the conflict with a lot of first hand interviews about feelings and events with people who live there. It was published in 1986, so it is not colored by the 2001-02 Second Intifada. The edition I have includes comments by the author at the end of each chapter which reflects on the recent happenings. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking more information about this terrible bitter conflict. So far, it has been sort of depressing to read; you learn about so many bad things that the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs have done. We in America often see the Israeli side of the conflict painted in move favorable tones (perhaps the contrast has been greater with the Second Intifada) but reading about the Israeli cover-ups, easy sentencing for Jewish terrorists, and censorship makes the situation reek of irony that the Israeli government was doing the same kind of things that governments which have persecuted them did. There was a very loud Canadian girl in class today which I’m already annoyed with. She talks VERY LOUD and made the following remarks today in class: “Is Iran a democracy?”, “…well in countries like France and London…”, [and this to the teacher while I waiting to buy the compendium from him] “…I, like, have a problem with listening and like, writing at the same time so I get behind. Should I or can you, like, ask about maybe having a designated note-taker I can get copies from later? Oh ok I’ll do it…”. Ugh. Maybe I’m just being academically elitist, but she has this naivete about the way she approaches delicate subjects…with no sense of tact or consideration.

Last night I made some teriyaki stirfry with vegetables and rice. Tonight I fell back on the old staple of spaghetti. I need to go tomorrow to buy groceries. I went over to Tim and Nancy’s place (two Canadian students that in my digital communications class) to work on the pre-lab. Apparently we were supposed to sign up for a lab sport last week but I didn’t know. I’ve been saving all my receipts so far and did some expense tallying. So far I’ve spent about $700 for groceries, household goods, traveling, etc. This does not include the rent though.

Other observations:

- Here in Sweden they round bills to the nearest 0.50 cents, due to the fact that the smallest unit of currency available is the 50 öre coin. I never quite noticed it until I started looking at the grocery receipts.

- In France, there are far fewer minutes of commercials on the television compared with the states. For example, they would see an episode of Lost as 42 minutes of uncut video. If a 2 hour movie comes on TV, they might get 10-15 minutes of commercials, and that is usually just at the end of the program. Their sport matches also only show commercials either during halftime or at the end of the game. The idea of showing 2-3 minutes commercials every 10 minutes is strange to them, and actually having ‘TV timeouts’ during sports game is downright shocking.

- In France and Germany, it is often the intellectuals (associated with the university) who go on to run for political office. Angela Merkel, who ran for the chancellorship of Germany with the Christian Democratic Union party, is a practicing physicist at the German National Academy of Sciences.

- Norway is perplexing. Have I already ranted at this? The country has 4.6 million people and is incredibly wealthy due to oil exports. It funnels the extra money into a Petroleum Fund that is valued at $150 billion. The fiscal debate in Norway is not “how are we going to balance the budget this year” but more like “how are we ever going to spend our surplus?”. Yet, despite all this, the country has crazy taxes. With so much money you can’t afford to give people a break? There is a sugar tax so Norwegians living near Sweden cross the border to buy chocolates and sweets. The cost of living in Norway is higher than in Sweden. Yet the ‘quality of life’ is so high that it often ranks top 3 in the world. Maybe for the citizens who can take advantage of the extensive social welfare system, but for exchange students and visitors it hurts the wallet.

It’s close to 1am today. I gotta go to a problem session for digital communications tomorrow (that class freaks me out…2 weeks to the exam and the exchange students have had approximately only 10 hours of professor-led instruction. That’s maybe 1/4th of what the Swedish students have had. And for those engineering oriented, -6 dB! It’s nuts.) and I gotta sign up for a lab. Sigh. Peace everyone.

Woke up late again today. I need to put an end to the cycle of going to bed late and waking up late. Discipline! Nothing too eventful for this past week. My Role of Religion in the Middle East Conflict class has started, and we have to do a lot of reading for it. It is a good thing though; it forces me to read a lot of things I should read anyway. The package from home that my mom sent me finally arrived as well! It was great when I opened it — so many spices from home and two DVDs. I was able to watch the NC State vs. Virginia Tech game (we played surprisingly well I thought, but lost due to stupid penalities) and an episode of Battlestar Galactica (the best show on TV). My corridor is planning a trip to Norway for the first week of November. They found a house we can rent for a week for just 350 euros. It will be a good chance to be in the nature and go hiking. On Thursday I gave a shot at making dosa, a typical South Indian dish. Think of it like an Indian crepe…except the batter is rice-based and it isn’t sweet. The dosa batter was ready made and tasted fine, except it was hard to spread properly in the pan. I also made the masala for it, which consists of onions, potatoes, and garlic.The masala turned out great. The others in the corridor liked it too. Today I made cookies for everyone too. Chocolate chunk with white chocolate chips and hazelnut. We don’t have an electric mixer so it took forever to mix the dough properly. Then after I was taking them out of the oven Marion told me that Laure has a mixer. D’oh! I’ll keep that in mind for next time.

Someone made a hacked version of DirectConnect that operates inside the Lund University network. Excellent. I have finally caught up on all the Battlestar Galactica episodes I’ve missed, and now will be anxiously waiting for the second season to resume in January. So far Battlestar Galactica has had a marvelous second season. It’s just a shame that many people thumb their nose at it for being in the ’sci-fi’ genre and don’t even bother to take it seriously. Oh well. It’s their loss.

Well, I’m gonna go to sleep for now, and make Sunday very productive!

Today has been pretty lazy. Went to bed late, woke up late. Tided up the room, took care of clothes, etc. It’s not to pleasant outside: cold, overcast, a bit rainy. The Swedish fall has arrived! Yesterday I saw the sunrise from the hilltop. Not as cool as the sunset, but I did get to see the mammoth Oresund bridge connecting Malmo to Copenhagen. In the afternoon I played soc- ahem, football with Frieder and Paul at a ‘field’ behind the Sparta residence. I say ‘field’ cause it wasn’t grass..just fine gravel. It was fun, but I prefer ultimate frisbee. I find just using the legs to be clumsier than using your arms. But most of the world would disagree with me. :)

I’ve been picking up more interesting cultural things.

- In most of Europe I believe, attending a university is free, or costs less than 1000 euros. Some students are balking at having to pay 500 euros a year in some places. In Germany, textbook prices are the same as in the US, but in Greece, textbooks are free. That’s right. When you sign up for a course, the university will supply you the textbook. And you don’t have to give it back at the end. And you don’t have to stay enrolled in the course to keep the book. I would sign up for 30 classes, get my books, then drop all by 6. It’s incredible. No wonder Amalia was complaining at paying 50 euros for a textbook.

- The Chinese language has an amazing grammar system. The verb doesn’t change when you change the tense. To speak past-tense, just add a small word to the sense. The same with the future tense. The verb itself never changes. And if you change the subject (I, you, he, she, we, they) the verb doesn’t change either (Swedish does the same). That’s awesome. If I were to create a new language, I would definitely steal this idea from them.

- Swedish (and likely Danish and Norwegian) does something very strange with the definite article. If we take ‘house’ for example, in English it would be “a house” and “the house”. In German it is “ein Haus” and “das Haus”. Note the difference in saying “a ____” and “the _____”. But in Swedish, it’s “en hus” and “huset”. The definite article is added to the end of the word itself. Weird.

More to come later.

It’s been an interesting week so far. I’m getting a slight bit nervous about my digital communications class - we have less than a month to go and I really don’t know how much of the material is expected for us know. The good news is that our professor is back from his conference trip to Australia so I think it will pick up from here on. The Swedish language course is going well - the professor is good and there are several cool students in the class. On Wednesday we had a lecture on the Scandinavian Culture class about the history of Scandinavia. It was quite interesting for we saw the maps of the age and how it influenced the way people thought about Sweden. Scandinavia is actually a misspelling; the original was Scadinavia, and the ‘Scadin’ part is based loosely off the German ’schaden’, which means to damage or ‘dangerous’. Scandinavia was referred to as the ‘dangerous island’. The Romans never quite got up there due to the Visigoths, and thus the region was not well explored. Today, many Swedes still think of themselves as not part of the ‘continent’, though it is firmly attached. There was also an interesting origin myth that Scandinavia was the first bit of land to appear after the biblical flood and it was here that civilization started and that the civilized peoples of Europe originated from Scandinavia. Yesterday the corridor threw a big party for Helene, who had her 21st birthday party. We had a lot of food - I made two pizzas; Lishuang, Lishuang’s friend (it’s a difficult name), Yuko, and Judith made Chinese dumplings; Laure had a variety salad starter, Pablo made Spanish pancakes and a lemon cake; Christian made apfelstudel; and there were two or three other cakes and deserts. Christian brought his stereo in and kept the music flowing with his powerbook and ipod. I was so busy playing host that I really didn’t take a whole lot of pictures. But there were 10 cameras there snapping away, so I’m gonna get some pictures and add them to my site. Pretty soon a LOT of people started coming, people that we didn’t even know. Word must have spread through the Delphi compound (where there are 23+ buildings) that a great party was being thrown down in building N. Pablo had a huge continent of his Spanish friends out in the corridor singing Spanish drinking songs. Lots of French people there, and the French got the most hammered from the alcohol. It was great fun to watch. Later on, I was sitting with Lishuang and Frieder and Paul on the sofas by the table. The conversation got to languages, and we spent a good hour with Lishuang showing us the Chinese language and all the characters. Lishuang has extremely good handwriting and her Chinese letters were really great to look at. Frieder and I agreed that we wouldn’t even know how to start drawing a character. We challenged her to write our names in Chinese, and sometimes she would have to find an analogy. Paul’s name in Chinese loosely translated to ‘protect’, while Frieder’s name was “to fly arrive”. My name was more difficult. She showed us how they write numbers and Frieder challenged us to count to 31 using just one hand (the trick is to use binary). With Chinese you count to ten with one hand, because the numbers 6 through 10 are represented with hand signals. Before we leave we want Lishuang to write all of our names big on nice paper. I will try to write their names in Gujurati.

A great moment happened actually when most of the people left. The people living in corridor and a few close friends were left, and we all started to clean up. The result was impressive: with 12 people working together, we had all the pots, plates, glasses, pans, utensils, counters, and stove cleaned and dried and put back on the shelf, and the floor swept and mopped. The kitchen, after sustaining a huge party, looked ready for an open-house. We called it a night at around 3am, but I stayed up talking with friends until 4:15am. I went to bed and ended up getting up at 1pm. My internal clock has gotten so screwed so I’m gonna stay up the whole night studying and working engineering problems (just had two cups of coffe). At 5am I’m gonna bike to the hill and watch the sunrise over Skåne. The laundry time slot is at 7am too. By Saturday evening I’ll be exhausted and thus get back on the normal cycle.

It’s been quite a while since I last posted, and I apologize for that. During the last weekend I visited the great city of Stockholm. I left Saturday morning at go there at around 1pm. After some initial trouble with the hostel reservations (they said they had no booking my name), I was able to find a nice youth hostel that was actually a boat anchored in the sound. I didn’t have to check in until night, so I set about exploring the city. Stockholm is over a 1000 years old and is situated on around 12-13 islands that sit where the freshwater Lake Malaren empties into the Baltic sea. The central part of Stockholm consists of around 5 islands, varying in size. The old part of the city is called Gamla Stan, and the layout of the streets have been left unchanged for the past 500 years. Because of the islands, Stockholm has an extremely pleasing feel to it. As you walk around exploring the city or taking the public transportation, you see waterways and canals and bridges and boats. Architecturally, buildings and houses hug the many coastlines and cliff faces on the islands, and has a nice mixture of old Europe and new Europe feel. Antiquity and modernity. The weather was spectacular so the blues of the water and the bright colors of the buildings truly came out. During the first day I explored Gamla Stan. I wasn’t feeling terribly hungry and combine that with the very high prices for restaurants, I ate by going to supermarkets and purchasing food there. I made up for it by having my first real Indian meal on Sunday night, blowing 150 SEK on it. In the evening I went for a riverboat tour around Djurgarden and the main harbor. I was feeling tired after the day, so I went to bed at 10pm. I began Sunday by hitting the streets at 8am. The city is very quiet at this time of day. I made my way to the Nobel Museum, which is at the Stortorget (main square) in Gamla Stan. The museum was small but interesting. I had the Stockholm card, so the entrance was free. They had a nice exhibit on Einstein in honor of the 100th year anniversary on his 1905 year in physics. I was surprised to learn of the great controversy the Nobel committee had over his award. They were unimpressed by relativity so finally after an unusually long time of waiting they decided that the photoelectric effect was less controversial and gave it to him for that. After swinging by the train station to pick up my last minute train ticket back home to Lund, I went over to Djurgarden and saw the Vasa museum. This was incredible, but the museum is dedicated to a ship that set sail in 1620. It was the new flagship for the King, but on its maiden voyage it tipped over and capsized before even leaving the harbor. The water in the Stockholm harbor reduces the impact of sea worms, and just 35 years ago the entire ship was raised to the surface in one piece. It is remarkably preserved, and was a great museum. Next I went to Skansen, an open-air museum that gives visitors a glimpse of what historical Sweden was like. It was ok. I ended my time in Djurgarden by going to the Kaknas tornet, which is a tower that serves as a hub for all of Stockholm’s communication. This tower is a 133m tall (435 feet) and it has an observation deck on the top. There I enjoyed breathtaking views of greater Stockholm. It is definitely a must-see stop on anyone’s trip to Stockholm.
Stockholm is a city that easily stands among the ranks of Paris, Vienna, and Rome for most beautiful capitol city of Europe. Though pricey, it’s a definite must-see city to visit.

Lund University has a remarkably draconian enforcement of their university network. They have automated sensors that can identify if you attempt to use peer-to-peer file sharing programs such as Kazaa, Naptster, eMule, etc. and if it catches you using them, it will disconnect you for 2 days without warning. Also, if your computer has a virus that it deems hazardous, it will cut off your internet access. A call to the computer help desk often ensues, with the question of “I need to access the internet to download tools to remove the virus.” and you will get the response of “Uh…um…ask your corridor mates for help. Click!.” Tremendously helpful, I know. My internet was disconnected when I attempted to download the new Linux GNOME 2.12 Live CD. The program BitTorrent has become the preferred method of delivery for Linux distributions, and seeing as I had been having some problems with Windows, I wanted to use the LiveCD for debugging. So I am being punished for downloading a legitimate, legal, and perfectly free file. Ridiculous. Oh, and no warning of course was given. I’ll be getting my Internet back this weekend.

Anyway. The Swedish language course has started and it looks to have homework every time. The lectures for digital communication have been fairly useless so far; I find it better to read the book instead, however theory & equation based it might be. We are learning some pretty neat stuff though.

This weekend I go to Stockholm. Even though other people’s schedules aren’t really matching up, I feel compelled to go this weekend because a) it is likely the last weekend of good weather we’ll be having, b) i’m told by the local Swedes that Stockholm is a summer town and is best seen with good weather, c) this is likely my last three day weekend until December, and since Stockholm is a 5 or 6 hour train ride away, three days are necessary to fully see the city. I have booked my hostels and will go tomorrow to get my stand-by train ticket. The train ticket costs around 350 SEk one way, and the hostels are coming out to be around $60 for two nights. I’m gonna be packing some food and when I hit a new city I go into ’survival’ mode and can do for 8 hours w/o a full meal. BRING IT ON.

It’s around 12:15am and I gotta get back to Delphi from this computer lab in the E-huset. I hope my bike is still outside where I left it.

My next post will be on Monday or Tuesday, after I get back from Stockholm. I’ll be sure to put up pictures too. Peace.

Just got back from the ‘Novice Pub’ dinner at the Helsingkrona Nation. I might have explained the whole nation bit earlier, but I’ll do it again briefly here. There are 13 ‘nations’ at Lund which serve as the social hubs for the students. They have their own pubs and nightclubs, and offer lunch or dinner for cheap prices. They also organize sports, activities, theater productions, photo clubs, etc. You are required to join a nation because that is how you get your student ID card and pay the university or faculty fees. You can choose to be involved in a nation, or not at all and just get the card from them. Even though you are a member of one nation, you can still go to activities and events hosted by other nations. We don’t have anything quite like it back in the States. Tonight was an event for all the first-year students. I ran into a girl while entering the nation and we got to talking and sort of just stuck together for the rest of the evening. It turned out that My (that’s her name, and it’s not pronounced like ‘my’) had lived in Hickory, NC for 8 months last year, so it was an interesting connection for sure. She is also politically active so it was nice to see that as well (besides being tall, blonde, and beautiful like Swedes have a greater chance of being). I also met the guy that was getting involved with the Helsingkrona website so I’m gonna attend the meetings, learn more about PHP, and help maintain the English webpage. One tends to pick up a lot of cultural perspectives during dinners such as this (it was the first time I was surrounded entirely by Swedes). My said that she couldn’t understand the whole fad with the Atkins diet that she saw while in the States. People would ask her “wow you eat potatoes and bread…how do you stay so thin?” She said that Americans are more open and friendlier too than Swedes. She said that she met a guy selling shirts at the supermarket or someone else at a gym, but in Sweden such a thing is unheard of. Many times Americans would strike up conversations while waiting in line or on a bus, but in not so in Sweden. She brought back some of this openness to Sweden, though, and she likes it. She also noticed that Americans tend to naturally speak louder while talking than people from other cultures. She said she began to do that too. After reflecting on conversations I’ve had with my corridor mates, I’m realizing that the observation is indeed true. It was a fun night.

Yesterday, a bunch of us in the corridor happened to congregate for dinner at the same time so we had a nice conversation there too, this time more on food actually then shifted to cars as we guys began drooling over the new Bugatti. I decided to post some things I learned from that:

- You can spend over a 100 euros for one meal at a very nice restaurant in France. One corridor mate spent 200 euros for a dinner…not including wine.

- Germans are extremely price conscious. They will tend to look at price over quality, and the idea of spending that kind of money for a meal is incomprehensible. You probably won’t find meals costing over 30 euros at German restaurants.

- At very nice French restaurants (where reservations are usually required), women are given different menus that have all the prices removed. This is to allow them to pick whatever they choose without fretting over the cost of the dish.

- I am probably the youngest person in my corridor, at age 20. We have many 23 year olds, 21 year olds, and Lishuang is 25! Helene has her birthday on 15 September, and Christian’s birthday is at the end of October.

- When drinking German Weißbier (white beer), you usually have to drink it out of a special glass or else it will taste horrible.

- Most of the corridor is now avoiding Swedish bread because it is too sweet. More and more we have started to buy our bread at the Saluhallen Market in Mortenstorget. I asked for a loaf of ‘German’ bread and it’s great.

- Laure and I shared a pot to boil spaghetti noodles and she prefers to put the noodles in the boiling water without breaking them in half. When eating the spaghetti, I began to cut the noodles to make it a bit practical. This was quickly pointed out to me by Helene, who told me that you should never cut noodles. This was affirmed by Christian, who told me that two Italian guys started to get really agitated when British tourists at the next table over started cutting pasta.

- The Fanta brand was created for the German market because of some problem with the Coke brand. Germans wanted the caffeine of Coke but prefered the taste of Fanta, so spezie was formed, in which you mix Fanta and Coke.

- Bugatti has created a 1 million euro car that has a 1001 horsepower engine. It can go over 230 mph.

- Volkswagen is apparently said to oversee Porche, Bugatti, Audi, and Lamborghini, just to name a few.

I better get to bed. Digital Communications lecture at 12.