It is beyond cold!

So yeah.. The mercury is creeping below -20 Celsius, which means we've gone below -4 Fahrenheit. It is cold, but it is also wonderful! There is ALOT of snow here (see picture in my previous entry) and it is not going anywhere.

Christmas celebrations have been pretty nice. The normal holiday clashes within the family have been about as usual. Don't act like you're surprised! I bet every family has some days where everyone is stressed out of their bones and just want to do something else.

I got to be Santa Claus for a family this year as well! They seemed to enjoy it quite nicely, even though the boy of the family said it was a different Santa this year. Quite an interesting observation, seeing as I did the exact same thing, looking the exact same way, last year. They seemed happy enough when I was finished, and I got a present of my own from them.

Christmas Day felt like one big giant party. Swerving back and forth between different places, visiting friends, acquiantances, relatives, not-so-much-acquiantances-but-I'll-take-it-because-I'm-not-sober, and so on. I did spend abit of ye olde monetary funding on that evening, but it was damn fun as well!

On the second of January, I'll be flying from Stockholm back to Los Angeles. Let's hope that the terrorists decide to bugger off for a good long time at that point. I miss all the friends over there!

See you guys soon!

Am Home

Am tired

Am happy.

God it's beautiful here.

Misery in Heathrow

American Airlines. You guys are a piece of work.

1:30pm: I ask Scott if he wants to go to Denny's and have a small celebratory and expensive lunch before I go home. We end up being there until around 1:30pm and then head off to LA Internation Airport (LAX).

2pm: Notice that plane has been delayed from 5:30pm to 7pm. This would screw up my itinerary royally. I kindly ask the guy handing me the ticket if there is anything I can do to better my chances of getting on my flight in London (Supposed to depart at 2:20, we would land around that time with our new departure time). The answer I got was an indifferent "No, you'll have to be on stand-by in London. Next!"

7:30pm: Finally in the air. Flight is fairly smooth and problem free. Flight attendants are nice and professional about the whole ordeal. Guy on the intercom really needs to vary his inflection abit, he sounds like the epitomy of a plastic flight attendant voice.

London, 3pm GMT: The descent into madness...

From this point on, me and Ludvig (another student from M.I. who happened to be on the same flight) would spend 5 hours in lines and additional time moving between lines. We end up having one of the most unlucky days in my life.

1. Lines move extremely slowly here. People are not cooperating with the staff members and this just prolongs the debacle that is missing a connecting flight. Me and Ludvig are laughing at the whole ordeal and keeping a level head so as to not sink into the cynical swamp that has engulfed the other passengers.

2. We received a stand-by ticket for a 8:10pm flight to Stockholm. We needed to be at the desk approximately 45 minutes before departure so that we could get our tickets (if there were any). Problem was, we were held up for roughly two hours at another desk, because the woman there was working in an extremely slow pace and even chatting away with her colleagues. I lost my head for five seconds and cursed angrily in Swedish. Then I remedied it by assuming my normal zen position of awkward happiness.

In short: We lost our stand-by tickets, which were available for just the two of us. All this due to sloppy staff members.

3. We missed a bus ride, there was foul tasting cider that I ordered and also bad quality food. We had received vouchers from American Airlines to use for a hotel room, dinner and breakfast as well as transport out to the hotel. We missed the first bus due to being misinformed by a bus driver, missed the second one because of misplaced tickets but got on the third one.

The hotel did not accept our voucher, saying it was invalid and that we had to pay 44£ for one night. I said "screw it" and we headed back to Heathrow.

12 midnight and onwards: So here we are, back in Heathrow. We got locked out of Terminal 5 eventually after trying to find some safe place to rest. The train that would take us to T5 was closed down after midnight and thus, We're stranded in T3. I'm typing this to keep myself awake since I don't trust some of the overnight passengers here.

In the future, I will look back on this and laugh about it. That puts a smile on my face right now. I've endured worse and I'll go through similar things in the future. This is a breeze!

We have a flight booked for 7:15 tomorrow. Hopefully these tickets are valid.

A sigh of relief

Yep, all the finals are done and that feels like a huge burden off of my shoulders.

I'd say that on average, I think that my worst grade this quarter is B+ (VG+ for the swedes) which is satisfying.

I'll have you know that all the swedes I hang around with at school seem to have done really well. Congrats to Charlie, Johan, Fredrika, David, Arvid, Adam, Mikael, Daniel, Josefine, Josephine, Linda etc.

Thank you everyone for keeping my Swedish lingo intact (albeit influenced by southern dialects now).

On saturday, I will be heading back to Sweden for christmas and new year vacation. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone back home!

A crazy week!

What the title says... This week has been pretty insane in terms of personal pressure to perform and the overall mass of things to do.

Monday and tuesday held nothing special besides an artist showcase performance on tuesday afternoon (between 4 and 6). The biggest anticipation was for thursday which had a stagecraft final AND the final rehearsal of a monologue for Art of Preparation class (in simple terms: acting class). My monologue is very personal and I will not reveal any details here since I want to keep that information from reaching the people it affects.

Monologue comments info in short: My teacher, Katie thought that my performance was fantastic and asked if I was into acting. I did say that I had contemplated taking classes but hadn't made a big deal of it. Maybe I will look into it in the future. I know that her own teacher has a class going close to where I live.

The second class I had was one of my electives, stagecraft. Where we had a final test. This test consisted of four songs. Two of them being popular songs of old, one being a blues melody where we had to write our own vocal melody and lyric, and one being ourselves accompanying on piano.

My setlist was as follows:

1. Do You Know The Way To San Jose
2. Route 66
3. Own blues song
4. I'm Sorry (piano, Evergrey cover of Dilba's hit song)

All in all, the performances went pretty well. I am still bummed out that my bottom end (my lower register) decided to not support me well, the only time it didn't work out of dozens of practice trials. It was such a relief to have performed this set, since my brain was pretty overwhelmed by having this burden on my shoulders, on top of preparing for final exams next week.

Examples of the songs listed above:

Route 66:



Do You Know The Way To San Jose:



I'm Sorry (this version is transposed down, I played it in a higher pitch than this):



Random great video from Lady Gaga:





Closing statement:

Last weeks have been hectic, but life has at the same time never felt better. I am constantly stimulated by all the great friends I've made and all the challenges I face here. I highly enjoy it!

The Midnight Sun

I find myself telling people over here in Los Angeles about the midnight sun and how it is only visible to the northernmost countries of the world. Alaska, Canada, Norway, Finland, Russia, Iceland, Greenland (Denmark that is) and Sweden can all see it if the location is in the northern regions of said countries. People down in Stockholm can not view the midnight sun since they are south of the arctic circle.

Some fast facts:

Midnight sun is a phenomenon that occurs for the northernmost regions of the world because of earths tilted axis. Because of this, all northern regions are subject to long sun exposure during summertime. The farther north you are, the more days of uninterrupted sunlight. The most extreme being The Arctic and Antarctic poles where the sun does not set for 6 months.

Some examples of midnight sun:


Kiruna, Sweden



Nordkapp, Norway

That concludes this post. Hope this illuminated the minds of some people out there!