San Fransisco and the sun

Why does it always seem to be that the new year starts in turbo mode?
Before you know it you’re halfway through January and you barely finished reflecting on the past year before your calendar for the next one starts filling up?

Well, not that my last days of 2018 were the least bit intolerable. After leaving Nicaragua, I met up with a happy, and slightly jet lagged, gang in San Fransisco on Christmas Day. The next three days were spent waking up at almost ungodly early hours (when aforementioned jet lagged people wanted breakfast), walking 20k+ steps a day, eating lots of good food and biking across the Golden Gate Bridge. San Fransisco is definitely a place to come back to. We also visited Muir Woods National Park which was amazing.

After a couple of beautiful days in San Fransisco we squeezed into a Range Rover, that looked large on the outside but was rather small on the inside, and headed south. We stopped by Mavericks and a beautiful lighthouse before we landed in Monterey. My biggest impression from that place was the authentic american breakfast at a local cafe with pancakes the size of pizza plates, served with extra everything. The next day we passed through Carmel by The Sea, Santa Cruz, plenty of beaches, lighthouses, steep cliffs and hairpin curves and landed in Morro Bay. The village is mainly a big harbour protected by a natural lagoon that smells of fish and where both seals and otters were swimming amongst the many boats.

After spending the night in Morro Bay, we headed onwards to Solvang, an authentic Danish village, in California, complete with log houses, (swedish) candy stores, and a small mermaid statue. At last we came to Santa Barbara where we welcomed the new year with a nice dinner and somewhat weird champagne. No firework show lighting up the sky other than what mother nature put on herself. Most enjoyable.

After saying goodbye to my father and brother, who headed back to San Fransisco to fly back to Sweden, the remaining parts of the gang made our way to Los Angeles, hit the boardwalk for a bit and ate burritos before continuing onwards to Laguna Beach. 

Waking up the next morning it was my 25th birthday (or did I turn 25 nine hours earlier in Sweden because of the time difference? This confuses me…). We had a really nice breakfast and drove the last few miles to San Diego. The remaining days were spent hiking, surfing, hanging out with great people and watching sunsets. 

This morning I waved goodbye to my mother and sister and suddenly found myself back in the class room and normal everyday schedule. This quarter I’m taking one extra class, potentially a busy time ahead, but all classes seem super interesting so far and it’s a good balance between topics and theory/practical work, so I’m very much looking forward to it.

As always, thank you, take care and I hope you have a happy start to 2019.

¡Hola! and hermit crabs

¡Hola!
These words are typed at Managua Airport in Nicaragua where I and Michelle Obama are sat this Christmas Eve waiting to board a flight to El Salvador. Well, I and Michelle Obama’s voice in my headphones reading her newly released memoir ”becoming”, that is. It’s pretty good so far, an interesting peek behind the curtains. Final destination tonight is San Fransisco where my family will meet me tomorrow. I was supposed to fly via Miami but was rerouted due to delays and missed connections. I am pretty proud of myself for managing to get through check-in and immigrations (twice) with annulled stamps in my passport and new boarding passes, all without understanding any Spanish and not being understod when speaking English either. Some hand gestures, smiles and plenty of ”gracias” goes a long way.

I’m leaving Nicaragua a little bit more tanned than when I left, with camera full of pictures and a head full of impressions. Nicaragua is a small country, the people are very friendly and the nature is beautiful with rich fields nestled between volcanoes, white beaches and green jungle. Riding along the highway to the airport this morning (a single file road which was a nice change from the 7 lanes you often get in California), we passed sugar cane fields, banana plantages and small roadside stalls selling deep golden papayas and plantains stacked three metres high. Along the road you find small houses, that could aptly be called sheds, with corrugated roofs and painted in rich colors.

The roads are trafficked by plenty of motorcycles and ”chicken buses”, that is old, repurposed american school buses driven down here and turned into the local buses, some have been painted beautifully. Most vehicles are pickup trucks where the back of the cars are used for passengers, and that was also how we rode to the beach every day, on a dirt road with more holes than a Swiss cheese, with the surf boards stacked on the roof.

My surf technique has gotten a little better over the course of the week, but I have also managed to break not only one but two boards. If you’re a beginner you get to ride a ”soft top” or ”foamie”, that is, a board made of styrofoam covered in a layer of plastic. It floats well and it doesn’t hurt too bad if it hits you in the head, but they are not unbreakable. Photographic evidence provided below.

When I left for Nicaragua I thought I would have a chill getaway with plenty of time for myself, but that mission was a moderate success. The other guests at the camp were super friendly and there were so many fun activities happening besides of surfing. We went to see the Jesus statue, perched atop a hill overlooking the small village of San Juan del Sur, and saw the sun go down.

We went to a hipster brewery/bar that had an open mic night and I couldn’t help myself (I mean the guitar was a super nice Ibanez…).

We went on a jungle adventure and rode a 4×4 up a mountain to go zip-lining. Whizzing through the air seeing the green lushness of the rainforest, hearing howling monkeys scream from somewhere amongst the treetops, was a cool experience. The last ride we got to do upside down and no hands, that was definitely the best part…

Our guide told us about how if it hadn’t been for Panama becoming independent just at the right time, and being in need of money, we might have had a Nicaragua canal instead of a Panama canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Despite Nicaragua being broader that Panama the digging actually started not too far from San Juan del Sur before it was abandoned when Panama said go ahead and dig through our country. He also spoke about how the country could be pretty much self sufficient on renewables like wind and solar, but instead, for political reasons, is turning to Venezuela for oil. Tragic, and being very dependent on tourism, the recent political unrest in the country has hit many business hard, scaring away visitors. But as often is the case in these places in such times, when you go there as a tourist you are treated very well, and the locals want nothing more than for you to have a good time and to go back home and tell everyone about it, bringing more visitors.

Last night I found myself at the beach, barefoot and in a bikini, sand everywhere, with my hair tangled to a mess by the salty waves of the Pacific, with the warmth of the setting sun on my face and watched a tiny hermit crab trying to haul its shell house across my left big toe. It hit me in that moment that life can be bloody spectacular sometimes.

I hope you who read this will find some spectacular moments in your life in these holiday times. Give a hug to someone you love, and as always, thank you for scrolling all the way down here. 

Spontaneous solo trips and sunsets

Hola!
After an intense finals week where I wrote three exams, a total of 9h in the span of 24 hours, an exercise that can make your brain feel something like a mix of superlaggy computer and mashed potatoes. I made my way to San Diego Airport and got on a red eye to Miami. After a few hours of sleep, in flight and on the floor in a quiet corner of Miami airport, I found myself walking into a wall of heat, the smell of fried plantains and Spanish words being thrown at me as I exited Managua Airport in Nicaragua where I decided to go on a very spontaneous solo trip. Why Nicaragua? Well, why not? Tickets were cheap, weather’s nice, surf’s good and I had 10 days before meeting up with my family in San Fransisco. Yes, it’s pretty much as spontaneous as it sounds, and no, I don’t speak a word of Spanish. Whatsoever. But I like to travel on my own, meet interesting people, learn about new cultures and get out of my own everyday for a bit.

I’ve now been in Nicaragua for about five days and I’m loving it. I’m staying at a surf camp/resort that is pretty upscale, but gave 50% off anything booked in December in an attempt to attract customers after being closed for the past months due to the political situation in the country (Google it). Thus the place is aimed towards travellers with bigger budgets but the crowd is what you would usually find in a hostel. It’s great. We’re an eclectic mix of ages and nationalities. Surf’s good, they have great vegan food, and I splurged and got myself a single room, which I feel I deserve after not having a door to my ”room” (aka little corner above the staircase) for three months.

My surf instructor is hilarious and describes just about everything exciting as ”suuuuper trippy man”, and the beach is pretty nice. Sunsets are not too bad either as you can see from the pictures. There is a lot more I could say, but I’ll just show you for now and collect my thoughts on things and save the words for later.
As always, thank you for reading, take care and go hug someone you love!

Useless facts and underwater animals

Hello,
Hope all is well and that the arrival of December brought with it some Christmas spirit. Wherever in the world you might find yourself.

This might be a post with more text than photos. Sometimes it is nice to not carry around a camera everywhere. It allows you to see the world through both eyes, without always looking for the best light or composition. Instead you get to see a photo of me and my dear siblings who are coming to visit in just about two weeks now, and I couldn’t be more excited.

All is well in San Diego. The past two weeks we’ve had a total of three rainy days. It’s been surging down the streets and we’ve had flash flood warnings go out over the mobile network. A little bit of rain here has the same effect of a proper winter storm with lots of snow has back home. You’re excused for being late to class and the teachers will say ”thank you for braving the weather and coming to class”. I can’t help to find it amusing, but I get that it’s all about what you’re used to and what your infrastructure is built to handle. But the sun is back out now, and the thermometer shows 20°C and order has been restored. We’re officially done with all lectures for this quarter and what’s left now is just ”finals week”. I’m taking final exams in all my three courses at the end of this week and I thus have a couple of days to cram in a bunch of oceanography related things in my head.

Here are some slightly useless but potentially interesting facts I’ve learned in school recently (but that are unlikely to appear on an exam):

– We can prove that there have been parasitic lifeforms in the ocean for about as long as there have been other marine animals by findings of tapeworm eggs in fossilised shark poop.

– El Nino (”the boy” in Spanish) has its name from it appearing around Christmas when we celebrate the arrival of Jesus. This year the likelihood that we get to see and El Nino event is about 80% based on slightly elevated surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific.

– Scandinavia has produced a considerable number of prominent oceanographers and physicists. I have tried to teach my Oceanography professor to say ”Ekman” with the emphasis on the ”e”, but I’m not making much progress. They prefer to put the emphasis on the ”k” and say ”Äkkmann” (if you know Swedish you’ll hear the fun in this). Anyways, Ekman used to be a professor at Lund University and came up with a bunch of really important solutions describing how the wind and Coriolis forces puts the ocean into motion. Rossby gave name to planetary waves and Bjerknes and Sverdrup (Norwegians) came up with equations describing mass, energy and momentum balances in the ocean and interactions with the atmosphere.

– The man who came up with dividing fluid motion over an object into boundary layers, and thus solved fluid mechanics problems unsolved since Newton, his name was Prandtl and he had to marry his PhD-supervisors daughter, which was customary at the time.

(I did warn you the facts were slightly useless… Unless they can remind you of the vastness of the world and the fact that there is something to nerd out about for everyone out there. Curiosity keeps your mind young.)

Other exciting things that has happened recently include me officially becoming a volunteer at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. That means that I pretty much every week get to go there and help out with a little bit of everything. It could be anything from teaching kids visiting the aquarium about how penguins regulate their body temperature, all while gluing cotton balls on to pictures of penguins (there was ”penguin fluff” glued all over the place and myself afterwards), or walking around the aquarium a late night when a big pharmaceutical company have their Christmas party, and tell people the story about the turtle with a 3D-printed shell and show the swell star eggs where you see the baby sharks moving through the shell.

On the weekends the public can book a birthday party at the aquarium, and I’ve helped out at a couple of those. The first one was something of a culture shock, for sure. I had no idea that a birthday party for a six year old could be turned into such a big deal. There’s snacks, drinks, pizza, cake, presents, admission and a guided tour of the aquarium for all the kids AND their parents, special interactive activities like petting the juvenile horn sharks and giftbags for all the guests. When I was a kid you ate cake and went to the park to play a game when there was a birthday party (but maybe that’s just me getting old…). I was already a little overwhelmed, and add to that a fire alarm that went off due to an overheated bagel in the microwave in the staff kitchen, and having to keep track of 15 six year olds on a sugar high (and their parents) as the whole aquarium was evacuated, and all 300+ visitors stood outside waiting for the fire brigade to say it was okay to go back in, and you have all the necessary ingredients for a memorably Saturday… But I am enjoying my time at the aquarium, and I get to walk around and look at things as much as I want after my shifts. Here are some pictures, from the top: a leafy seadragon, California Moray Eel, and a giant octopus. 

Now it’s also officially December which mean that I cannot protest the Christmas music any longer (I do have a limit for how many times in a day I can listen to Jingle Bells without going crazy). In the ÅÄÖ – Sorority House we’ve been drinking ”glögg”, baked (Swedish) saffron buns and gingerbread, attended a Christmas party with reindeer horns/Christmas trees on our heads, assembled gingerbread houses (yes, plural on that one) and decorated the house with hand cut paper snowflakes.
We also had a diverse group of people over for a ”Swedish Christmas potluck” where everyone had to bring something. IKEA supplied the pickled herring and meatballs and there was eggs, potatoes, salmon, cheese and cabbage. Not too shabby. But to be completely honest, now I feel pretty done with Christmas, at least for a little while…

Time to go back to studying. As always, thank you for reading.  

Bulldogs and breathtaking views

Phew.
Might be a strange way to start a blogpost, but it pretty perfectly sums up the past two weeks. I came back home from Memphis and spent four days in San Diego. They quickly filled up with a midterm, a photography job at at conference and a bunch of other fun stuff like a washing machine malfunction and sushi-dinner, before I once again packed my bag and headed to the airport. This time to go to Atlanta, Georgia, where my cousin grew up. It’s been almost three and a half years since we last saw each other, mostly because I’ve managed be out of the country whenever he came back to Sweden to visit, and the rest of his family (mother, stepfather, half siblings) I’ve never even met.

I landed a late Friday night and woke up early the next morning (super early if you’re jet lagged) and drove to Athens and University of Georgia to watch a football game. American football that is, the weird one they play running with the ball in their hands despite it being called ”foot”ball. I was expecting something of an event, but nothing like the show that unfolded. Tens of thousands of Georgia Bulldogs fans dressed in black, red and white filled the huge stadium in the middle of campus. Luckily I blended in quite well in black jeans and a red jacket. Some would call it luck, others would call it skill, closest to the truth, however, is probably ”travelling only with a small backpack and clean clothes in short supply due to the before mentioned washing machine malfunction”. 

This was college-level football, but holy guacamole, what a show. There were national anthems, a 100+ people strong marching band (where my cousin’s younger half brother plays drums), more American flags than I’ve seen in a while, Georgia Bulldog flags, mascots (yep, plural on the mascots, a real bulldog and a guy in a bulldog suit), tributes to the military and US veterans, Coca Cola commercials (it’s founded in Atlanta), several different cheerleading teams and a big smoke machine. The Bulldogs won big time over University of Massachusetts and I was still speechless several days afterwards.



The rest of the week was spent hanging around the small town outside Atlanta where my relatives live. We went to check out the town of Marietta, went on some short hikes, saw some monuments from the civil war, went bowling and played frisbee golf. The entire family is full of super talented musicians, so there were some jam sessions too. One day we drove to downtown Atlanta, walked along ”The Beltline”, rode electrical scooters, checked out the very hipster mall and walked in the botanical garden and Piedmont Park.





But the grand finale of the week was of course Thanksgiving.
I haven’t celebrated Thanksgiving before, and was not really sure what to expect.
Turkey? Televised football? More turkey?   

However, my amazing hosts whipped up a ton of vegan food (a ton of food in general) and I spent Thanksgiving helping out in the kitchen, fire BB guns at empty beer cans in the garden and drinking whiskey (I mean, it’s the south, right?), eat delicious food, play some music and laugh until my belly hurt with a bunch of unique and funny people that were invited and showed up right and left. I was also taught how to do the worm and dance to Queen, and what I take with me is that the most important thing here in life must be to feel free to be yourself surrounded by people you truly enjoy being around.
That’s what I am thankful for.

I had a smooth flight with great views back to San Diego and I’m writing this early a Saturday morning (thanks jetlag…), thinking that it’s actually quite nice to be back home in California.

 

Last night I made my way to the beach and watched the sun fall down behind the ocean.
Had to pinch my arm it was so pretty.



I can barely believe that I’ve already been here more than two months now, that this quarter is soon over and that Christmas is around the corner. Life keeps on turning, it ain’t perfect but it sure is beautiful.

As always, thank you for reading and take care!

Memphis and Mississippi

This week Santa Ana came to California.
It’s a catabatic wind, that is, downslope winds sinking due to gravity, from the north east. As the airmasses sink down towards the coast they’re adiabatically heated and become warm and dry. Unfortunately that also brings an increased risk of wildfires of which we currently have a couple raging in both northern and southern California. They have been incredibly devastating claiming lives and destroying whole towns. San Diego is safe for now, but it is tragic to see.

This las Friday I left California and headed towards Tennessee.
Two flights, two timezones and a temperature drop of about 40 degrees (fine 40° Farenheit, something like 22° Celcius) later I landed in Memphis where my grandfather lives with Pam. (He’s from Skåne, but has been living in the US for the last 35 years, and Pam is from Memphis).
Farfar and Pam – if you’re reading this: thank you so much for having me!

Memphis served up some cold (very cold if your inner thermostat is set on San Diego temperatures), clear weather and pretty fall colors on the leaves whirling around. We visited Shelby Farms, an old jail combined with peanut farm, that has now been turned into a park, and Thor, a welsh terrier who sure knows how to beg for food (he weighs the same as 1.5 welsh terrier, but has an ego like 5), tried to mess with a german shepard about twice his size. No luck there.


I also got to go on a roadtrip through pretty much all of Memphis in a scavenger hunt for murals and walk along the Mississippi watching the sun set over Arkansas in the west.




Memphis is said to be known for two things, barbecue and Elvis. The former I covered by having some tofu, and the latter of course meant a visit to Graceland. The mansion, the air planes (yes, Elvis had more than one airplane), the automobiles and the costumes. The Full Tour. I cannot say that I’m a hardcore Elvis-fan, but I will say that it sure was an experience.





I’ve not only walked along the Mississippi but also crossed it on a new walking bridge, thus technically speaking, I’ve been to Arkansas as well (I mean, who doesn’t have that on their bucket list?).


When Monday brought rain (Veterans Day, which is a federal holiday) we visited The Civil Rights Museum by The Lorraine Motel where Marting Luther King Jr was shot. It was most thought provoking and well set up, and it will sure take some time to process all I learned about how terribly wrong people used to be about the worth of different people (hint: we are all equal), and how horribly people used to treat each other, as well as how incredibly brave those who fought for civil rights were.

After that it was time to head to Memphis Airport where these lines are written. The smell of french fries is positively all pervasive (it smells like a McDonalds kitchen, times a hundred) and comes from the four different food places here (BBQ, Hamburgers, BBQ with chicken or BBQ with sports on big TV-screens). Hopefully I’ll be home in San Diego tonight despite being rerouted via Dallas due to delays.

As always, thank you for reading all the way down here, and have a great week.

Adios! 

Fake blood and frantic studies

Survived both my midterms and Halloween.

I cannot say that Halloween is something that I’ve celebrated a lot in Sweden, but here it’s a big thing. Huge really, and lot of money and effort is put into it. We decided to invite some people over to our house on the day after the ”real” Halloween (which is celebrated on the 31st of October) as people hade midterms.

Turns out that preparing for a Halloween party and decorating your house is a really nice way of procrastinating studying for midterms, and I might have thrown myself into decorating with a little bit more enthusiasm than studying, but some black and white paper, a pair of scissors and some tape and glue sure did the trick.

We decided to dress up as the four characters from the movie ”Mean Girls”, hence all the pink (yes, the party was originally intended to be on a Wednesday, if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll get this reference), but we added some scare with fake blood, scars and open wounds, ghosts, spiderweb and a beer pong table in the basement.

”The ÅÄÖ Sorority” is what we call ourselves. Greek Life, that is, fraternities and sororities with a bunch of Geek letters for names that organises parties, is a big thing here, but we felt it was kind of pricey and also very geared towards first year students, hence we decided to run with our own Swedish sorority – ÅÄÖ (I mean, we already have a house, and I have to admit I find the name kind of clever…).

Apart from fake blood and frantic studies the week has also delivered some pretty cool views of San Diego covered in fog. Relatively speaking, it’s not very cold here, but the temperature difference between night and day, and between land and sea, is enough to produce some pretty impressive white masses (but there are no photos of that, since it’s all white…).

Next week a somewhat slower tempo hopefully awaits, and a trip to Memphis.

Stay tuned…     

Plumbing and hot springs

It is not that I’m not having a great time over here in California, but for the record I just want to emphasis that not all days are sunshine and beach time despite what it might seem from what I’m posting here. This weeks top happenings included writing a difficult midterm and fixing a blockage in the kitchen sink. The latter required all forms of tricks and crawling around on the kitchen floor in dirty dishwater in an attempt to play plumber. Very unglamorous, but we managed to solve it in the end.

When the weekend rolled around, so did a friend from my class back in Lund who has spent her summer working in Kansas. Saturday morning we took off on a roadtrip, together with a Los Angeles based friend of hers, with a little hike and some hot springs as our goal. But nothing went quite as planned.

Google maps took us down the wrong road (or maybe we did wrong by trusting Google maps?) and after some serious off-road driving, on what I would hesitate to even call a dirt road, in a small Honda Fit (doable, but not something I would recommend for the faint of heart) we had to get out of the car and walk to the gatekeeper at the start of the trail. After a little detour (we had to walk back to the car, drive it around and come back another way befor they let us in…) we were finally walking along a sandy path with great views.


The path was a part of the PCT, (Pacific Crest Trail, a legendary trail along the North American west coast) and there was a river and geothermal hot springs at the bottom of one of the ravines. Maybe I was expecting somewhat more of a ”untouched nature” experience, but there are a lot of people here in California (about four times as many as in Sweden, on the same area), and the clock was drawing towards the late afternoon, so of course we were not first on site.

And would you believe, we’re sitting in one of the hot springs speaking Swedish and a voice says ”Är ni också från Sverige?” (”Are you from Sweden too?”) and that it turns out to be a bunch of exchange students from Lund University attending UC Santa Barbara, and we realise we have a bunch of mutual Facebook friends. So yes, the world may be big, but in certain places there are a lot of people in it.

We crawled out of the ravine and caught the last rays of sunshine as they made way for the impending night sky which was a sight to see. Once we were back in civilisation (paved roads were a nice change of terrain) we realised I had missed the last bus back to San Diego, and I prepared to stay the night with the others in LA and catch a bus back in the morning. About the hit the showers, my friend realised she had misread the departure time for her flight back to Kansas, and that it was early Sunday morning, not late at night. So we did a midnight run to LAX and dropped her off before heading for bed for a couple of hours. As the sun rose over suburban Los Angeles I caught an Uber with a driver who took me through a misty LA down to the bus station in 90 miles per hour, all while blasting Lady Gaga over the speaker system. I boarded a Greyhound bus, watched Southern California blanketed in fog through the window and arrived alive and well in San Diego about 30 hours after first leaving.

Like I said, nothing went quite as planned, but it was pretty fun anyways.
The blockage in the kitchen sink too. At least afterwards. There is a silver lining to every cloud.

This week more midterms awaits. And Halloween.
Not sure what scares me the most.

Thank you for reading, and have a lovely week!

Schoolwork and stargazing

Sometimes you wonder where the time went.
The week passed by faster than I could blink. Midterms are coming up and thus plenty to do in school. And for some strange reason it seems like times with a lot of school work always coincides with a lot of things to do outside of school. It this a coincidence? Or maybe it’s because you’re trying to escape from school stuff and therefore you come up with a bunch of other stuff to do as well?

This week I’ve wrangled difficult homework and course books that feel they are written in Chinese and not English (and I only speak the latter, not the former…). But we’ve also been to the movies and watched ”A Star Is Born”, which was very good, and we managed to scramble together a little camping trip over the weekend (like I said, things tend to coincide).

We rented camping gear from school over the weekend, and Saturday morning we crammed all our things in a rental car and headed for Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. It is located about an hour east from San Diego. A rocky and dry landscape with small villages consisting of only a couple of houses along the old highway 80. We summited Stonewall Peak at 5730ft (about 1700 m above sea level), kept an eye out for rattlesnakes and could draw patterns in the dust on our legs afterwards.

Then we headed even more east along Interstate Highway 8 and passed endless boulders in a landscape that looked nothing like I’ve seen before. We ended up at an old Desert Tower built in the 1920’s. Today it is a quirky museum and curiosity shop run by a quaker family with a bunch of dogs, chickens and peacocks around.


We had reserved a campsite ahead of time (no such thing as ”allemansrätt” in this country…), and set up our tent amongst stones and cacti. Regarding the cacti, they are a curious thing. There are videos on Youtube, and stories going around, about a cacti species called ”Jumping Jollas”. Described as some sort of man-hunting, thorny monsters that can literally jump onto you, if they get a chance they will put their roots in you via their thorns. Of course we couldn’t help but poke at them a little with a stick, but the ones we met seemed very meek. Other cacti just looked cool.

Eating our packed dinner of nachos and salsa (and some vegetables too, a very balanced diet…) while the sun disappeared behind the mountains, when then lay down under blankets watching a gazillion stars while the day’s desert heat slowly made way for the night chill.


With four people in a tent with extra thick down sleeping bags, the chill was no problem though, and the next morning we packed up the car and headed back to San Diego. We had a somewhat bizarre breakfast stop at a casino with a view over the iron fenced border to Mexico. At 10 am on a Sunday morning the casino was already filling up and the ethnical division between guests and staff was just what you would have expected. The breakfast menu in the restaurant was probably as American as it gets (though they had oatmeal for me), and the portion size too. With full stomachs and amazed minds we headed back home and spent the rest of the weekend studying.

There will likely be more of that this weekend, studying that is, and maybe some preparations for Halloween which is coming up.

Adios amigos,
Take care!

Philosophising and signs

It is fascinating how fast you reach a ”new normal”
I’ve been in the states for a whole month now and I cannot really decide if it feels like a lot more or a lot less. You get into a rhythm. You get used to everything from the sound of the fighter jets from the nearby airfield practising loops, to the sweat producing hills on the way to school and reading all the food labels as a vegan (them Americans, hiding milk and cheese in everything from bread to cereal and pizza-dough…)

I’m biking to school on my emerald green secondhand bike with blue fenders. I’m remembering to take left and not right by the bush with all the hummingbirds. I’m not forgetting to adress my professors with their titles and saying ”thank you” to the bus driver. I’m starting to figure out where to buy groceries (Trader Joe’s has the best hummus, Ralph’s the cheapest fruit and Whole Foods the best tea) and how the oven in the house works. Though I’m not fluent in Fahrenheit yet, I still need to calculate to get to Celsius (subtract 32 and multiply with 0.55, -ish…). I’ve ordered a clothes rack and a small desk for my little corner over the staircase and finally moved out of my suitcase. Oh, and I got myself a guitar too, my new Ibanez AW54 and I are already the best of friends…

To sum up: it feels as if I’m slowly starting to build up a little life here. Looking at the bigger picture, it’s not too different from back home in Sweden, I mean, the things you’re doing are kind of the same. You study/work, buy groceries, cook dinner, work out, hang out with friends etcetera. Maybe that the frame holding all these activities is a little different. It’s a different climate, a little different society. I am very grateful to get to test out the frame that is San Diego for a year, but I’m also very willing to admit that it isn’t perfect all the time, there are definitely good and bad things. Just like back home. Just like anywhere I guess.  

Enough philosophising.
This week’s comment on cultural differences between Sweden and the USA comes in the form of signs. I’m not sure what it is, but it seems like everything you step outside you’re overwhelmed with information on how to act. For example the roadsigns here are plentiful and sometimes not too easy to understand.

”PED XING” painted on the road? Took me a solid week to get that it means a ”PEDESTRIAN CROSSING” ahead. Get it? ”X” looks like a cross, so ”crossing”. Like I said, took me a while to figure that one out.

The signs telling you what you can and cannot do are quite a few.
In the classroom we’re told ”No Pets Allowed” and ”Footwear is required to be worn at all times”. Down at Scripps we’re practically at the beach and people go surfing during lunchbrearks, so I guess there is some validity to that last one though.
In the park The City of San Diego just wants to remind you not to bring your off-road four-wheeler and take it out for a spin, and that the park is not the place to practice your golf-swing, which I guess makes sense?

It isn’t just signs here though. Everything seems to have a message (hidden or in plain sight, or hidden in plain sight – confusing, right?). The cars are full of stickers, telling you everything from which National Parks the car’s owner has visited to what they are voting for. And if it isn’t stickers it’s custom-made holder for your licence plate, ”______ Alumni” (insert Ivy-league school of your choice) and ”GO _______” (insert football/soccer/basketbal/baseball team of your choice).

Even what people are wearing is a means of communication and a way to signal your opinion and what group you  belong (or want to belong) to. The UCSD campus has its own bookstore (and several restaurants and gyms, a police station, an Amazon pickup point, a post office, a health clinic etc), in two stories where only one is dedicated to books. The other one is all UCSD merchandise. And we’re not talking the regular t-shirt/hoodie/tote-bag in two different colors here. Oh no. This store has it all. Everything. Underwear, socks, workout apparel, hats, beanies, keychains, notebooks, pens, water bottles, backpacks and more, all in a variety of styles and colors. You can get dressed all UCSD everything and use only UCSD branded stuff all day if that is what you want. And how about some UCSD spirit for you dog too with a branded dog-scarf? A little UCSD bib for the baby (read: future UCSD student) perhaps?

What’s most fascinating to me is all the merchandise for the families of the students. ”UCSD Mom” and ”UCSD Dad” (plus of course granddad/grandma) can be found on t-shirts, hoodies, thermo-coffee mugs, licence plate holders and even wineglasses. But for some reason there was only ”UCSD Mom” wine glasses – doesn’t dad drink wine?

I’m going to stop pouring irony into these words and stop mocking what’s here called ”school spirit”. I mean, it is completely reasonable to be proud of studying at a great school and to show it. It’s community building. My little inner Swede having grown up with this thing called ”jantelagen” (google it!) squirms, but will get used to it eventually I guess.

Now, time to head to the beach. (Definitely a part of this San Diego frame that I like…)
Have a great week!