Kanotpolo

I haven't biked that much since my last post. After taking a 35 km tour I realised I had to slow down the pace a bit after my knees protested. Hopefully I'll be back in the saddle before I leave Linköping on Thursday. I have, however, been doing other sports since last time. Last Saturday I and most of the other Gozinto members started what will hopefully be a yearly tradition by arranging a reunion for our alumni members (of course called Golumns). What Gozinto is? Shortly one might say that Gozinto is a student consulting group. The goal is to be a "learning bridge" between the academic world and the business world. We do real consulting assignments for real companys and charge real money. We just charge a tad bit less than for example Accenture.

Anyway, first stop on the Golumni day was kanotpolo (I have no idea what the sport might called in english). I had missed out on this activity last year and so many people had talked about how fun it was so I was really looking forward to it. What you do is that be you have two teams, consisting of 5 people each with each person wearing a hockey helmet and sporting a quite sturdy kayak (this particular brand was called "Revenge", don't ask me why). The kayaks were quite manuverable which also means they were quite easy to do eskimoo-turns in, or at least do them half the way as a couple of people. did... (not me though). The water was around 10 degrees "warm" by the way. The goal of the game is to score goals in the other teams goal, which was a 1 by 1½ metre square raised in the air. You're not allowed to paddle with the ball or hold it longer than 5 seconds. You are however allowed to tackle (or should I say ram) with the kayak and even push other people when you're defending. It was so much fun playing. The teams were even and the spirit was high. Everybody wanted to win but not enough to hurt the other team members physically (which usually is a good thing, if you're not playing blood sports). I can definitely recommend this for any group that needs to have som sort of team building experience. I'm even considering joining the real team when I return from Grenoble.

After kayaking we had a sauna with plenty of singing and a beer or two and after that it was time to go home and switch clothes to go to Nationernas Hus, which is a student owned pub, in the centre of Linköping. We had a taco buffet which was decent and the spirits were high. Quite a few of the people in Gozinto are former members of what's in Swedish called a festeri. They have basically worked an entire year without pay and arranged parties for the rest of us students. This duty includes plenty of singing and there were some real nice songs sung during the evening. Real singing, mind you, in several harmonies (stämmor).

All in all it was a great day!

First real entry

Hey everybody!

First off. I realize that a ridiculously large percentage of the people reading this has Swedish as their mother tongue, but since I still have some non-Swedish friends I'll probably write in English, at least most of the times.

My hopes are that this blog will be an easy way for you to keep you updated with what I'm doing and thinking. It's going to be tough giving you a resumé of my first two years here in Linköping so I hope one of the latest week will do.

I've started biking with biking shoes after an "intense" lobbying campaign from my older brother. I wasn't that hard to convince but anyway. Biking with biking shoes is quite an interesting experience, especially when you forget that you have them on. Imagine one of those nature films, where they cut down a huge tree and it's slowly falling over, and you'll get an idea on how it looked when I fell in the woods the other day (in a large puddle of mud, of course). Need I say that my shoes are not that clean anymore?

Yesterday I got a flat tire which was a bit annoying since I was 4 kilometres into a bike trail in the woods and about 9 kilometres from home. In the end it worked out great. After two kilometres of walking in bike shoes (I don't reccomend it one bit) I entered a small community and ended up in the backyard of a house owned by a police man and his family. The guy had a bike chain tattoed on his upper arm and "bike cog" in silver around his neck. I couldn't have ended up in a better place. He fixed my tire (!) and soon after that I was on my way home. Absolutely amazing and a good reminder that kindness is cool.

Oh, and I got a scholarship for my Grenoble year. It feels great that some hard work actually payed off. Ask me about it if you want to know more.

Barbeque season has begun. We had a little get-together yesterday with my "kids" from the first year at my program. (Maybe you can't tell but I only drank juice.) Had a lovely time anyway.
Well. The weather's too nice to do blogwork. More later. Do write comments...