Tuesday morning fever

I'm at home today since I felt like I was coming down with a fever this morning. I'm still getting a little of that cold sweat and feeling somewhat lethargic, but the headache is mostly gone.

On the upside I've been in contact with the tax people and they said I could expect my personal number within the week. Hopefully I'll be able to get my salary this week too. Not getting my due pay was NOT part of my plans this summer.

I've also spoken with Amnesty in Finland and put my membership on a hiatus since I can't afford the fee. I'm glad that went as easy as it did.

Now to do some post-processing I've been putting off for way too long...

Soon in again, out.

Sport fans

Lots of people have gathered upstairs here at the barracks, supposedly to view the football (Soccer, for you Amerikanski.) match. As you can see from these images, they don't particularly care about the match.


ED: I spelled Ritwik's name wrong on the image, but I'm too lazy to edit it.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

City-limp

Monday, day of writing, for once. This afternoon I made my way to the bank to hear about being able to log into my account over the net and check if the money my parents sent my have arrived. I made sure to walk as little as possible and utilize public transporartion to the maximum extent. By the end of the day I felt damned lazy.

Turned out that the money had been registered on my account but would for some strange, strange reason not actually be usable until tomorrow.
When I tried to log on to my account at home it turned out it still wasn't able to do so. I'll have to revisit the bank and ask what's up.

I also visited the Nordjob office to fetch some mail that had arrived for me. I was going to go to the tax-office thing and clear something up about my ID but they closed before I was done with my other tasks. I have already showed them my ID so I have no idea what's holding them. When I get there I'll have to ask them to hurry up as much as possible with my papers.

Still one post with pictures coming up from last Saturday, but I haven't post-processed those yet so that will probably be a task for tomorrow, or the day after. - When you have a lot to write about you don't have a lot of time to do the writing.

One wounded-but-still-going-strong expat signs out.

"Grytan", Saturday 17.06.06

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nosforit/sets/72157594169691235/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nosforit/sets/72157594169691235/

What a weekend

I have a hole in my shin the size of my thumbnail. The hole is sewn shut with I think three stitches. "Why?" you ask? Elementary, my dear Watson! - I fscked up. On a really simple thing too, which makes me feel as dumb as the shadow of half a rock...

On Saturday's Parkour jam I decided to photograph instead of participate. The jam was the stuff of legends and consequently on the jam on the day after I was really psyched about the whole thing. I was well-prepared and full of energy. And before we even get started I decided I was going to hop up with both my feet simultaneously on a ledge a bit higher than my waist.
It's probably no suprise; I bail. I screw up. My toes slip from the ledge and I crash down on the stone ledge with both my shins. This of course is painful, but not more painful than I'm used to so I think I just managed to scratch some skin off. I sit up on the same ledge and when I'm about to check for damage I notice the right leg of my pant has big spots of blood on it. Roll it up and violá; I can see what I think is bone through a deep hole the size of my thumbnail.

After the gang has taken a good look and everybody has confirmed I won't be participating today either plans are drawn up for getting me to a hospital to get it sew shut. Luckily for me a 'new' guy has got band-aid with him, so I slap on a full length of about 15cm of it, as no one brought scissors.
While this is happening we work out the theory that my right shin probably hit the ledge where two pieces of stone meet and form sharp corners on each side of the space between them. My shin probably got punctured by one of them.

Finally we work out that the nearest hospital is Södermalm and that it's easily reachable by the subway followed by the bus. A guy called Caspian from the gang kindly offers to take me there, and off we go. - Shouldn't travel alone when one's injured like this.

After having asked a security guard for directions we find the bus station, and luckily again the bus is quick to arrive. We go straight to the hospital and the ER. The sign-in is relatively easy since I just happen to have exactly the cards I need to get med-care for 'free' and then I'm off to the... waiting room.

After a while a nurse arrives and I show her my boo-boo. When she asks how I accomplished it I explain to her what Le Parkour is. She tells me she's seen it on TV and that it looks dangerous. I find myself agreeing with her. She runs off with the papers I got at sign-in.

I wait some more and a male nurse arrives and leads me to an op-room. He fetches a bed for me to lie on. A third nurse arrives and carts me out of the op-room and into a waiting booth. She bandages the wound and I explain to her too what Le Parkour is. She hasn't seen it on TV. She tells me the M.D. will be with me soon.

I wait.

I wait more.

More!!

I eventually start falling asleep and like a charm the M.D. arrives. I explain to him what Le Parkour is. He and the nurse cart me back to the same op-room I was in before and soon he's injecting painkillers around the wound and begins cleaning it. I find it funny I can still feel temperature while I can't feel anything else around the wound. He tells me that's because it's different nerves that deliver that info. (Can't figure out how or why they'd develop a selective painkiller for that though.) Soon he's sewing it shut and I lean to the side to try to watch. I really can't feel a thing even as he pierces the skin with the needle and pulls on it.
Throughout the whole ordeal the pain has been minimal too. It just hurt for short while just after I injured myself. After that the worse pain was when I pulled the band-aid off my hairy leg.

Plaster on, the M.D. disappears for a short while and returns with a recepy for painkillers. He tells me to wait in the op-room where someone's supposed to bring the pills.
Half an hour of WAITING later a nurse arrives and asks if a doc has already looked at me, hinting at the blood on the leg of my pant. I tell her I'm supposed to wait for some pills. She looks at my recepy and says that she thinks I should go get it at the pharamacy instead. I have the breif thought that doing that would probably cost me money, so I just basically say "the doctor told me so".
She runs off somewhere to look for the doctor. I decide I'm fed up with waiting and promptly split.

At the pharmacy I find out that the painkillers will indeed cost me money in spite of the recepy. And since my economy is next to extinct I'm left without pills. But it doesn't hurt to bad so I take the subway to the closest station and walk home. At home I take 400mg ibuprofen, which is the last pill I have.


Today I've switched the patch on the wound and there's still a bit of blood and plasma seeping out, but I think it'll close shut proper tonight. I didn't go to work today even if the M.D. told me when I asked that I probably could. It didn't feel right. I doubt he realized how much I move around at work, come to think of it...

Oh well. Pics from last Saturday on their way. I shot more than just Parkour that day. And I have some stuff from today to write about too.

Blog-lag

Well, the last batch of images are fairly old and I have been a bit lazy in updating the blog , but I don't have much material to add either...

The last few days have been very warm, and I would not be surprised if the thermometer has reached 30 C more than once. I have become particlarly sensitive to the heat it seems, so I've been rather uncomfortable.
Today however, blissfully, hasn't been as hot. It even rained today and the current temp is a few degrees below 20 and dropping as the sun descends.
Still, I'm perfectly content sitting here without a shirt and the window open. Apparently I have not only become sensitive to the heat, but somehow actually grown resistant to cold.

My economy isn't really all it could be right now, and since my SS number still hasn't arrived yet I can't sign my contract and get paid. I have to, reluctantly, bowrrow a bit more money from my parents.
...Well, I should be overjoyed that I actually CAN borrow money. It's not a thing to be taken for granted.

I intend to pay everything I've borrowed back ASAP and postpone that purchase of the mobile phone I wrote about. The phone is a luxury I don't actually need right now, nor one I'd use to any greater extent, so it's easy to put the whole thing on hold. My parents on the other hand probably do need the money since they recently discovered that the water damage isn't contained to the bathroom, but actually extends to what amounts to half of the house. They've already started tearing up the floor.

I wish I could be there to help... but there's really no practical way for me to do that. I have to sit here on the other side of the pond and send them well-wishes.

Expat out.

These images are from last week. 06.06.06 to be exact. It was Sweden's National Day. I'll explain more tomorrow, since the bed now awaits me. =)

Le Parkour pictures

Took my camera to last Sunday's Parkour, to shoot rather than train. The result:

http://flickr.com/photos/nosforit/

Examples:







Nordjob's got something scheduled for us at 16:00, though I haven't actually bothered to find out what it is. Today's the Swedish national day, so it's of course somethig related. I guess I'll find out about the details when I head out.

Le Parkour

I'm hurtin' all over. I think there isn't a muscle in my body which didn't get a thorough workout yesterday. But it was fun; a real blast. Apparently I'm not completely without talent for the sport even if I'm a complete newbie.
We kept at it for almost six hours, but half of us disappeared after we ate at Burger King. Today I'm going to tag along with more experienced PKists with my camera, and since the weather is very nice right now I can probably promise you some rather fine shots later this evening.

Retro-vision: Day Five

Day five... Saturday. Already. Actually, no; not quite 'already'. Though it feels like I just got here, it simultaneously feels as if the days have absolutely crawled by since so much has happened. An odd ambivalnce. Time isn't just relative; it's quantum. The cat is both dead and alive at the same...time. - Hmm. Need to think about that some more.


Yesterday another Nordjobber like me knocked on my door and asked me to come out and chat, and lo and behold almost everyone in the whole building had gathered in the kitchen for a sort of multicultural amalgam picnic. The thought of Muhammed and the mountain came to mind, except both I came to the culture and the culture came to me. More than I bargined for, for sure. And I have pictures to prove it.
I actually knew about the picnic thing, but it kind of slipped my mind inbetween the cracks of everything I had to do. It didn't seem to concern me at the time, but obviously I was mistaken. Not that I really know how I would have managed to come up with something worthy to offer in a timely manner...
Well, after having chatted with a lot of the new Nordjobbers I had the time to talk with a Brazilian girl named Uana. She'd gone to an university in Sao Paulo (Spelling?) and was on her way on a career in some unspecific multinational when she decided that wasn't her thing, and then she traveled to Europe; an unspecific city in England, then Kopenhagen and then Stockholm. To memory, she'd studied electrical engineering in Sao Paulo and then something regarding the environment here in the Old World. She knew what biodiversity meant, and I used that term to say that in general Sthml has more of it than Helsinki. Though I could have said Sthml has more variety... But I digress.

As I had nothing to offer I felt it was inappropriate for me to participate in their feast, though in my book I'd already gotten plenty out of it. It was amazing to see how closely knit these people from all over the world have become. They're certainly setting a very nice example for us who are moving in to follow. While the location and housing is below par for sure, the spirit of this place is out of this world. I'm going to do my best to ensure it stays with us, requested or not. It'll be a thing to make this all worth remembering for everybody.


Uana seems to have left today. This morning I did have a chance to talk with her, but she must have assumed I knew since she didn't mention a thing. She left a message behind on our whiteboard saying she's left, along with her email address. - I'm going to email her the pictures I took yesterday. I think she'll like that.


Oh. My first day of work has been once again postponed; to Monday, 6:30. The pay will be better than I assumed and I'll probably be putting in quite a few hours, so that's mundo cash for me. Here's to hoping they'll be easily earned too. Hehe.

And finally, alas, I could not make it to this Saturday's Le Parkour. I was going to check the time and location at the State Library, but they opened at 12:00 and I couldn't get a time on a computer with a net connection until half an hour later. Then at scheduled time I found out that they'd started at 11:00. Better luck next week, I guess...

All I can think of for now. Time to study Japanese. Out, I sign.

Retro-vision: Sqeek!

Sqeek! The rubber feet of my laptop go; the desk is so clean. The rest of my room is equally so, but getting it in this state was no small task. I first vacuumed, then mopped and even had to take a microfiber cloth drenched in soapwater to the floor before it stopped being icky. I can finally sit down to stretch my much over-used legs. (6h + 10h of walking two days and yesterday. No kidding.) I'm gonna try my outmost to have the cost of doing this professionally deducted from my rent, since I shouldn't need to do this in the first place...

I've also began studying Japanese again. Got a library card which might be good for all libraries in Stockholm and borrowed a book and a beginners course on the language. The book says it should take about two years before I'm for example able to read a Japanese newspaper without a dictionary. Still, my main short-term goal is to be able to communicate in a Japanese web forum, which is slightly easier since one has the time to look up the words one wishes to use. That's how I learned English proper and you may judge the result on your own.
My spoken English is not at the level of my writing, but that's mainly an issue of pronounciation. I guess I'll at some point make an Expat Experience in Great Britain... and by surmission eventually in Japan aswell.

I'm learning Japanese by reading books for people who speak English, and after having learned Japanese to a decent level I plan to learn Spanish. It thus follows that I'll learn Spanish through books written for nihonphones. And end up in a Spanish speaking country at some point too.
...Provided I survive Stockholm.

It stopped raining, so I'm out to go find something edible. And inexpensive.

Retro-vision: Day Three

Ah, silence. Finally. I thought I was going to go insane yesterday when for some odd reason people stayed up talking and noisily walking past my door until 0:30 when I was trying to sleep. I finally gave up and ventured out into the Stockholm night in search of an open pharmacy that might have earplugs. There was a lot of people out partying as Thursday, today, is a holliday. It was slightly creepy walking around people making all that noise when I myself was tired as hell.

Eventually I did reach an open pharamacy and bought earplugs, but as I was about to return the subway had closed for an hour or two that night. Incidentally the subway was something else keeping me awake, since it runs maybe 50 meters from my window.

Retro-vision: Day One

Finally over. I've done so much walking I at times felt my knees were going to explode into a gooy mess on the sidewalk, manifest the corporal form of anger and attack me with switchblades. But the essentials are at least taken care of. I've got a roof over my head, but I estimate that roof to be approximately two millimeters thick plastic. Same with the walls. These are barracs converted into corridors; where a whole bunch of us live down a long corridor and share kitchen, showers and laundry machines. Towards the summer there'll almost entirely us Nordjobbers here, which means we can pretty much do as we like. Provided we get along.

When I first saw this dump I immediately thought "Hell no" followed by trying to get the gods to tell me it's the wrong place. But I actually knew when I saw it. This is where I'll be staying for the summer. My vehemt complains amounted to formailty.
Then again, when I first saw the place I was dead tired. Now I've had the time to rest, talk with a few people here and take a shower that felt like being licked clean by silver tounged cherubs... and obviously my opinion has changed as a result. I now see the different possibilites, each holding vastly more value to me than all the problems. A bit of touching-up, something on the walls and the floor, and this place'll be just fine. Hopefully I'll be able to get authorization for the wireless network here, and then, with the world once again at my figertips I should be quite happy.
The previous resident who I estimate to have left in early April left behind a pair of those cheap plastic speakers you get with a new package PC, so I hooked up my MP3 player to it and now I've got sweet, sweet musak massaging my audiotory nerves. This previous resident, named Jing Ni, probably from China, left behind a bunch of other things too. These things include two pieces of mail (which I haven't decided what to do with yet), a book written with his native language, a bunch of magazines (no pr0n - checked), these stickers that give off various scents when scratched (they'll be fun), a bag of candy (For me? Edible?), and alas, a whole bunch of dirt and dust.

The place should have been clean when I moved in. That's the way it works. - When you move out, you clean the place up. - But he (or she, come to think of it, hence lack of pr0n) might have left in a hurry. (Maybe the book is pr0n...? I hear chicks prefer something left to the imagination.) I kinda get that impression.
Either way, (Or maybe he had a laptop like me.) I'm gonna ask to have the cost of cleaning the place up deducted from my rent. (Not that I have pr0n on mine. *Cough*) This is resonable, and as far as I know standard practice in Finland. My uncle is very kindly bringing me some cleaning supplies tomorro afternoon so I can fix the place up. Then I'm thinking... pastelles. (Spot the quote!)

I won't be able to post this until tomorrow at the earliest. Oh, right. I forgot about the plane ride. I've got lots of pictures of that too. Gotta post-process a bit...(And stop using so many parenthesii.)

It's 22:20 Sthlm local time. Started raining heavily again. Goodnight.

Pictures!

And thus with spreading happiness I arrived in Stockholm. The posts I wrote in my offline days are now to follow.
Aplogies for the smashed continuity.

Online!

This blog-station is fully operational!

Will begin prepping posts now.

Thank god it's Friday

Finally, the weekend. Not that I think the work's bad, but if I got paid to waste time I'd of course rather do that.
Today was a bit of an odd day at work since some maniac(s) had sawed down a bunch of trees and barnches in a park. They certainly put a lot of effort into the wanton act of vandalism, but the purpose is a big mystery. All they've accomplished is cost the taxpayers money.

The newly graduating students are crusing around the city on lorreys, blasting music with at least three PA systems. We did something similar when we graduated, but not at this scale. The city's roads are also congested, so a lot of the time I spent at the wheel today was just waiting rather than driving. Quite a mess. I should have brought my camera.

Parkour tomorrow. Yay! I'm gonna stretch a lot this evening and make sure I'm ready for vigorous exercise. I'm actually somewhat excited.

Bouncing off,

...And fourth

At the library again. Yesterday a guy living in our barracs and I conceived of a plan to arrange for us Nordjobbers to get online, and hopefullt he'll have news about that when I get back. The web works just fine here at the library, but it's web only; not the rest of the net. Would be nice to get Gaim up and running again. And post the pictures I've taken...

Also found out that my pay from my jobb is for some strange reason always delayed one month. I'll have to ask them to pay up early, lest I run outta cash.

Can't do anything 'bigger' money-wise without a social security number either. Consider this Lesson One that I've learned.

Time's running out.