My new room, empty and plain.
Malmö sunset.
Rosengård.
The turning torso.
My new neighbours.
From the bus.
University Island at night.
All these lovely photos can be seen in full resolution here.
PS for Auntie karen:
First I’d like to show a couple short films so everybody can get a general idea of what it is like to study at the masters level in Interaction Design:
And that is what it is like to be an Interaction Design Student.Tonight I had dinner at Rönnen with the South Africans (Laurens, Chad, Jeune and Jeanne). I don’t want to say it was a traditional South African meal but it was delicious nonetheless. It was a salad with mushrooms, avocado, tomato, spinach, two types of cheese, bacon, and croutons, and we had baked potatoes. Jeanne was curious to know what I did for food back home at Uni Island, I told her I was cook and that she, Jeune, Laurens and Chad have to come to Uni Island some time for some of my cooking. I left there just after 22:00 to catch the bus that would take me back to Uni Isle. I’m sitting on the bus and looking out the window I can see this yellow figure approaching in the oncoming lane, it’s too big to be a bike and too small to be a car. As it gets closer i realize it is an ATV, as it passes I can see that the person driving works for the city of Malmö and being towed by the atv is a canister full of salt. I wonder how many kilometers the atv/salt truck gets to the litre?
Friday after writing my last post, I walked to centralen to catch a bus out to Rosengård. I was meeting Sebi and Soo there and we were going to a youth centre there to do some research for our project. I get off the bus at the stop we are meeting at and of course i’m the first one there. I’m in a part of Malmö i’ve never been in before and I’m standing at the bus stop just rocking out with my ipod. I look up at the overpass to my right and I can see this silhouetted figure standing there looking at me. I raise my hand slowly and wave, and then the silhouetted figure waves back, so i yell “Sebi?” and he responds back “how’s it going?” Soo showed up and we walked over to the youth center. The kids there were blown away by my hair, it was insane, I’ve never experienced anything that even comes close to those kids. They were jumping up and down, running around, touching the fro and taking pictures, it was chaos in it’s purest form. But we did get some good information from the people who worked there and the email addresses of some of the kids (aged 10-14). This will help us when we are place storming and prototype testing. After the youth centre I said goodbye to Sebi and Soo and took the bus back to centralen. I had been invited to go hang out with some other internationals at one of the student accommodations called somerstaden. At centralen I switched over to a different bus and was on my way. Having never been to somerstaden I only knew which stop to get off at. At the bus stop I call Krysta to get further directions, I’m walking down the road listening to her trying to figure out how to give me proper directions, when I see someone across the street waving at me. Turns out it is Louise who used to live in Uni Island but moved to somerstaden, that was pretty lucky, had I kept listening to Krysta’s directions I would’ve ended up in Göterberg. At Krysta’s place we meet up with a few other people and head out to a pub called “Golden.” If this was one of those beer commercials where the tag line is “enjoyed in fine establishments and questionable joints since 1964,” well this pub was definitely a questionable joint. Just as in Canada, there is no smoking in restaurants/bar/clubs…etc but Swedish pubs still cater to the smokers with designated “smoke-rooms.” A well intentioned idea until someone leaves the door open and a thick smoke billows out and spreads through the rest of the pub. We met up with Laurens, Jeune, Jeanne and Vid at Golden and we sat around the table laughing and having a good time. Things got a little interesting when a cat fight/bar brawl broke out at the table next to us. It was subdued quickly and order was returned. Marine and I had a fun time passing notes back and forth in french. And then we started getting creative with the permanent markers, I had a red heart on one hand and the words “rock ‘n’ roll” written across my knuckles. About that time a guy walked around the bar ringing a bell, last call. It was only 1am and as the blues brother would put it “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” Under the impression that I had missed my last bus I began to walk back to somerstaden with Krysta and Marine. We passed a bus station and right there was a bus getting ready to leave for centralen. I got on and then made the 15 minute walk home to Uni Island from centralen. It’s a very peaceful walk at that time of day. Saturday I had to go into school for a team meeting and afterwards there was a party at Rönnen. It was one of the smallest parties I’ve been to at Rönnen and wasn’t too much fun with the speakers cracking. I got home at 3am and knew that the group back home was getting ready for Greg’s going away party. As much as I wanted to stay up and video chat with everyone at the party, I was sitting at my computer barely able to keep my eyes open, ended up going to bed. Sunday was fun, I did my first load of laundry at Uni Island, well if you want to know how that turned out, just check out my three pairs of sky blue socks. But it was sunday and that meant one thing: Uni Island dinner, so I wasn’t to disheartened by my unfortunate sock incident. Dinner was amazing, Oliver had gone fishing saturday and caught 43 herring, yes 43, and Ariane and Verena made quiche. We didn’t eat all the herring if that’s what you’re wondering, we still have 37 left. We had the option of going to Rönnen for an International students dinner, where everybody brings food from his or her home country, I was going to go with Ariane, Verena and Oliver as an honourary German (the three of them are German), but we all agreed staying at Uni Island was the best choice and that way Nils and Eunice could join us. And this coming sunday Nils and myself are cooking at our place, we have to find a Canadian recipe and a Belgian recipe that doesn’t include chocolate, maybe I should make Bannock….. Yesterday, we had two second year students come to class (by that I mean second year masters) and they presented us the concept of computer vision, it’s not a new concept the film industry has been using it for years, but they have multiple cameras and post-production, these to students are working on having one camera and having the video shown in real time, in other words making a tool for interaction designers. The two of them presented for an hour, we took a lunch break, then came back and got to fool around with the program. We used the colour tracking to manipulate sound. Came up with some crazy “songs” by dancing around the room. I’m pretty sure Jeune has an embarassing video of me doing an mc hammer/vanilla ice impression. I’ll check tonight and put it up here if she has it. And then at 8:30 we played poker at Uni Island, I was doing well, I knocked out two people then someone decided to let Ariane play, she had been sitting the game out, just watching but now she was playing, about 5 rounds later she took me out of the game, and as i just found out about 30 minutes ago she won the game. I’ll be victorious next time.
One week ago today, the other masters students and myself took the train from Malmö over to København to check out what the students at the design university there had done for their final projects. There was a handful of projects on display, some better than others. There were two cool projects that really stood out, the first was a remote controlled car shaped like a rabbit, and it was controlled by two controllers that you would wear on your arm or even leg, then depending on how you moved your arm or leg the rabbit would move. Sebi (a Romanian in the masters programme at Malmö) and I tried it out, each taking one controller and we probably had the best time for maneuvering the rabbit around the obstacle course. The second project that was really interesting were these firefighter gloves that would allow for fire fighters to communicate to each in any situation, bend sensors in the gloves would send a message to the other pair of gloves and vice versa. The gloves were well constructed and the two guys who created them were showing everyone how the gloves worked, and there was even a sensor, i think they used sonar, that would allow in a dense smoke environment for the fire fighters to map out the room. All the projects made use of the Arduino micro-controller and definitely helped to inspire us for our project on different ways to use Arduino. After the display at the university, Anders (the Danish guy in our programme) took us to this sweet little restaurant for dinner. There was 8 of us from the masters and 3 from the undergrad programme at K3 and we talked and laughed for about an hour and a half at the restaurant, we scared the other 1 or 2 patrons out of the restaurant. We then took the train back to Malmö and arrived there around 10pm. We got back to the station and we all went our seperate ways, I was off to Rönnen (student accommodations) to check out the party that was going on. Katrin (from Germany and one of my team members) had told me horror stories of the kitchen on the 5th floor at Rönnen and that night I was witness to its horror, I left that kitchen in a hurry and headed up the 6th floor. It was pretty fun, ended up meeting three of the people from RGRA (the group we are working with for our project), one of the girls stood and starred in amazement at my hair for at least 30 mins, the other two RGRA members kept laughing at her, because we were trying to talk to her and she would be staring at the hair. I left the party around 1:30 and caught the 2:00 bus home to Åkarp. Then on Saturday, there was another birthday party for one of the cousins of the Karlssons. This was a little farther drive than the previous birthday, we drove to Kristianstad for this party. And this time the birthday boy was turning 18. It was a much better birthday party than the one a week before. A couple spoke to me in english, and one gentleman was a hockey fan, and we had a small conversation about the NHL. And the food at this party, wow, best salmon i have ever had, sooooooo good. All the other international students have no idea what’s going on outside Malmö but I have the inside hook up. Then Sunday was moving day. Anders (yes same name as the danish guy, and they both got hair cuts on the same day, but they live in two different countries) drove me and my stuff down to university island and when Anders saw my room, he commented “it’s just the basics.” It’s nothing special other than the fact that my view outside my window includes the Turning Torso. It took me Sunday night and Monday to get settled in, and now it’s starting to feel like home. Sunday night was the beginning of a Uni Island tradition, about 8-10 of us international students get together and cook supper together and hang out. It just felt like I was at home, it was so sweet. That night we made pizza, and we all agreed that we need better meals in the future, so this sunday were getting people to bring assorted dishes. Wednesday, the masters students and I went to the RGRA clubhouse to meet the rest of the people we will be working with for our project. It’s a cool little place for the youth of Malmö to hang out and stay out of trouble. When I first got there I started speaking some sort of hybrid of english and swedish, when asked where i was from is replied “fråm canadia” (the correct way to say it would be “från kanada”). Needless to say all the people there were digging the hair, and one guy was telling me of a friend of his who works in a pub in Malmö and is from Vancouver (yeah BC pride). After the meeting at RGRA, at 19:00 there was diploma ceremony for all the international students who attended the 3 week intro to swedish course. The emails informing us of the dinner/ceremony said dress smart and fancy, so of course I show up wearing my “Who” t-shirt and adidas pants. Oh yeah I was rocking out that night. They handed out certificates to all the students, and it just says “Gordon Brown has participated in the Swedish Language Course,” not a certificate that actually shows I completed the course just that I participated, I don’t even know my mark on the final exam. I’ll have to find that out. Last night I was reminded of home, as it rained Vancouver style for most of the night, and the soothing sound of raindrops on the roof put me to sleep.