Blast...

I spoke too soon.

I'm up to my 5th cancellation and 6th booking.

I Love Belgium (and Belgians)

I know I said to expect posts about Prague, but I haven't gotten around to working on that and after going to The Netherlands, the idea of tackling both trips is rather daunting. I suppose I should work on that, but I'm going to go a bit out of order and write a bit about the trip I'm on now. This isn't going to have pictures because I'm working from a friend's computer and I always like to sort through the photos before I post them, so a more detailed description will be posted later. This is kind of a pain to type too because this laptop has a French keyboard.

I love Belgium. I also love Bretagne and Normandy. Mostly what I love is Belgians though.

I can only speak of about 50% of the population because I've only come into contact with Walloons and have only spoken to a few Flemish people for very brief amouts of time. Spending time with the Golliers, the Werbroucks, and their friends has shown me that the country is not only characterized by chocolate, beer, waffles, statues of urinating children, and diamonds, but also big, lively, long-lived, happy families and a distinctly non-french French accent.

Initially this trip was only supposed to be 6 days but because of the recent volcanic activity in Iceland, my flight was cancelled 4 times and I've booked 5 different times.

Luckily for me I am staying with a super awesome family. I've had an absolute blast with the Werbroucks and will find it very hard to leave them. Wivine and Vincent are so welcoming and together with their children, Cedric, Morgane, Gaetan, Camille, and Loic, family dinners are always a riot. Feels like home!

Another American girl, Jenny, came to visit too. She knew Cedric from back when they were in school together in Tennessee and stayed for a few days. She is apparently studying in a very expensive part of Southern France.

We got to meet several of Cedric's friends as well. I met several at one dinner- these were the students he went to Corsica with, and met a few others, Antoine, Martin, and Nicolas when we went out. His cousin and her boyfriend also met up with us at a bar (on a boat in a canal) about 30 min from where he lives.

It's awesome when you feel so at home halfway around the world.

European rankings

So after doing a bit of traveling, I've decided that the top 3 most attractive European countries are as follows:

1. Denmark (hands down, the best looking people by far)
2. Sweden (the handsome ones are seeeriously awesome eye-candy)
3. Belgium (NO I am not biased at all. Belgium is definitely up there)

Easter (and the decline of the Church) in Sweden

It's Easter!

Biking back from SLU today I had to take great care in not mowing down vast hoards of children dressed thusly:

Note that I wasn't the one who took pictures of these pink-cheek-painted, freckle be-daubed, headscarfed children because I was not brave enough to dash out to any of their parents and beg to photograph their kids so images could be posted across the web on this unknown American's blog.

In the olden days, Swedes believed Easter was witches time. On the Thursday before Easter, witches were supposed to have flown off to Blåkulla, Blue Mountain, to meet with the Devil. Now, little kids dress up as witches and walk around town knocking on people's doors, taking along their painted eggs and handmade cards to trade for sweets.

You also see a lot of these in windows and shops:

They're decorations derived from a somewhat disturbing tradition that the Swedes had for a while. In the past, kids used to whip each other with birch switches to remind one another of the pain Jesus suffered (although I personally don't believe this is the lesson most kids took from such an activity).

This is, for most Swedes, a cultural holiday as opposed to a religious one. This brings me to the country's religious history, which I actually find very interesting.

Prior to the 11th C. Swedes believed in Norse paganism and worshipped the Æsir gods. Their pagan stronghold was actually centered in Uppsala at the Temple in Uppsala. Cool, no? I almost can't believe I'm living in a place with so much history!

With the Christianization of Sweden in the 11th C. however, laws were passed that forbade the worship of any other god into the late 1800s. Then in the 1530s after the Protestant Reformation the church and state were separated and the Roman Catholic bishops were stripped of their power. This led to the rise of Lutheranism (note that I'm including these links because I absolutely cannot keep divisions of Christianity straight so I figured this would be helpful to any readers). Between then and the 18th C. non-Lutherans who played a large role in the economy's growth (Wikipedia says: Calvinist Dutchmen, the Moravian Church and Walloons or French Huguenots from Belgium) were allowed to live and practice in Sweden as long as they kept a low religious profile. Until 1860 it was illegal for Lutheran Swedes to convert to any other religion.

The 1800s began with the introduction of free churches and ended with the introduction of secularism, which led many Swedes to distance themselves from Church rituals. Finally in 1951 it became legal for Swedes to withdraw from the Church and remain so without being forced to enter another denomination. In a welcome meeting SLU held for us, we also learned that when this law was formed, 20% of Swedes withdrew from the Church.

In 2008, 72.9% of Swedes were still part of the Church of Sweden. Apparently, this number has been declining by 1% for the past 20 years, with Church services attracting less than 10% of the population. Free churches though, have a higher attendance rate.

Many Swedes are still considered part of the Church because up until 1996 all children were automatically included in the system if one parent was. After 1996 however, only children who are christened would be considered members of the Church. My Swedish buddy, Matilda, told me others remain members of the Church because sometimes complications with funeral services in churches can arise if the deceased was not a member.

Brief Comments on Centralized Systems

At both SLU (Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet) and Uppsala University, students are allowed to use the public printers available at the libraries on either campus. Using the system is easy, but setting it up has been one of the hugest pains I've had to deal with while studying here.

In order to print, you need a print card, which is your login card for whatever printer you wish to use. You get this card about 2 weeks after you've begun classes and things get rolling. However, you still can't print because you have no credit on the account. To get credit, you have to add money to an online account with a company called PayEx, which acts like an online bank, which then must be linked with your university account.

Usually this would only be a moderately annoying process, but this has turned into a real project. To begin with, I was given two different student accounts along with two different P-numbers (personal number- it acts much like a SSN in the US but here it's used for many more things) and different logins. Up until about two or two and a half weeks ago I'd been using the wrong account and found this out the day I created the PayEx account. After I'd linked it to the wrong one.

I ended up going back to the IT center, asked them about the accounts and was told that they would take care to delete the incorrect one and that I should use the other. Okay. No problem. Then I had to go to the printing desk to make sure my card was switched over to the correct account and would not log me in as aute0002 instead of aute0001. Then I had to log into the PayEx system and switch the account from being associated with aute0002 to 0001.

Since this all takes some time to process (and note that Swedes have one of the MOST laid back lifestyles I've ever seen, with breaks for nearly anything you can think of), one of the administrators gave me fake money--basically adding credit to my account without money to back it up--to spend on whatever I needed to print. This was supposed to be fixed within the next few days, but a week later, I printed again and realized the printer was still deducting from the fake money instead of the 100 SEK I'd deposited initially.

What?

So back I go to SLU's campus (which, mind you, is about 6 or 7 km south of where I live) to see what the problem is. They don't know when I go to the printing desk, so the man there takes my number and says Björn (the helpdesk head honcho I take it) will call me back.

Eventually we set up a time to meet and fix all of this. That would be today at 11:00. I came back to the campus, logged in, and with his help we figured out the problem now was that because I was not a Swedish citizen and because about a week ago the government demanded that banks enforce tighter control over the security of their systems, I had to send PayEx a whole mess of information to verify my identity, including a copy of my passport.

Greaaaat.

When I left the office, I forgot a notebook there and got a call from Björn again when I was back in the downtown area. I biked back to Rackabargsgatan (the street my housing compelx is on), grabbed my passport, and headed back to campus again.

THIS time, I'm hoping everything has been sorted out. Björn complains about the centralized systems too, noting that they are safer this way, but infinitely more troublesome when something goes wrong. If I was studying here for a year or more, this wouldn't be too much of a bother, but being on exchange for only a semester means it feels like more trouble than it's worth. But hey, how else am I going to print out my Ryanair boarding passes?