A day in my Swedish life

I thought that I would write a post about a typical week day for me. My week days change quite a bit day to day and week to week depending on my thesis work but I picked one that was pretty normal.

 I woke up around 7:30 am and ate breakfast, got my school stuff together and started the long process of putting on lots of clothing layers for my bike ride to school. It takes about 25 minutes to get to the university where I am doing my thesis work. It's really not too bad except for when it rains. The only thing that can make me wish for snow is biking in the cold rain.

I bike by a lake on the way to school, I don't usually stop but I did today to take a picture and it was very beautiful even though it was a bit of a dreary day outside.

Almost to school! There is a bike path the whole way there and I usually don't see many other people until I get closer to campus. Look at these trees though! Lucky I took a picture of them because now they are basically bare and have dropped all of their leaves!

This is SLU, the university where I am doing my thesis work. I technically attend Umeå University but since they are located about 100 feet from each other they work together a lot so I was able to do my thesis here instead :). 

SLU has these really cool murals by the staircases, this is just a tiny part of one.

Then I go upstairs to the lab, put on my lab coat and start taking a bunch of samples to be tested. Above is an example of some algae I'm growing in wastewater.

I typically finish with all the samples before lunch and then after lunch I bike about 10 minutes to my Swedish class at SFI, or Swedish for immigrants. 

My Swedish classroom! It looks like I'm the only one there but there were about three others this day, but I waited until the break to take the picture. I really like my Swedish class and wish I could go more often.

After I finished Swedish class I met Alex in town while he took a break from writing a paper around 3 because we needed to show the tax office our marriage license so it could be registered in the system. I didn't get a picture of us doing that but this is a picture of the new mall they are building that we checked out on our way there.

The skies were looking a bit dark and scary so we tried to rush home afterwards.

You can't really tell from this picture above, but it started raining and we got SOAKED. And we still had about a thirty minute freezing cold windy bike ride home.

Finally home! We had to hang up all our layers and layers of wet clothes. Also you can see here our very Swedish style shower. There is a curtain but no boundary separating it on the floor. I barely even notice it anymore.

It stopped raining so we decided to walk to the store nearby and get some milk because we wanted to make pancakes for dinner after that freezing cold bike ride home.

We stopped to take a picture on our way back :).

I finished a couple things up for school while Alex cooked the pancakes (and apparently snapped this picture!). He makes the best pancakes.

Then we watched a movie and relaxed a bit and then went to sleep. Besides the cold rain it was a pretty normal, but wonderful, day. 

Maybe I'll do another post like this after winter comes, because our lives in winter day to day are a lot different than in the fall.