I can proudly present: Two more international students here in Umea who decided to overwhelm the web with information about staying abroad in northern Sweden. And here they are…

• Whats up in sweden? Marco launched a blog (yeah!) to answer this question. Primarily written in English, the extensive travelogues (are|will be) published in German.
• Christoph launched his Experiment Schweden, a web page including his monthly newsletter and some galleries. Check out the beautiful Northern Lights page! Contents written in German.

Monday, 4:30 pm, workout at the campus sports field. No more excuses.

Norrlands Guld is a beer brewed by Spendrups. It’s very popular here in northern Sweden (“Norrland”) – especially with the hoi polloi and us international students. They offer – as many Swedish breweries – the “supermarket versions” with 2.8/3.5% alc. and the good old Systembolaget brew with 5.3%.

This year, Norrlands Guld celebrated its 40th anniversary (is it just a coincidence that the university has the same jubilee?) and launched its Jubileumsbutik. Of course we ordered some shirts and towels. This is how the stuff looks:

International Norrlands Guld resources:

• Micha about Norrlands Guld & its branding
• Rolf was our trend-setter

BTW: Our team for this year’s Brännbollscupen is called Golden Girls. Guess what! More details will be published soon…

There hasn’t been much activity on my blog during the last days. And this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to tell. In fact, a lot of interesting events took place and some new projects just started.

I haven’t told you about the first home match of Umeå IK’s women soccer team which they successfully won 7:0.
I haven’t told you about the beach volley contest with my mentor group last Monday where my team perfectly sucked.
I haven’t told you about the pleasure of sunbathing at 13°C after experiencing months of snow.
I haven’t told you about some really nice BBQ sessions at Nydala and in good old Mariehem.
I haven’t told you about the Valborg (Walpurgis Night) where I was camping out in the woods close to the freezing point.
I haven’t told you about the official world championships in Brännboll, for which I formed a team to defeat the world elite.
And I still haven’t told you about holy Norrlands Guld and Umea’s plan to apply for being the European Capital of Culture 2014 (*sic*).

The reason for not writing about all these wonderful topics is my incredibly poor time management: I have to hand in one assignment per week for my Speech and Language Processing class. I normally write that stuff some hours before the due date. Last time, I didn’t even meet the deadline. I haven’t been in Swedish class for 2 weeks now. I asked my teacher in Academic Presentations to postpone my final presentation, because I was running out of time.

So what do I actually do all the time? Well, besides doing all that fun stuff stated above, I spend many hours reading blogs and listening podcasts. It’s a weird contradiction that I was speaking about saving time by managing blogs using RSS in my final presentation, but I myself spend more and more time in the blogosphere. One can discover fantastic things every single day: People who understand the net as a social setting. People who think ahead. People who share and spread knowledge. The web is people, not just dusty documents.

But maybe this is just an excuse for my continuing laziness… Shit.

Just a short post with some links to photo pages and blogs of international students here in Umea… This is what I discovered during the last weeks:

• Marce’s Dagbladet (Marcello’s blog in Italian – Mica’s pics and much content, unfortunately I don’t understand a lot )
• João’s Suécia Photo Blog (Brazilian action, click últimas fotos on the left to see a list of all galleries)
• Aventuras en Suecia of Sebastian & Nicholas (photo page from two Uruguayan students, funnily enough hosted at German Arcor)

Hey guys, I know that there is more of this stuff out there. Show up & post your link!