Walpurgis with spring songs

This evening the choir Olle joined some weeks ago, sung typical spring songs to welcome the spring. It was the first time he performed in front of an audience, but it went quite good. Next time he might know the text to the songs a little bit better, it looks better if you are not holding the paper almost in front of your face :-)





The tradition with lightening a fire was kept alive, even if the effect was not the same as we are used to. You can notice that the daylight is longer here.
For many students this evening is a party evening, since the day after is a holiday. We went home after the fire was lit, but took the road through a neighborhood we hadn't seen before in order to check out the area.

Maria's biking route to work

Having biking distance to work is especially nice this time of the year, hearing bird songs along your way. Usually Maria takes the bike path a little to the west, next to Nydalasjön. Here the bike path goes through the forest with a lot of lingonberry and (European) blueberry sprigs, a typical picture of northern Sweden. You really feel like home seeing this view, you find it in southern forests as well.
It takes almost fifteen minutes biking to work, so you get your daily exercise at least (around 3.5 km). All the way is on bike paths, so you just need to watch for cars when crossing the road on a few occasions. Maria can also select to cross among the houses, but she thinks it's nicer to be close to the nature. Most of the way is quite flat, except a hilly corner in the university area.

The ice still covers the lake, but it will be nice in the summertime to have walking distance from home to a lake to swim in.


(pictures from our bike ride on Saturday, today was a rainy day)

Blood donor again

Today Maria went to the hospital, located next to the university area. Both of us were blood donors before leaving Sweden, but have had a two year break in the US. Time to go back to old "work", no excuse not to when it just takes around 15 minutes 3-4 times a year.
At the same time Maria signed up as plasma donor. It is good that the hospital is close to work, when you're going to spend ~45 min once a month or so. In the future she thinks of booking the same time for plasma donation as her office mate, it will be a nice time to chat.

Record warm day

Also today we woke up to nice sunshine which lit up your mind. How often does it happen with really nice weather during the weekend, and not during the work week? Usually it's the other way around.
After lunch we headed for another bike ride (today a total of ~17 km), enjoying the spring weather as long as it will last. Today we biked to the west parts of the city, visiting a furniture store (without buying anything). It was good we brought the map with us, so we could find the bike paths we planned to take. After a while we placed the jackets in the bag, no need in the early summer temperature of 18C.

Something that strikes you is that even if Umeå has 110 000 inhabitants, you are always close to the nature. And not arranged parks here and there, no, quite often you bike next to forests, which are looking quite wild. The borders of the town are not far away anywhere, so you easily find some green area to visit.

Bikeride to the southern part of the city

Instead of sitting inside the whole day, we decided to take a bike ride along the river to the southeast part of Umeå. As always when going somewhere else in the city, you get an easy start downhill, our apartment is located in the highest parts of town.
You got nice views when looking towards downtown of Umeå.
We continued along Umeälven, with Kolbäcksbron south of us, the best-looking bridge over the river.
We then stopped at a shopping center, where the biggest food store in town is located as well. We bought some lunch and enjoyed it next to the river, who would like to sit inside this nice spring day?
For the bike ride back home we took another bike path, to explore other parts of the town. In total we biked over 10 km today, but we still have several bike rides to do until we've covered the 170 km bike paths present in Umeå. Yes, Umeå is a bike friendly town with bike paths in many directions and next to all main roads. In some parts of the city you share the wide sidewalks with pedestrians.
Today is the first day with really warm weather (~15C), nice to really feel the spring in the air. Being outside without a jacket/coat is definitively a spring sign.
Back home it was time for some rest in the sun. Since our balcony (it is really on the first floor, but we call it our balcony) is on the north side, we brought two chairs to the south side of the house. Sitting just next to our office window, you almost thought it was early summer. But the view to the south reminded you that late April up here in the north still means piles of snow here and there.
Today was the first day we saw more of spring flowers, on the south side of houses. Since a lot of the snow melted the last week, the lawn is still not green.

Umespexet - time to feel like a student again!

Tonight we went to this year's student farce featuring Umespexet. As usual, a real story is converted to a farce including a lot of songs (often known melodies with a new text). The theme this year was Apollo - the first landing on the moon. We have been to some student farces in Linköping before, and also here the show was interrupted by the audience shouting "Omstart!" (= start over), followed by a repeat of the song/dialog but with a new text. Improvisation is an important quality of the actors, but we guess that they have practiced a lot of different varieties for a certain scene.
We missed the sentences with all the words starting on the same letter, as well as the sentences including a lot of a special kind of words (like car brands or animals), which was common in the Linköping farces.

Career coaching

During two evenings Maria has been to seminars about work/career, arranged by Naturvetarna (The Swedish Association of Scientists). Right now Maria has a job for two years, but what does she want with the rest of her life? (an unanswered question). It is never to early to start thinking about that.
The Tuesday seminars were of a more general character, including information from the consultant company Proffice Life Science. Other themes were 'How can you influence your salary' and 'Career directions and career cultures'.
During the second evening Maria went to a longer seminar about career planning. What to do when searching for a new job and how to start with your own career planning, were two questions discussed during the evening. Both theory and practical exercises were mixed. Some of the exercises included harder situations, mostly since you don't have much experience (being in an interview for example).
Tomorrow there will be a follow-up with 40 minutes of individual guidance.
It is really good to get some hints about what to do when trying to find a job.

Plants at home

After work today, we met outside a flower shop. High time to fill the window shelves with some plants. Maria is more into green plants, since they are usually easier to handle and, not the least, last longer (nice looking all year around). The shop wasn't big, so it was a little bit tricky finding plants being able to withstand direct sun light. Our living room has the windows towards south, so the sun can get strong there. We left the shop with four different plants, all of them new kinds for us. The coffee plant might not give beans, but is a little bit fun to have. The myrtle plant will hopefully get small white flowers later on. The one most to the far right is a funny looking one, a milk bush (Euphorbia tirucalli). The tall one is the easy-to-handle mother-in-law's tongue.
Together with the four smaller plants (Kalanchoë and ponytail palm "flasklilja") we found during the weekend, we now have plants in the kitchen and living room. We'll get plants for the other rooms later on, maybe we will bring some of our old ones from the southern during the summer vacation.
Right now the plants are not so big, but we will see how they look 5-10 years from now. According to the handling information about the species, several of the plants are actually big plants, not really suitable for the window shelf in the long run.

TV and microwave oven arrive

The TV and microwave oven that we ordered in the beginning of the week arrived tonight. The TV was delivered to the door, but we had to get the oven at a store a couple of hundred meters from our apartment. Not to bad, the bike is a good transportation device if you are two people. The microwave oven is quite deep, but we managed to fit it on the bench. The TV on the other hand is a LCD which makes it quite thin. I guess it is hard to find an ordinary CRT TV these days.

Another spring sign

When arriving early spring in Umeå, you do ask yourself if the bike/walk paths are paved or gravel. What you see is only gravel, even up on the snow piles.
But with the spring comes also the removal of all gravel spread during the winter, gravel is probably used more than salt. Suddenly you realize the paths are of course paved or cobblestoned. Clearly you can see the difference between areas being wiped and areas not, like where the bikes are parked daytime.
When Maria went home around 6 pm, her bike was lonely. Many people have adapted the summer-worktime, leaving work around 4 pm after working 7½ hours a day. That's accepted up in northern Sweden to work shorter during the summer season and then work longer during the dark winter.

Choir time

I have always been interested in singing, but have never really tried to practice it before, that is, joined a choir or similar. I might have had a chance to do that in Madison for example, but that specific choir seemed to serious. But now, in another new city, it was time to do something about the singing itch. I found a choir that seemed like a fit for me at the Umeå webpage's cultural section. A couple of e-mails back and forth to the choir's webmaster later, I was asked if I was interested in joining the choir, which I of course was. My first sessions (but the choir's third-to-last for this semester) was this evening. I thought that I should sing the bass voice, but since they were short of tenors, I started there instead. It's a little bit different to sing one of these voices, since you are not at all singing the ordinary voice that you know from the song. But, I guess that this is something that I have to practice. Luckily, I am quite good at reading notes, since I have been playing the piano for quite some time. The fact that we brought the syntheziser will also make it easier to practice at home, by myself. Tonight's practice was some spring tunes that will be sung at Walpurgis Night (April 30th). The rest of the choir encouraged me to continue which felt good. I guess that they are quite happy to lower the mean age of the choir too.

Enjoying the spring weather

Today we took a biking tour to one of the cheap stores on the west side of city. There are some smaller things you find need for the more you unpack stuff and decide how to furnish the rooms. Bigger stuff like additional rugs will have to wait until we have better means of transportation.
You hardly wanted to go inside again, since spring showed a nice weather with almost 10 degree Celcius. We saw some people enjoying the day on the lawn next to our house. What more can you ask for?
We can admit that birches are a very common tree species in town. Hopefully in a few weeks the buds will burst, not so much yet.

First meeting with the cousin-kids

Around 3:30 in the afternoon we took our bikes downtown to visit Olle's uncle. But we were not there alone; Olle's two cousins showed up too. One of them has two little kids now, it was fun to meet them for the first time. One old tradition in some families in Sweden during Easter is to roll eggs. This game works like this: Each person gets one egg, preferably colored in a distinguishable way (painted by yourself) to differentiate them from each other. Then you roll your egg down a slanted brick (the waved one, used on roofs here in Sweden) in order to knock another persons egg. If you are knocked, then you are out of the game. Eventually there is only one person left, the winner. We played a kind kind of this game that gave everyone a price. Afterwards we had a really nice Easter dinner with all the traditional food. We have really missed that during our stay abroad.

We went home again around eight, it is convenient to live just 15 minutes bike ride from each other.

Easter weekend is here

So far we don't have any flower/green plants on the window shelves, since we thought it would be hard for the plants to survive two cold nights in the moving truck. But it will come more in the nearest future. In the meantime, why not decorate the pots?

Yesterday we tried to get a little Easter feeling by coloring some eggs, whereof we had two of them for breakfast today. Otherwise we have not celebrated the Easter Eve so much, except having herring on crisp bread for lunch (nice to have easily/non-expensive access to these traditional foodstuff).

Boxes away and curtains up

Good Friday in Sweden means holiday, so Maria was home from work and together we made a huge effort to prepare our apartment for normal living. What else to do when you wake up to snowy trees, even if most of it melted away during the day.
We spent half of the day removing all the boxes from the apartment (temporary stored in our bathroom), to our small storage in the basement. It's a puzzle to get as many small boxes as possible into the bigger ones.
After lunch we cleaned the floor and placed rugs, which really helps for comfort. We also put up curtains in the last two windows.

Microwave oven - end of life

Our microwave oven, that had been stored with all the other stuff for two years, ceased to work today. Suddenly, it started to sound very noisy, and there was a smell of smoke inside of it. We chose not to use it any more since then, and it is therefore about time to order a new one. It is actually about nine years since we bought the old one, so I guess it is written of now.

A weekend full of unpacking stuff

Saturday started with unpacking boxes/bags in the bedroom. A easy place to start, since the wardrobes have plenty of shelves. Maybe we will rearrange some time later when we've found out a better order, but at least be we have somewhere to store all our clothes/towels/fabrics etc. Another reason to start with the bedroom was to make place for the beds, so we would be able to sleep our first night in our new apartment.
Next room to get some order was the kitchen, the main question was just in which cabinet to put what.
Already after this first day we had released we now have more cabinets than we had in our earlier Swedish apartment. So now we have more shelves to use for other stuff.

The furniture/boxes arrives

Olle greeted the moving company around 2:30 in the afternoon. Most of the furniture and boxes seemed to be in good shape. I tried to have them put the right boxes in the right room, but there will be some stuff that we will have to move around later on. It was a much quicker story to unpack than to pack; they were ready around four pm.

The new "toys" at work

Yesterday Maria's new computer arrived, so now she can spend a lot of time optimizing it for herself. But most time will not be playing around, but trying to understand the menus in Office2007, there's another layout than the older versions (our home computer has Office 2003 student version). Also trying to make the labnotes in OneNote is new, so there's a whole new program to learn how to handle.
During the afternoon today Maria spent a few hours in front of the instrument she will be using a lot during the nearest months - of course a mass spectrometer. The Orbitrap was installed during March, so no one in the group is an expert on the instrument so far. A mass spectrometer measures really small weights, and the Orbitrap should be very precise. Part of her work will be to identify the compositions of the different molecules in her samples, being able to decide how many atoms the molecules include (as well as if it is carbon, hydrogen or oxygen). The project will study metabolites in poplar, correlating different concentrations to different phenotypes.

Olle leaves "the Southern"

Today it was Olle's turn to go north. He took a later train than Maria and didn't have to wait that long at the airport. It was nice to be picked up by his uncle (and Maria) at the airport in Umeå.

The load of furniture is going north

The guys from the moving company arrived after eight in the morning. The seemed calm and serious, I felt that our goods were in good hands. Three hours later they left the house on their long journey north. Olle spent a couple of hours outside, enjoying the nice weather.

The first day in Umeå

The rumors saying that it would still be around 1 meter of snow up here showed up not to be really true, some decimeters are more correct. The snow piles are up to 3 meters high, though. It will take a while more until the spring arrives.
This small forest is just around hundred meters away from our new home. I would guess there will be cross country ski trails there during the winter, according to the man walking to the right in next picture.



Before noon Maria took the bus to our new apartment. The three-story apartment house is built in late 60s, but the appliances in the kitchen are just a few years old, which is nice.
Our apartment is a 3-room apartment of 85 m2, suitable with a bedroom, an office (with space for a temporary bed) and a living room. The kitchen is not big, but have space for a kitchen table at least.
A prerequisite for selecting this apartment, was to have biking distance to the university. It will take next week to find out the best/nicest biking path to work for Maria.

In the afternoon Maria met her new boss TM at work. Not much of work today, only paper work and introduction to some new people (in the best case she will remember them later). She will get her own office desk, in a small room together with three other girls (two of whom are on maternity leave right now).