Jani Bizjak

After coming home from Christmas market I only had 1 hour to defrost and get ready for a farewell dinner. Even though, I put hair dryer into my shoes as soon as I came home, I didn’t manage to get them dry in time so I had to wear my summer shoes. It look really weird and felt extremely cold, since they are below ankles, not to mention that evening was record low -19 degrees.

This time the dinner was in STUK not central restaurant, so it was half the price of welcome dinner. When we arrived we had a chance to mingle a bit with people and then we were seated. The program was fun again, this time a lot of students volunteered to do sketch shows so everything was almost 4 hours long.

Again we heard women choir singing us some Christmas songs, but we all agreed the best part was when the slide show with pictures from our stay here started rolling. Whole room was full of emotion, you could feel everyone being a bit sad since the end of our adventure was near. I don’t know anyone that is happy to go home and everyone would love to extend their stay for at least one semester if they could.

The food was ok. The fun part was with waitresses. Since STUK is student’s bar/club/restaurant it is managed by students. All the waitresses were students but for some reason, they were all acting like a professional restaurant. And by that I mean at the beginning of each course they all (around 10 waitresses) came out at the same time. Then they waited at the beginning of the tables until one of them gave signal to start. Even later on when they took our dishes back they always came from the right side etc… Really interesting to see.

After the dinner and shows we had party at STUK. How was it I don’t know, since I went home to defrost some more. Besides I don’t like clubbing that much.





This dinner was beginning of the end, it was the last time we all got together and it is sad that I won’t see some many of them ever again.

Two weeks ago there was a Christmas market in the old town (Gammelstad). We decided to go there by foot like in the orientation week. The only difference was that now there was snow everywhere and it was around 35 degrees colder (it was -16 to be exact). We decided to start at 10 o’clock since sun rose at that time. In the summer it took us about 2 hours to get there, so timing was perfect, since market was open from 12 to 16 o’clock.

Once we started walking we didn’t feel cold anymore, though exposed long hair froze up, to a nice white shade. Thankfully I don’t have long hair, even so, I put on both a warm hat and a hoodie, from my jacket. Because I thought path was going to be flooded with people, I wore normal pants, since I wasn’t expecting much snow on the road. Later this turned out to be a grave mistake.

First hour went by fast, while were walking through the forest. To my surprise we were first to go there, as there were no other tracks in the snow.

When it’s this cold, snow doesn’t stick together when it falls on the ground (at least I think it’s because of this) instead it’s like light dust and if you kick it a snow cloud goes up into the air. It looks amazing.

When we reached the bird tower we decided to take a “shortcut” over the frozen lake. Shortcut is in quotes because even in theory it isn’t shorter. But the fun part was that we could go over the lake, so we took it anyway.

As we were making our way toward the lake, we found just how hard it is to walk on the marshy land that surrounds lakes and rivers up here. For some reason ground doesn’t freeze and snow builds up, so when you step onto it you go knees deep and there is a lot of swamp vegetation that you have to navigate in order to reach the lake.





After we were on the lake, we were making good progress again. Sun was already (well it’s like this all the time) low on horizon, it was more like dawn/twilight, despite being only 11.30 AM. Fun thing with a sun so low is the length of ones shadow. Our shadows must have been at least 15 meters long, on a flat lake surface.





After crossing the lake, we found out, that there is a highway separating us from the other side, where the old town is. Here we could have turned around, but instead we decided for a more exciting option of continuing down the highway until we would cross path with the “real” trail.

Our progress slowed down dramatically, we weren’t on a lake anymore but were walking through a deeply snowed marshy land. For some reason, despite not wearing waterproof pants, I was leading first through the deep snow. As I later learned (nah I actually knew this before :P), it is much easier to follow someone on such terrain, since he flattens the snow and makes a path in it. After about half an hour of walking we reached a small shaft under the highway connecting lakes on both sides. The shaft was small, maybe around 0.5m in diameter and half of it was filled with frozen water from the lakes. After much deliberation, whether we should go through it or not, we split into two groups, one continued beside highway, mine decided to go down under.





Again I was the first one to go, the tunnel was so small I had to take my backpack from my back, lay down on my belly and push it in front of me. After first few meters of really careful movement and intense listening if ice was cracking I got more courage and continued faster. A friend passed me a flashlight so I could better evaluate depth of ice. When I turned it on I found myself face to face with frozen fish just about 5 cm under the ice (my face). I almost screamed, but there was not much I could do but continue. Even with the flashlight it was hard to tell how deep the ice was, I have a feeling that it was frozen through and through. After about 5 minutes I was on the other side. It took me 5 minutes to crawl through a 50m shaft. Ice was so slippery that it was impossible to push yourself forward, that’s why I had to cling to the ceiling and walls, really weird to see, like a Spiderman.

On the other side we were greeted with another lake and about 0.5km of marshy land in the direction of the town. After about 15 minutes of struggling through the snow I suddenly felt my leg sink deeper than usually. The snow came almost to my waste and as I was trying to pull my leg out when I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my leg. It was water. For some reason water wasn’t frozen on that spot, probably because of deep snow cover providing sufficient insulation. As soon as I freed my leg out, pants up to my knees went stone hard as water froze instantly on a -15 degrees cold air. And like if that wouldn’t be enough icy cold water also went into my shoe. Despite them being waterproof they can’t prevent water from going in from the top.

But wait, there is more. Like if that wouldn’t be enough… Just after few steps the other leg followed. So there I was in the middle of nowhere, with freezing cold water in my shoes, frozen pants and with sun already gone. I felt like I was in the middle of Antarctica.

I have never experienced anything like it, the pain didn’t go away as it normally does, when you touch something cold. It was burning like someone spilled boiling water on my legs. The worst part is there was nothing I could do, except continue toward the old town (the closest civilisation). Even after 45 minutes, when we finally reached the market, my legs were still in pain. It was then, when I got really scared, that I would get frostbites from all the cold.





At the market, I got a chance to take the shoes off. Despite expecting water to pour out, everything appeared surprisingly dry. Even socks were only moist at worst. I’m still thankful that I bought the best shoes I could find, they probably saved my feet from a nasty frostbites.

The market was much smaller than I expected. Merchants were selling all sorts of stuff, from trinkets, statues of dwarfs and elves, some kind of sweet Swedish bread, moose meet and many more.





After short trip around the market, we decided to take a bus home, since it was already pitch black, my legs were frozen and we had a farewell dinner to prepare for.

Despite market being disappointingly small, the journey was one of a kind and like usually it’s the about the journey not destination.

Yesterday we did our last great push and finally finished our project. Now I can say I’ve build my own working Skype with chat and video conferencing, Microsoft watch out, you’re going out of business!

I’m still not done with the course though. I need to write my “home exam” but I’ve decided that I’ll do that after I come home. The due date is till 20th January so I’ll have enough time to finish it, and after that I will have an oral exam over Skype. I can already see my grandma coming into frame just at the moment of the exam…

In other news; after long deliberation, if I should still continue working, after I come home, I was forced to decide yesterday, when I received invitation from my old boss to come there after New Year’s. I’ve finally decided to let it pass, last year was too intense in regards of work and school. This year I’ll take it easier. I’ve left an option open to get there though, I may choose my topic for master’s thesis about something they will need. It could be good motivation to get paid for doing school work although I’m not sure they can offer me interesting enough topic. We’ll see how it will go … I think my topic of interest has started to drift from AI (artificial intelligence) to Multimedia (Games/Entertainment).

Haven’t written anything in a while, not because I don’t have anything to write about but because I’ve been incredibly busy last few days (weeks). I had a project presentation last Monday, seminar presentation this Monday and we are rushing as fast as we can to finish our last project as soon as possible. We were hoping we will finish it until today, when one of group mates is leaving Lulea, but sadly we missed this deadline.

As usually when you are in a hurry nothing works as it should and I’ve got yet another confirmation to avoid 3rd party APIs when it comes to programming. Not that we choose to use it, it was mandatory, but still the thing is less documented that the code I write, it only works on my computer, so instead of programming simultaneously with 3 people, only 1 is programming and the other two are looking at my screen giving suggestions and comments.

Anyway I’m so fed up with it that I just want to finish minimal requirements and get a pass on it, instead of working on those extra features to get better grade.

In other news as you may have guessed majority of people is leaving this week. So usually when you see people around they all look kind of sad, be it for leaving Lulea or leaving all newly acquired friends behind.

For me it’s something in between. My time has not yet came, though some of my friends will leave shortly. Unlike majority of others I have Veronika’s visit coming next week, which is really keeping my spirits up and adding views to blog’s statistics, since I’m checking every few hours how much is it still left on the timer that I’ve posted in one of the previous posts.

Lately we’ve had some really nasty weather here. It’s gotten surprisingly hot, around 0 or even 1 degree, so snow is starting to melt, on the other hand it has snowed really hard in previous few days so now we have ice and snow everywhere. Thankfully Swedes are putting gravel on the ice so it’s not that slipper and they are doing this almost in real time, I saw one truck sprinkling little rocks yesterday at 4 am in the morning (what I was doing up at that time is a story for another post).

Hm so this is becoming quite boring, wall of text with no pictures again. Today we had our last training of hockey so here is a picture from there.

One more thing before I forgot. Today I’ve sold my hockey equipment and bike to a friend, who is going to resell it in next semester. So from now on I’ll be walking a lot again.