Yesterday I went to this martial arts show in a nightclub in Uppsala, Birger Jarl, known among English speakers as Club BJ. Anyway, the show was pretty fun to watch; they had Muay Thai, jujitsu, capoeira and MMA. Aside from the fighting itself the stuff revolving around it was also pretty entertaining, from the announcer shouting, "Let's get ready to rumble!" in a Swedish accent to the fights having their own soundtracks (who hasn't wanted to fight to a good song?) to watching the girls holding the round cards get instructions before the fights. It was agreed that the jujitsu fight was by far the best; faster, harder more immediate and also just prettier than some of the other fights. And of course it's always more fun watching people if you know what techniques they're doing. Their fighting style reminded me a lot of the Ko Sho system, in fact.
The capoeira was sadly not an actual fight but a demonstration of acrobatics and coordination. Entertaining, but I really wanted to see an actual capoeira fight. The last fight was a free fight against an MMA guy and a Muay Thai guy (that rhymes!) but that wasn't very pleasant to watch. Judging from the punches to the kidneys, rabbit punches and kicking the opponent while they were down the only real rules seemed to be to stay in the ring and not kill anyone.
One thing I would have really wanted to see was a match against all these martial arts against one another. A jujitsu/capoeira match would have been just awesome. But even without it, it was still a fun time.

I learned this in class from an Australian and thought it was just worth mentioning: place a 2 liter water bottle in the water tank of your toilet. This reduces the water use for flushing from 7 to 5 liters. If you have a household of four people that in average uses the toilet 5 times per day and person this is a reduction of water use by 40 liters every day.

Words of the Day: leechate-garbage juice.
shibboleth-A word or pronunciation that distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another. A custom or practice that betrays one as an outsider.

So yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous spring day, the best one yet and I arrived just in time for it too. I also learned in class that on the first day of spring it's tradition that someone walks around naked in a park. See in the Eastern US the first robin is the sign of spring, in Tucson it's the first vulture and in Sweden it's the first naked man.
Also, today is 4/20 which, as any American knows, is National Pot Day. This concept is completely unknown to Europeans which is unusual considering its ubiquity back home. I recall the endless snickers I got when people learned I lived in dorm room number 420. It's refreshing that the Swedes aren't all crazy for pot, though in Vilnius I did learn of a very bizarre tradition the Russians have on 4/20. I cannot confirm or deny this but this is what I hear: since today is also Hitler's birthday, the Russians, allegedly, go on a xenophobic rampage and beat up any foreigner they can find. So Americans will chill out and smoke weed today and the Russians will go out looking for a fight. If there was ever a difference between our two cultures, that would definitely be it.

Well I'm back safe and sound from my Easter break vacation. Though I did end up leaving 10 hours later than I planned thanks to the unwavering incompetence of SAS Airlines and Arlanda airport. It saddens me to think that the last thing I will see of Sweden when I leave will be that wretched place.
But I digress; I made it to Warsaw all right and after being overcharged by a Polish mafia taxi I made it to the hostel. The hostel itself was kinda crappy, and it was in a bad part of town. I'd call it a ghetto, but y'know... My roommate in the hostel I feel is worth mentioning, as he seemed to be the physical manifestation of Warsaw. A disheveled middle-aged man with a moustache, who does not speak a lick of English, smokes heavily in a non-smoking room and drinks copious amounts of vodka. The last thing he did before going to sleep was have a cigarette and finish off his bottle of vodka. He went out like a light and the only way I knew he wasn't dead was his insufferably loud snoring. The next morning I swear the very first things he did when he woke up were light up a cigarette and open another bottle of vodka.
Warsaw was totally destroyed in WWII, absolutely nothing remained, which means that it's built for the 20th century and traveling by foot is nigh impossible. It also means that the city had to be rebuilt by the Soviets, who have a real eye for aesthetics. Really, communism leaves a stink of its presence wherever it goes, not unlike my roommate at the hostel. The Old Town in downtown Warsaw was really fun and cool I have to admit, though my appreciation for how well kept it looked was misguided since it was all recreated based on prewar photographs. Still fun to see though. Aside from that, the only other thing really worth seeing is the giant fugly skyscraper downtown that I believe is a replica of the 7 skyscrapers in Moscow.
After 2 days in Warsaw I was really worried about the quality of my heritage, then I took the train to Krakow and felt tremendous relief. Apparently Krakow is the town my ancestors are from originally, and strangely enough the city was virtually untouched by war. There was a funny feeling of seeing the Old Town and the castle just as my great great grandparents would have seen them. It's such an amazing place, full of history and culture and delicious Polish food.
I took a day trip from Krakow to Oświęcim, better known as Auschwitz. Needless to say it was rather unsettling, I felt that perhaps I hadn't gotten the scope of it all, though. But maybe it's impossible to actually grasp the magnitude of it all. One odd thing I noticed was that in all the other Polish cities I visited, all the multilingual signs had German text since it's one of the most common languages in Poland. But, perhaps fittingly, there was no German text to be found anywhere in the Auschwitz camp.
After Krakow I had planned to go up to the northeastern part of Poland where, on recommendation, I would tour the lakes up there. Unfortunately because of Easter the buses to Lithuania stopped running after the day I got there so it was either leave immediately or miss Vilnius entirely. Olstein was the name of the town, not much to see and more of a hub for destinations than a destination in itself. It was a small town yet it had the crummyness of a downtown big city. Before I arrived in Olstein I had been very pleased to see an absence of hateful political graffiti in Poland and had figured the Poles more than any other country would understand why Nazism is a bad idea. But my happiness was short lived; there were white power slogans, swastikas, anarchy signs and hammers and sickles EVERYWHERE. I'm going off on a tangent here but what the hell is wrong with these people? I'll give them the anarchy thing since after enduring two totalitarian regimes a lack of any government might seem appealing, and I'll sort of give them the communist thing since it's a good idea *in theory* but having seen its application firsthand I just don't get how any Eastern European could support it. And the swastika, did these people never go to school, watch TV, read books or even look around them? Their capital city was obliterated by the Nazis and 6 million of their citizens were brutally murdered and there are still some that support it?

OK since this whole post is so damn big I'm chopping it up into smaller sections.

My view of Poland and Poles after seeing the country for about a week was that there were two types of Polishness. One is of beautiful, clean, safe cities and friendly, intelligent, beautiful people while the other is of dodgy, run down, ugly cities and stupid, vulgar, disgusting people. After I got back to Uppsala I was discussing my impression of Poland with a Pole and she said that there are in fact two Polands; what the politicians refer to as Poland A and B, which possess the exact characteristics I observed. So it was good that the locals see the same things I do and that I'm not way off base.
But back to my travels: Vilnius itself is gorgeous and the change in architecture and overall atmosphere between the Old Town and the modern district is so amazing it feels like you're in two completely different cities. I should also mention I went to a metal concert I found in town on the grounds that Eastern European metal must be some pretty intense stuff. I was half right; the fans were some of the scariest people I had ever seen; I'd say 90% of them were about 2 meters tall and all manner of angry (the concert was delayed 3 hours so that might have contributed a bit). The music was quite sub par, I can say that with some measure of objectivity since even though metal isn't really my thing most of the other fans were pretty unimpressed as well.
The hostel I stayed at had the most awesome people ever and we had so much fun whether we were touring the city, going out on the town or just playing cards when it rained. This is my wholehearted endorsement of staying in hostels when you travel. Even if you don't meet fun people, you're very likely to meet interesting ones, case in point: I met a real life Veruca Salt. The daughter of a diplomat (a self-described and ever so apt diplobrat) this girl had a large amount of personal wealth and as such only wanted to stay in five star hotels and eat at the most expensive French restaurants. It was only at the insistence of her incredibly fun friend from Brooklyn that she went to the hostel. This girl was just unbelievable, she evidently normally has an Australian accent but while on the trip adopted an ultra high class British accent and went on about how she didn't like (insert any nationality besides the British, Germans, French and Belgians here). I could go on all day about this girl, she just put everyone off and it was just astounding how alien she was.
Fortunately her friend was more than awesome enough to make up for her. She and I visited a nearby small town with a medieval castle surrounded by lakes. An absolute blast, we even got to use the archery range in the castle.
So I think that's about it, though getting home was interesting too since I think my (expired) Russian visa makes the passport control really suspicious. And we took a propeller plane from Vilnius to Arlanda. An international flight on a propeller plane. The people all saw it and started laughing. Oh, and Feifei picked me up at the airport, so that was a nice surprise.

Naturally, I have many lovely pics from my travels.

Ice Age 2 with Ray Romano and John Leguizamo. Fun, cute movie though slightly darker than the original. The jury is still out on whether it was better than the original, IMO, but it was at least as good. I found the most interesting part of the movie was the different species, and just how much research the creators would have done to come up with weird creatures like that. Also helps to educate little kids on prehistoric creatures besides dinosaurs. They did change a few things though, apparently Sid would have been friggin' huge and would have kicked Diego's ass, maybe Manny's too. Anyway, I thought the nature of the scenes was pretty cool, there were a lot of them that could have been standalone animated shorts, particularly the ones with Scrat. It made for a refreshing change from really linear movies.

Mononoke Hime with Yôji Matsuda and Yuriko Ishida. An older movie by the same guy that made Spirited Away. I'm not much of an anime fan to begin with, so anything more positive that total disdain might be interpreted as praise. The moral of the story is pretty plain and simple, but that's about the only thing that is. That's probably just cuz of cultural differences, or the aforementioned disinterest in anime. There was a consensus that for an alleged non-hentai movie there were a lot of tentacles. I don't feel totally unqualified to judge this film since I was not the only person who thought it was really weird. Bottom line: if you like anime, watch it, if not, it's not the best introduction to it.

I was going to write something about my fieldwork at Lundellska Skolan but I'm tired and full of delicious cake and I have a busy day tomorrow. I'm off to bed and see y'all in 11 days.