I’m now quite busy with moving and planning the last few trips in Sweden. I'm moving out of my room for good on Friday. It’s amazing how much stuff I bought while I was here that I now have to take back with me. I guess it’s not that surprising, all things considered, but when I think about how I arrived in Uppsala with literally little more than the clothes on my back, it’s astounding.

Since Uppsala is a student town, it gets really quiet during the summer months and am told can be horribly boring since everyone leaves. It’s calmed down a bit but the town is still trying to keep active. On Thursday there was this festival organized by the local radio station that filled the streets downtown. All manner of souvenirs and confections were being sold up and down the roads. Granted, Feifei and I were rather old compared to the majority of the crowd, but it was still fun. I guess the high school students can’t leave town so easily and they can’t go to clubs or nations yet. I gotta say, in terms of consistent fun times, Uppsala definitely wins over Tucson.

By now all of the Swedish high school students have finished for the year and the seniors have graduated. The Swedes graduate mid day rather than in the evening. After the ceremony they all hop in rented cars and trucks and joyride around town waving banners and honking horns. They also are all dressed in white and have these cute graduation caps. The white is supposed to symbolize innocence, though it is my belief that teenagers in Sweden are anything but innocent. I was fortunate enough to see the graduation festivities in Stockholm last week, which was a novel experience. I’m told the celebrations in Stockholm are the biggest and best and that it’s not as common in other towns. The latter turned out to be false; Uppsala’s gymnasium had similar (but naturally smaller) celebrations going on as well. Regrettably I was not able to see the festivities at Lundellska, though I did see those of their rival, Katedral skolan. After seeing the Swedish graduation traditions, no one in the US has the right to complain about people throwing beach balls or tortillas.

I also went sailing for the first time over the weekend. It’s a lot like I would have imagined in many ways and rather different in others. It’s difficult to explain, really. I wasn’t really happy the first couple of hours but once I got the hang of it I had fun. The fun is contingent on what you are expecting; that is, if you were expecting a leisurely cruise and the wind is fast or if you are expecting more action and there are hardly any waves you won’t have fun. Thankfully, we got both so I could appreciate the two sides of sailing.
And I should also mention that it is clearly now summer in Sweden. It's not a pleasant heat either, not that it approaches the spontaneous combustion inducing temperatures of Tucson, but it's pretty rough. When you're outside it's fine, but the Swedes don't believe in ventilation of any sort, so indoors is torturous. All I want is a fan of some sort, but since "fan" is Swedish for devil, they likely consider such a device to be heretical.

X-Men: The Last Stand with Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart. A nice entertaining movie though a bit frustrating in several ways. It definitely did have a real comic book feel to it with regard to how several of the characters were handled. I was rather frustrated by the fact that certain characters were never shown (coughGambitcough). One thing I will say though, I never liked Juggernaut until Vinnie Jones’ take on him.