A goodbye to Lund

After a loooong break without real updates it's time for a final note from Lund. For me it's still unbelievable that it has been almost a year now since we are here but it's a fact that we are leaving Lund on Monday morning. My feelings about that are mixed as usual when a period goes to an end. On the one side I am looking so much forward to the next three months of awesome holidays but on the other side I am somehow sad to leave Lund. Don't get me wrong, I love you guys home and I miss all of you here in Sweden but this year being over means the end of one of the best times I had in my life. Meeting so many new people, finding new friends and settling down in a new country in a new city, studying at a different university and traveling around in northern Europe was an amazing experience. And all this together with Annina without troubles like almost all other couples had where only one went abroad, it's just perfect....
But it was also a quite successful year at university. I have been taking exactly 60 ECTS credits throughout this year, which is equal to one year of full-time study, I had a lot of really interesting courses and I learned really a lot! As it looks now, I will get around 45 ECTS credits for my Master at home, so this year here did not even "cost" me a lot of time for my study. And by the way: I passed my KORE-exam at home with a 2 and I do not have an oral exam. So all the efforts I spend in this stupid exam have been worth it :)

I feel like I have grown a lot as a person during this year abroad. Meeting so many fascinating people from all over the world leaves it's fingerprint on you. Although it's quite sad to leave all these people behind it will also be a pleasure to see some of them again. We have now friends all over the world and a bed or couch is waiting for us almost everywhere.

I want to use the opportunity to say thanks to my parents and my grandparents that gave me great personal and financial support during this year, thanks to all of you who read my blog and left comments from time to time, it was a pleasure for me!

But now we make a 180° rotation from the past to the future. As the most of you might already know we are staying in Scandinavia for quite a while. Annina's parents arrived yesterday in Copenhagen and will come to Lund tomorrow. We will drive with them along the south east coast up to Stockholm and stay there for a few days. They are leaving on Saturday next week from Stockholm airport. Annina and I are probably staying a bit longer in Stockholm. From the 6th till the 13th of June, we will be Kayaking in a national park in Arvika which is between Stockholm and Oslo. I am looking really, really forward to that, Kayaking is something I wanted to do for my whole life and now is the time for it. The place should be one of the most beautiful kayak places in Sweden so we will have an awesome time there.
After that we are driving further on to Norway, more precisely to Rondane national park, around 250km north of Oslo. We will be hiking in the Norwegian mountains for around a week and probably celebrate the midsummer night there.
Those who are still not green with envy (vor Neid erblassen), back up now! We will meet Aaron at the 29th of June in Bergen/Norway and take the ferry to Iceland where we will stay for 7 awesome weeks, exploring one of my personal dream destinations, hot springs, lava, volcanoes, glaciers and a lot of untouched nature. Yeah, yeah, yeah! We have been planning this trip since more than half a year and now comes the time to get the credits for that preparation.

Since we won't have a regular internet access during the next 3 months it will be a bit harder to reach me. But I will try to publish an update on the blog about once a week. I think we will probably publish some kind of diary or newsletter from Iceland as well here, so stay tuned and check out what is going on here