Winter Wonderland

How Much Is Your Dollar Worth?
$1 = 7.8918 SEKFirst things first... GO COUGS!! It wasn't a pretty game but a win over the Fuskies is the highlight of any season really. Especially in dramatic fashion. If you weren't in Pullman this weekend, and CougsInSwedeland obviously wasn't, but our man in the street said the huge mob that rushed the field took over downtown en masse. It doesn't matter what the rest of the season looked like, but on one afternoon it was if the Cougs had just won a national title. Hopefully it carries over to the islands this week against Hawaii.

Meanwhile we have just experienced a winter storm Sweden style. In the last post I put up a picture taken on Saturday morning. Here are some pictures from last night. For the most part Saturday was a nice day, the skies were pretty clear. In the evening it started snowing again but not much additional accumulation. When we woke up Sunday there was a little more snow on the ground but not much else happened during the day. That evening the wind started to pick up and it started to snow harder. I think it was the windiest day we have had here, and it is pretty windy up here. In fact there were hurricane force winds recorded less than a hundred miles south of us in and around the archipelago. The snow started to pick up that night and snowed all day on Monday. It was almost like a blizzard from Sunday night into Monday. I would say we have about a foot of snow, more in places due to drift. The bus schedule is all messed up, buses have gone into ditches, found themselves stuck after stops, and getting caught in an intersection as they try to take a corner. Craziness ensued. Not really. So we thought we would put up some pictures to show off.

Bicycles in downtown. Some of these are cleared off because people actually do ride through town on them. In the street because the sidewalks aren't always cleared off. But sharing the roads with Buses that occasionally slip and slide, I don't know if that's an idea I can get behind.

Make sure to check on your cars often other wise you should bring a shovel with you if you want to go anywhere.

Some bicycles parked in front of our apartment building. Unfortunately we just found out that we will be unable to rent our apartment for the next year. Since we are heading back to the states for the holidays on the 16th and our lease ends before Christmas, we only have a couple weeks to find a new apartment and move our stuff before we go. Or we could return to Sweden in 2009 without a place to stay. That would kind of suck. We looked at a couple ads last night for some swish apartments in downtown. They cost a little more than our current place but some are a lot fancier. Fortunately people seem eager to rent to young professional couple like ourselves as over half of the people we contacted last night have responded.

Star lamps are pretty traditional Christmas decorations and most homes and storefronts have them hanging in the windows. What we were surprised to learn is that red, white, and blue are traditional Swedish Christmas colors, much like the red, white, and green back home. As a bonus we now have some 4th of July decorations when we move back.

Basil. Also note how much snow we have on our windowsill. A lot.

Finally a picture taken this morning to compare to the picture from Saturday morning. Notice the difference, and also the windowsill snow in the foreground.