My Favorite Hobby

Our Building

Edgar, Ruben and two other boys paid Patrick and me a visit last night (you might know this if you read the last post of yesterday).
We laughed, drank, ate (Patrick knows how to cook, this is good information!) and made a mess in the apartment.
At 1 am I gave up and went to bed. At 4.30 I was woken up by the cars outside only to hear The Beatles playing in the living-room, and the boys in some discussion.
By 5 they had left and around 6 I fell back asleep.

At 8.30 I woke up, had a nice skype conversation with my mom and cleaned up the mess we all made last night.
Although I haven't cleaned the dishes yet, Patrick's room as actually not a room, but the maids corner, his room is only accessible by going outside, Hilarious, and it is situated just behind the kitchen.
There's no hurry in doing the dishes, and I know that if it would have been me that was up until 5 am, I wouldn't have been too happy to be woken up at 10-11 by someone making the dishes.

Anywho, so I took a walk.
Not only is this to proove to myself that I can, but yesterday Patrick and I made a bet.
We need to work out 45 min a day, 5 days a week.
Working out implies any form of work out = walking, gym, running etc.
The one who looses has to make or buy dinner.
I know I will loose several times, but it gives us both good incentives to move our butts a bit!

After my walk I went to the supermarket (hence the title of this post). Got myself some veggies, fruits, popcorn, juice and other awesome things, and also got some coffee filters for Patrick.
I have a feeling he might be a tad hung over today, and if I understood things right, coffee can help people feel better!

First Impressions

Hello there folks!

Like me and Patrick today, except we're not Chinese!

Haven't done much today since I wrote earlier.

But I figured I would write a bit about the first impressions of this city.

It reminds me a lot of certain parts of Panama. Not the old "antique" parts, but the oldER ones.
Pretty crappy road maintenance, less (crazy) traffic than PTY and Ankara, people are extremely friendly and it's not as warm as expected.

So, Patrick and I went out to get me a sim card and an adapter this morning.
We went to a mall, managed to get me a sim card, with the blackberry services. I am very happy, trying to download and make sure they work now.

We then tried to find an adapter. Which, in my head, without a dictionary I translated to adaptor (you need to add the spanish accent)
So we went around to stores, those which seemed to maybe sell those, I would walk up to random worker, half scream "BUENAS, TIENE ADAPTORES?" To which they, without exception, would look at us with a confused look, asking what we meant with that, to which I, without exception, would answer "PARA MI ORDINADOR, ELECTRICITY, EUROPEAN, MEXICO", which would confuse them even more...
most of the times they would understand us...
Finally a friendly man took us to a mall far far away, told us to go to "Radio Shak" where I could buy one!

Anywho, by this time I had a bad ass headace, transforming into a migraine.
We had lunch, I ran to a pharmacy to buy some migraine pills, cost me 497 Pesos... which is a lot of money for pills that turned out they didn't freaking work...

Now the migraine has passed a bit, I am back at home... trying to figure out if Dan is coming down here to visit tomorrow or not...

Oh well...

Tonight Edgar and Ruben are coming over for some dinner...

PUSS

My New Mexican Life

Arriving in Mexico yesterday I felt that this will be an ideal time to change some bad old habits that I have acquired through the years.

As a few of you might now, I have not smoked a cigarette in 16 days; this is HUGE.

My mamma and Kahn

According to some - every person spending time with me the first week -  I didn't deal with it as well as one might think I would, having a lot of self-control and dignity. According to these "some people" I was impossible to be around.
In my defense, this is something they ALL have asked me to do... so my answer was, and still is: Suck it up!

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you would know that it was pretty much impossible to take a walk, even less a power walk, in Ankara.
I like to walk. It's nice, burns enough calories and doesn't make you sweat.
So, another of my habits I decide to change was the no exercise one.
Now, my dear friends, this does not mean that I will start training for a marathon again (!). It only means that I will take more walks.
So when waking up at 7 a.m this morning, the whole city asleep, I took a walk.
And to make it better, I multi tasked a bit and went around to 3 different drugstores buying everything from sparkling water to normal water (It's true, but I also bought softener, things for the hair, cotton etc).

I have also decided that I should lower my wine consumption.
This might become the most difficult task, since you all know that wine and I are best friends, even better than cigarettes and I!!!

Oh well...

Now I need to do stuff and look around some more.

Puss

The last day of the European summer

Sunset at 11.30 p.m, Utö, Sweden

At some point of my last day in Turkey I thought I would have a lot of time while in Sweden to update you guys on what happened the last few weeks there as well as some sort of recap of the time I spent there.
This has not been possible.

I arrived here in Sweden on a sunny afternoon and am writing this post on my last day here, which also happens to be a sunny afternoon.
In between these two sunny afternoons quite a few things have happened.

The first 4 days I enjoyed the awesome Swedish summer weather in a tiny kids pool in my mom's garden, day time, and BBQ's with the family, night time.
It was amazing being back with my mom and the cats, having my sister and her husband around, laughing at peoples mistakes and  at fat neighbors problems.

On another sunny day I had to take an airport bus to go pick up Dan at Arlanda.
We spent a nice afternoon/night in Sthlm, leaving for the archipelago the next morning.

We enjoyed the care and stress-free life of the islands and I even caught a fish! I also drove into a fence and tried pushing Dan off the road!

We left the island on yet another sunny afternoon, went back to Sthlm, leaving the next morning for Västerås.
Here we checked out Viking stuff and spent time with family and cats; we ate meatballs, mashed potatoes and  a lot of ice cream.


The next day's afternoon was cloudy and we headed back to Sthlm, where we spent our last day together.
Had a lot of wine, went to Friday's and enjoyed each others company.
The next morning Dan pulled one of my favorite "moves", oversleeping for a flight!
He made it to the flight, luckily!

Helsinki, Finland

I made it to the airport a bit later to meet up with Bettina, my dad and sister.
We were off to Helsinki to celebrate my grams 80th b-day.
Instead of flying over, like we did last year, we took the boat.
Instead of 45 min, it takes 16h.
We had fun, enjoyed the view and had good food.

View from the Restaurant on the boat

Enjoyed some nice days over in Finland, meeting up with family is always nice.

Now we've been back in Västerås for about a day, and I leave for Mexico on about 12h.
I am not nervous yet, usually I don't get nervous.
Suppose you get used to moving and changing countries after a few times.

Now I need to get back to packing.

Bisous

The end of an era...

A short era, but the time doesn't really count!

My plan was to write some kinda recap post about the time I've spent in Turkey, my impression about this increadibly weird country and the people I've gotten to know.

I will do this, but in order for me not to become too emotional I will do this when I get back to Sweden on vacation... it's easier that way!

Now lets do the summary of what has happened since I wrote last.

D and I went to the beach. We went to Kizkalsi (I think it was). The reason we went there, and not to the "normal" tourist city was because the plants are in the end of comissioning and the minestry came down this week to certify it (maybe) so he had to be close.

Kizkalesi is about 7-8h from Ankara, until Karaman it was all good. Straight roads, nothing too crazy.

About 30 min after Karaman we had to go through some kinda mountain chain... that was a crazy and unsafe road, and on top of that a bird flew into the windshield.

I became very upset.

The town we went to was very cute and nice, nothing too touristic, mostly Turkish people, quite a few Americans from the military base in Adana.

The beach was clean, I saw no sharks, nor crocodiles, but a few fishes... they scared me.

Otherwise this week has been pretty calm. I finally had the communications presentation to Jeff, he said he liked it, I am not sure.

Other than that, I found out Cagla wants to die close to the ocean, Selcuk keeps boxes of oliveoil in his place even if the doctor told him NOT to eat oily food, I also learnt that Selcuk does not believe oilveoil is an oil.

Tomorrow is my last day in AES-IC; either Meral or Cagla will be there, it's sad!!

Esat promised me cake and soda, but he wont be there either.

Anywho... you get a more thorough update after the weekend when I get back to Västerås!

Puss