First week in Lund (Lund #3)

So far it has been good.

Thursday was a very important day. We had a meeting in our faculty building where were people who are actually from our department. Because until now we had only those general meetings regardless the faculty. We were welcomed in a big lecture hall in LTH (it's Lund's faculty of engineering) by the dean. He mentioned why he things LU is interesting for us and the whole world. Besides historical successes he focused on recent news For example, it might be surprising for you that there was an acquisition of one Lund's biomedical start-up by one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world in numbers like 6 billions USD. Another current successes are improving the efficiency of showers (by effectively improving the filters), which is going to be used in ISS by NASA, improving the photo-voltaic, converting thrown away bananas (basically waste) to flour and others. All of these are ran by students and professors from LU. Another highlights is Ideon Science Park, where are companies like Sony, ARM, Apple, Huawei, Intel, Gumro, Ericsson and others... When you add MAX IV and ESS, it seems that Lund has everything.

Then there were a talk from some other professor. He spoke about some rules here. For example, everybody is called by his first name, regardless his status or academic rank. It's kind of a funny picture to call some of my professors by their first name, but I like it. He provided some information about students also. There are about 344 students from 35 different countries just on the faculty of engineering. The most of them are from Germany, USA and Brasil. The Swedish students are going to come on Monday, by the way. He also stress that we should learn during the whole semester, mainly because there is only one week for all the exams and it's impossible to learn everything then... By the way, Malmo region (where the Lund lies) is one of the most innovative cities in the world according to Forbes (2013). It has one of most patents on the head.

Following speech was by student union president. These are students which are full-time working for students and they are paid by faculty for whole year. The faculty also officially stops their studies, so they have enough time for all organization stuffs. Awesome! They also introduced the concept of guilds. Guilds are basically groups of students of the same area of studies. My group is F group (which stands for Fysiks I guess) and there were about 30 students in this guild. Every guild has it's own building (where are the most of the lectures from that specific area) and it has it's own colour. Another guild is for example K guild which is for chemistry students, another for Architects and so on. Together there are 11 guilds. Every guild has it's own symbol in front of it's house about a child size made from metal. Our symbol is for example Rubik's cube and architects have a pencil. One part of introduction weeks is to paint all symbols to the colour of your guild (it's kind of fight :) ). Every student of LTH can also buy overalls of their guild's colour. But about it later :) .

Our mentors - 5 Swedish students: Olof, Tove, Eric, Elias and something I don't remember yet - give us a cheap lunch (20 SEK) cooked by students (kus-kus with vegetable and if asked with chicken) and then took us around the campus, which is really nice! Everything is basically one big green area with nice buildings. Then they took us to the Olof's place where was a barbecue. Our guild is quite nice, the core is about 20 people, about 15 men and 5 women. It's of course multicultural ranging from Egypt, UK, USA, Germany, Holland and so on.

No a lot of Czech people are here. I've met about 5 of them so far, only one girl from CTU (ČVUT, faculty of architecture). The rest were from other faculties, not even CTU.

I am kind of surprised that my English is average or even below average compared to the other people here. The most of the students have great English, really!

Friday started again with SUSA course (Swedish course). We did just some common sentences and pronunciations. Then there were this Student Association Fair, where student nations, student unions, the Academic Society and many other student societies from Lund described what they do and what one has to do to join them. Student nations are organizations which basically organize parties, trips, run their own bars, offers accommodation, job and others.

In Saturday, I basically spend my whole day by studying. I should have gone to the Hiking Tour in National Park, but I'd sold the ticket before. The main reason was that I got a bit sore ache. I guess it's because after the sunset it starts to be quite cold (like 14 degrees with the wind). Since then I take my sweater everywhere. From 19pm we had so-called pre-party. It's very common in other countries except in the ones which are on the east the Czech Republic. Because alcohol is usually expensive in bars, students do these pre-parties where they drink their own alcohol, which is usually cheaper. Then they go to the actual party. Another reason, which is IMHO more appropriate is the fact that on parties it's usually impossible to talk because of loud music and all the dancing.

Our pre-party was held in the apartment of one of our mentors. They bought some beer in cans (0,3l/10 SEK), cider (0.3l/15 SEK) and possibly made some drink for around 20 SEK. We played some (for all other students well-known) drinking games with cards, counting, beer pong and so on. Nobody got drunk a lot, personally I have only 4 cans (so 3 beers) in 4 hours (50 SEK). I must say it was kind of fun and I enjoyed that, even thought I hadn't thought that I will before. It's interesting that Czechs are known for drinking a lot, but we don't play any games. We... just... drink...

In half past 12 we went to the Welcome party (100 SEK). It was classical "disco" like style, where you can't hear a word, can't move and you can't find your mates... I left after half an hour or so and for few minutes I was sad for the money, but you never knows, how it gonna look like. But definitely not next time.

In Sunday I again, studies quite a lot and then I had a meeting with U (Poland), Blondie (Portugal) and her boyfriend, who was here just for one day (he lives in Copenhagen for a month). We went to another part of the town to our friend L, which invited us there for a barbecue. Unfortunately, we've got kind of lost and it took us about one and half an hour to get there. But then it was nice :) . I got home at 11:30pm.

I still don't posses front and back light on my bike so I have to avoid policemen, since it's about 750 SEK for a fine (500 for the front and 250 for the back one - it's a discount :D ). But it seems I am not the only one. By the way, this day I crashed my phone screen :( . I had it in my bag, which I put in the front basket on my bike (which is called Ame Lia). When I changed direction and just went from the road to pedestrian path, the bike jumped a bit (because of the bump) and the telephone literally jumped out of my bag through a small hole... I wouldn't believe it could happen :/.

It's all for now. I don't have a lot of spare time. Most of the time I study, I am with the girls (B, L, M, U) or with our guild. Currently it's about after midnight and I have to go to bed. The next report will be hopefully posted in Thursday.