went to the “new citizenship ceremony” here in uppsala yesterday with my wife and an exchange student/singing-club friend… the ceremony was boring as hell. first off, the invitations were in swedish, english and arabic but once there they actually only spoke swedish so i felt bad for all those who couldn’t speak swedish that well because it was misleading. it took place in uppsala castle which was kinda cool because i’d never been inside there before, but in the end it was just a concrete building with some fancy portraits.

here's the outside of the castle:














(the sign just says that they have sheep around the castle during summer).


this is part of the trail around the fenced-in area where the sheep are. it says it's an electric fence but i think the electricity's actually been turned off...

here's the inside of the castle, from going there for the ceremony yesterday. i should've checked out the bathrooms but i didn't! by the way i didn't have to show ID to get in or anything, i just said my name and they checked me off the list. a ton of people brought kids (apparently kids don't count when they say you can bring "2 guests" so you can bring 2 guests and 3 kids if you want):








once in, they gave us “memory papers” with like “you became a citizen! here’s a quote about what citizenship means!” and the quote was literally like “citizenship has good and bad points”. they also gave us paper flags, and i just felt like, hey, i think we’re at least worth fabric flags (y’know, something that lasts!)… they had drinks but it was ice water, apple juice in champagne glasses, or boxed juice (all the juice had added sugar in it…), no food or anything, which is strange because it’s super normal to at least have sandwiches.

secondly, it was 10 minutes of speech, 10 minutes of music, that kind of thing for an hour. the music was MOZART, it wasn’t even swedish. the speeches were like “we all live here together and need to cooperate! we put the ‘med’ (with) in 'medborgare’ (citizen)! take good care of children! the rest of us don’t know what it’s like to come from your country so please tell us all about it in books and songs and stuff! by the way since it’s national day there’s a bunch of activities to go to in the park!”

multiple born-and-raised-swedes messed up on ex. calling the “memory paper” your “proof of citizenship”, your “membership paper”, etc. sorry, getting citizenship isn’t as easy as all that…



anyway, then i saw stuff around town (rabbit-jumping contest, sailboating, traditional music, etc) & had a picnic with my wife & an exchange-student/singing-club friend. we got to pet piglets and watch scuba-divers pick up trash from the bottom of the river, among other things.

it was fun, but as usual it was just "small-time countryside fair" stuff. can't wait to get to japan where they have real cities and actual big events that don't feel like just two people organized them...


a rabbit-jumping contest. as in rabbits jumped over those hurdles. the one with the sign on it says "this is the world-record height for a rabbit jump". seemed like the rabbits really loved doing the hurdles...

we picnicked here on the boardwalk(?) at the river that runs through town. they had sailboats out and you could try going on one and steering it for free. after that we walked around and saw scuba-divers picking up trash from the bottom of the river, and saw chickens and hens and got to pet piglets. we saw some people going in a hansom kind of thing (horse-pulled sleigh with wheels...) too.

all healthy food of course!! i tried some new recipes: banana-rice-vanilla pudding made from coconut milk; kimchi omlette; steamed cauliflour in coconut milk-sweetpotato-onion-garlic-mustard sauce (it was supposed to be fake macaroni and cheese but tasted like dessert instead, the original recipe used squash instead of sweet potato so next time...), potato sallad (black/purple potatoes, pickles, balamic vinegar), tofu with sauce (didn't turn out so good, it was a bad recipe), berries we bought from a street-stand, and carbonated water with elderflower-lime flavoring. and smoked salmon. our friend is a vegetarian so originally everything we made was vegetarian but we went to the grocery store together to get the carbonated water and she said she actually does eat meat occasionally so we got the smoked salmon.

the red one is "one-time-use grill" disposal. apparently people use them so much at this spot they needed to get their own recycle bin. then it's trash, bottle recycling and general recycling.




typical/famous swedish desserts. first is "princess cake" (white flour, egg-cream, marzipan), then "chocolate balls" (cocoa, butter, coconut flakes), candied almonds (almonds fried in sugar; you can actually ONLY buy them on holidays and at festivals, it's a pan-nordic thing), and various white-bread things that aren't sweet.


at the bus-stop. "What do you think trees DON'T like? (Aside from being chopped down, obviously)". the sign to the left says "The Michael's Church" which is just the name of the church.


random under-construction building.

my wife and i also went to "museum night" the other night, which is where all museums and museum-type places have free or reduced entrance costs and are open until midnight (stuff normally closes at around 18-20 here). at the dinosaur/evolutionary museum they had turned off the lights on the upper floor and had a scavenger hunt to find all the exhibits marked on a piece of paper; it was probably intended for kids (the whole museum seems intended for kids) but the majority of people there were actually adults on dates, or foreigners with groups of friends! what i found funny was they had english translations of everything except for stuff that actually pertained to sweden, ex. some swedish guy who discovered a natural carbonated water spring (the same carbonated water i had on my picnic), his exhibit was mysteriously untranslated.

i didn't realize there was gunk on my phone camera lense until afterwards, so all the museum photos turned out really blurry.




"Think to yourself about what if you met Lucy! (= this super old skeleton) What would you do together?". there were various other signs saying similar extremely-swedish stuff, such as "imagine you were an ape! what would you do?"


here's the Carbonated Water Guy. it's too blurry to tell but, yeah, there's no english there.



kids had colored in dinosaurs and stuff and put them on that little wall there. i should've taken a better photo, they were really great.


i often complain about how incredibly rude english-natives are all the time, especially ones who are actually from england. yeah, guess who was SITTING on the TABLES? english exchange students! by the way, they were also showing each other videos of like car racing and stuff on their smartphones instead of, y'know, checking out the museum and then leaving.








this is one of the photos from the upstairs where they had turned off all the lights.


gift shop stuff. almost all of it was in english (obviously from foreign countries) and not actually related to any of the museum exhibits.

then we went to the plant museum, which is for botany students (or so we assumed). it actually cost a bit of money to get in and... wasn't worth it. i mean, normal plant shops in the US have more plants than this! they had had a water show earlier on but we missed it. it was my wife's first time in a rainforest-esque humid environment.








other general stuff:



the "American candy/food" sections are just growing and growing in all the grocery stores... and i've really noticed that the general population has been getting fatter and fatter. i've only been living here for 5 years and it's easy to tell.

when we go to town we tend to buy pre-made food at this one healthy shop (it's actually really cheap, I think their slightly raised prices on the "stuff that I could make cheaper at home" are used to lower the prices on what should be more expensive) and then have a sort of picnic outdoors:


the large-print japanese books i ordered came, but i haven't actually really tried reading them yet since i just feel so stressed all the time... the font still isn't as large as i'd like but it does help. maybe it'll be easier once my reading glasses come.




well, that's all for now!