Hallå!

May has been such an insane month, you can’t even make it up. In the very last bits of April, my family came to visit me to catch a glimpse of what life is like in Lund. We also visited Ystad, which is a small coastal town on the southern tip of Sweden, and also drove up to Helsingborg to catch the ferry across the Øresund strait over to Helsingør, which is the Danish town with the famous castle on which Shakespeare’s Hamlet is based. It was nice to spend more time in the countryside as well in my family’s cabin, since I don’t spend so much time outside of Lund. In fact, the soft hills and the wide open canola fields even reminded me a bit of home somehow (except Skåne is one of the flattest areas in Sweden, and Limburg is the hilliest area in NL).

Wrapping up April, just short of every single student in Lund got to celebrating Valborg. This is the real beauty of studying in Sweden during the spring semester, as Valborg is the festival marking the end of winter. It’s celebrated with a 30 thousand person picnic in the park from about 7am, and loads of booze, snacks, music, and enjoying the sun. In the afternoon, we headed across town for a barbecue and sleeping in the sun before heading back to the park for the city’s Valborg celebration with a choir and a bonfire (and, you guessed it, more alcohol. This is Sweden after all). We ended the night at one of the famous Student Nation’s Valborg club nights. The day after Valborg is Labor Day in Sweden, otherwise known as ‘första maj’. The day is once again celebrated with a student choir and a ceremony outside the gorgeous neoclassical university building, it was even broadcasted on national TV!

May started out with my first time singing at an open mic in Sweden, at the coolest bar in Lund. We also celebrated our friend’s birthday that night before he was sadly leaving his Lund at the end of the week. He was the first of our close friends we’ve had to say goodbye to on this exchange, so we celebrated our last day together with a day at the beach and a funeral ceremony. Saying goodbye to friends you’ve become so close to in such a close time is hard, but I’m excited to stay in touch with friends all over the world after this exchange time is over. Plus, all the more reason to go visit, right? That same weekend I attended my first ever ball for the International Affairs Association, which was a beautiful dinner held in the Lund Grand Hotel with incredible outfits and live music.

Around mid May, Kalmar Spex production week started. We started with a tech rehearsal that ended up lasting TEN HOURS, to get all the costumes, makeup, staging, acting, retakes, music, singing, and tech stuff lines up correctly. This was followed by the grand rehearsal just a few days after, which was followed by an impromptu Eurovision watchparty, a visit to Gothenburgs Nation club to see my friend’s first ever DJ set, and three official spex shows–the premiere, the pub show, and the grand finale. Despite the stress, chaos and panic, all of the shows went beautifully, and our play got rave reviews across the board–from Kalmarites, from Spex veterans, and from people outside Kalmar Nation. The shows were wrapped up with a post-finale afterparty where we auctioned off the stage props and got to sign each other’s posters, and a pirate themed spex sittning to end the era. <3

So as you can tell, production week was a crazy time and it unfortunately significantly cut into my time to study and work on assignments that were pressing during my exam week. I had a take-home exam for my gender studies course to figure out, as well as an oral and written exam for my final Swedish course (that would get me level A2 certified!). I spent the week after Spex constantly at my favorite study cafés, trying to pump out close to a thousand words each day, as well as absorb close to a thousand Swedish vocabulary words. All of my exams are over now, and though I’m not sure how, I think I did okay (knock on wood). It truly feels like a load off my shoulders as spex and the semester are now over. But on the other hand, this marks the end of studying at Lund University and also marks the end of my bachelor’s degree! I’ll graduate from Utrecht University at the end of this summer after four years, which is such a bittersweet moment.

To celebrate the end of the semester, some friends and I took a quick trip to Stockholm for a couple of nights. We took an early train and rode for around five hours, before arriving in the city. We spent our days there seeing the sights in the old town, enjoying local cafes and shops, listening to live jazz, dancing in the ABBA museum, visiting the Södermalm area, eating great food, sleeping in the sun by the harbour, seeing the Polar Music Prize red carpet from across the street (Queen’s guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor were there!), eating tasty food, constantly gawking at how expensive the city is, and loads and loads and loads of walking.

May is ending now, and that means I’m going into my last month as a student here in Lund. My hopes for June are that it will be a beautiful month of gratitude, reflecting, spending time with close friends, and looking forward to what life will be back after coming back home. And on a more cheerful note, as I’m writing this I have a quick break from everything while preparing for my dear friend from home to come visit me for the weekend to celebrate the end of the year!

Will tell you more next month. Until then, vi ses!

Ana