Great Weekend and I Did Something Swedish :-)

Dear readers,

I hope that all of you had nice and relaxing weekend again. This weekend I met with some of my friends from rowing and other people that I hadn't seen since before the Christmas holidays. We had a great time.

The end of last week was busy for me. I met with my Master's Thesis supervisor and we discussed our work, timelines, co-supervisors and other organisation matters regarding my Thesis. Things are starting to get serious! I look forward to all the work for the Master's, but I must say I'm slightly nervous about all the statistics that we will be doing for our statistical analysis part.

For my Thesis, we will be comparing Micarea globulusella (a formerly Swedish red-listed lichen species) growth, frequency and distribution in old-growth forests and younger forests. I will work on more concrete information as my work on the project progresses. Right now I'm in the starting phase, reading papers and developing hypotheses that we want to test. Also, there will be many questions to answer. I look forward!

Otherwise, last Thursday I did something extremely Swedish. Every Thursday I join circuit training sessions organised by members of my UARS Rowing Club. You might ask what circuit training is. Basically it's working out without weights. You just use your body weight. This sort of training really exercises your body control and core muscle groups.

Circuit training is part of our winter training program, and is also free of charge for whoever wants to participate. Circuit training is offered every Thursday at 17:30 at the Sylthallen gym here on Ultuna Campus. Anyways, after training we always go to the sauna (also located inside the gym). Normally after the sauna, we go under a cold shower, but not this time!

This time we ran outside in the snow and rolled around in it! :-D Supposedly this is a very Swedish thing to do, go into the sauna, get very hot and run outside into frigid temperatures and roll around in the snow. At first it was a shock, but once you're back indoors it feels really good. Try it! :-D

Anyways, these were the interesting points of my last days here in Sweden. Have a great next few days!

Julian