I had a quite tough start of it. As you might recall if you read frequently I'm writing a large study now together with my friend as the final job in the journalist education. Or well, I was doing it. I finished it last friday after several long workdays after new year, now I just have to wait and hope for the examination thursday next week. It feels like we're getting an fx, meaning that we pass as long as we fix some minor stuff, which we get a week to do but you never know. Until then I also gotta read another groups study through as I'm going to give feedback on it. Not as much work as writing my own but it is almost twelve thousand words so it will take some time, going to start with it today.
To another subject: What happened at new year?
I spent it which some friends old friends and some other people of which I knew some at an apartment in the middle of Stockholm. We had dinner, played the quiz game Trivial pursuit and had a general good time. I managed to get quite a few odd questions currect, I wasn't sure about when some random stuff happened but I did know for sure that the giraffe has a blue tongue. We had also talked a bit about what each person should be good at given their education and I got linguistics. When my group got the question which instrument the song that goes "blablabla" (forgot the text) is about. Noone in my group had heard it before but I just said that the last word in the text we got from it rhymes with guitar and voila! I guess it's sort of linguistics :)
A few hours later we headed out to a bridge where we could get a good look at the fireworks. I'm personally no large fan of the tradition due to what it does to animals etc but it's still beautiful. We spent some nice 15 minutes on that bridge, it was plus ten celsius so it wasn't cold either, making it no problem to pour the champagne for everyone without gloves on. It wasn't a night of heavy drinking or so but champagne for new year is quite nice. An old acquaintance saw me and said hello, then we went back to the apartment for a few hours of talking and reading random trivial pursuit questions for everyone to answer, not really caring much about game rules. I also spent some times talking old sports memories with two of my friends there who had been my fellow runners during my career when I was 14 to 18 years old or so, the time that we all lived in Stockholm that is. And some hours later we went home to our own places to sleep.
Since then I've mainly been working on the study as already written but if I stayed stable the weather didn't. New year was +10 in the night with very little snow, two days ago it was -19 in the morning with a lot of snow, slightly warmer now but the snow stays. I guess I don't mind if the long winter in Sweden starts now as I'm going to Amsterdam in three weeks anyway but I do hope that the winter doesn't follow me there. I don't leave Sweden to find winter, I leave to get away from it. The weather isn't the main reason I leave of course but you get the point.
New year resolutions? Well, during April in Sundsvall 2015 at around 04.30 after a party I and a few others were going to go to bed when someone said we should go to Sidsjön for a bath instead. Five of us did for some reason, and we were sober or we wouldn't go into water. I'm not sure why we walked the two kilometers to there and how we managed to get into the cold water that had been frozen not too long ago but we did. After a 30 second bath we then walked back home. One of these funny stupid memories.
The new year resolution for me isn't to repeat it, it is to tag along if someone ever comes up with an equally stupid idea in Amsterdam as long as it isn't dangerous. I know that some people say your resolution is invalid if you tell anyone else about it but I don't really care and when I get the chance to fulfil it I might not mind the excuse that it's invalid.