I traveled to a town on the southeast coast of Sweden, named Karlskrona. Krona means crown; the name of the town is Karl’s crown.

Karlskrona has always been an important naval base since it was founded by King Karl XI in the year 1680. The marine museum at the harbor is quite an attraction.

Façade of the museum.

This is said to be the oldest sub-marine in Sweden.

A real periscope, from which people can see what’s above the building.

These are the hats of navies from different countries.

The one to the right on the first row is from China; the one under is from Japan. If enlarge the pictures, you might find the one from your country~

This is one of the real figureheads of ships displayed in the museum. They fought together with the ships through thunders and storms and witnessed great explorations and communications of the Swedes. This one is named Saga, who is a goddess associated with a treasure land in the ancient Norse Myth.

The center is really beautiful. I like the architectures a lot. Some of them have been standing there for hundred of years.

I wish I have been there during the summer. Water is so crystal clear. The city encompasses quite many islands that connected to one another with ferry lines iterating between them many times a day. There’s even a ferry to the other side of the Baltic sea, Poland.

It would have been so much fun to sail on the sea….

/Carmen

Halmstad University has a lot of cooperation with local companies. The engineering students are the one who benefit directly from this. There are a lot of projects between the firms and the students.

We, as business students, also get to work with some companies once in a while. Instead of finding technical solution, our expertise lies in consultancy.

Not long ago, on the course Management of Change, we worked with an interesting firm, which locates right next to our campus, named Tylö. They are in the bathroom and sauna business. It was quite educating and fun experience working with them. We got to see the whole production line of making a sauna, infra sauna cabins, and cool designs of bathroom, etc and got to know the concept of soft sauna and the future trend of bathroom.

We appreciate so much of the trust and support that we have received from them, and they are pretty happy about the new ideas we provided. In order to keep the competitive advantage, I will not reveal our work…

Since then, every time we go to the swimming pool, we always pay particular attention to the Tylö sign on the door handle of the sauna in the swimming pool, which looks like this:

I guess working with companies actually helped in building brand loyalty.

/Carmen

Last winter in Halmstad was full of snow and joy. This year we are also expecting some white winter.

It did snow couple of times before, but the snow had all melted before it could leave a track behind. Today, it has been snowing and the temperature finally drops below zero and it seems it will remind that way for a few weeks. Everywhere is white now and that is soooo beautiful. I come from a region in China where we don’t have much snow in the winter. These dancing little white snowflakes are making me so happy.

I’m keep my finger crossed. Hopefully we will have a cozy, white Christmas.

My friend Charlotte organized the laser gun game, at a place called Slottsmöllan. It’s bit outside of the city, 15 minutes by bicycle from the center.

On the door, you will see the sign of “Laserdome”.

The whole game consists three rounds, 20 minutes each. Be prepared to get really really exhausted. There are two kinds of teams you can choose, red and blue. Each gun has a name, which players should bear in mind if they want to see the score afterwards. The playing field is very very dark. Usually you can’t see the players but only the blinking lights on them. You can shoot someone on the stomach, the shoulders, the back or the gun. After being shot, the player has to wait for 6 seconds to be back in the game in order to get killed again or fire.

After each round, you can find the billboard outside the room:

The score and analysis of each player will be printed and handed out. I was never the best player nor the worst. I was just thinking leaving the bloody cruel battle game to the males.

Woke up this morning with severe pain in my butt and legs…

Can anybody tell me why today’s Google.se logo looks like below? I tried to find out what is special about today in Sweden, but my efforts were in vain.

Help… I need to know the reason, otherwise the puzzle will bug me forever and ever, and ever…..

When I was giving a lecture in the Sturegymnasiet (a local high school), I told them that Chinese people are obsessed about food. One student raised a question, what do you mean by obsessed about food, do you eat all kinds of living things?

Oh, come oooon…. we are just Chinese, not savages.

Well, we do have a lot of weird stuff, such as snake, snail, scorpion… I’d better stop here before I bring in more strange creatures. But the truth is those are not commonly used as food. I have tried snake maybe two times in my life in some fancy Chinese restaurants. Scorpion, once, deep fried, tasted like plastic. I will never try it again despite the fact that I struggled for half an hour before I finally made my mind to take a bite…

The material is not the point. Chinese do not care so much about what we eat, but how we cook. Most Chinese eat pork as main source of meat. Depending how you cook it, the pork can turn you down or make your mouth watering!

I am not going to turn this post into a piece of Chinese food cooking guide… Actually, I just want to say that I love good food and show this:

Not really Chinese food, but we made it ourselves. Cheap beef in the supermarket and time to treat ourselves! Cheers!

/Carmen

I bought a big piece of lamb in Hemköp. Some people told me that it is called lammfiol. Lamm means lamb; fiol means violin. So here comes my interpretation:

The lamb violin sounds delicious!

/Carmen

Photo/Pat

A lot of museums in Sweden are free to people under the age of 25. I have been to the city museum in Göteborg recently. The theme of the exhibition was about the 18th century of Göteborg.

It’s hard to cover everything demonstrated in this five-floor museum. I will only mention two that are really creepy.

This is the symbol of this exhibition, of which the originals were placed at the city wells.  It’s far more spooky than it actually looks like. When I passed by, its sensor activated and it started to whisper: “Psss… Välkommen till Göteborg’s 1700-talet. ” (Psss… Welcome to the 18th century of Göteborg. ). That really scared the * out of me. I was alone; the light was dim; the head was whispering…

What’s in the privy, the outhouse toilette? You will know in a minute if you open the lid:

You can believe your eyes, these are the feces and worms, plus trash in the second picture.

The last picture shows an upper-class couple having a good time on dasset(the privy).

I have to say, dasset is gross. And it is hard for us, the so-called modern generation to think about the life in the past.

I like the idea that the toilette is put in the museum. People who lived in the past were not just figures, pictures, heros or kings etc. They were like us, real organic beings. They breathed, they ate, they drank, and of course they took a leak or poo. Though I hope they had a second thought about hygiene when building a toilette…

PS: Please forgive my stupid sense of humor. In all, the museum was great!

/Carmen