Fish and friendships

Dear Austria, Happy National Day!

In 1955 on the 26th of October, the Austrian Parliament signed the declaration of neutrality and declared the country permanently neutral. In celebration of this, I went with a new friend to the parliament building for a tour and ended up shaking hands with some (random) politicians, one of them was from Tyrole and told me had studied Swedish for ski instructors. Wow, what do you even reply to that?

This room is actually not used as it was built for the monarchs... But it's much nicer than the one in use!

This Friday, I went with a group called Young Water Professionals on an excursion to learn about small hydropower plants. We went all the way to Ybbs and Lunz am See in Lower Austria on a very cold day, and looked at technologies for fish passages (Fischaufstiegshilfen) at hydropower plants. We met this really cool old man who has invented a kind of spiral waterpower tube that can transport fish both up and down inside the hydropower plant! Because the normal passages are kind of stairs so the fish can jump up the stream next to the power plant, but it doesn't actually let the fish come down again... At Lunz there is ongoing investigation on how different elements in the environment are affected by surge and sunk - when the water sinks away for example after heavy rain, some stupid fish may get trapped in puddles and die. Sad. I didn't really get this part, because all was in German, but the people were kind enough to give me summaries in English afterwards.

Fish Feeding and the surge and sink constructed study area

After returning from that long day, my fantastic flatmate brought me to a fantastic house party - there was even chocolate fondue! And boardgames! And a pool table! And so much alcohol! haha!

So a quite eventful week actually, and I've made a few new friends! My companion at the parliament I met at a football table game (which we won), and I've met a lovely American girl who seemed to be like an overseas version of me - I imagine I would have been something like her if I'd been born there. Except the marathon  running maybe. And today I had a pancake brunch with a language tandem partner who's gonna help me a bit with German (but mostly we were talking about other stuff...). And I've had dinner and coffee with some French girls! And talked a bit more with some of my classmates, as we hung out after class and met up yesterday for cake and wine at someone's house.

I of course knew all of this would happen, as I am a person who inevitably makes friends, but the first weeks before it kind of takes off is really dull. I was also expecting to be more busy at university and spend more time there and meeting people there than I have been so far. Seriously, I've read four novels since I got here! And about halfway through my fifth. Which is not a bad timekill at all, don't get me wrong, but it's definitely not the most social one. In hindsight I think the good thing about it is it allows the brain to rest, when otherwise it's working hard to adapt to everything new around me. Some days I've even declined social activities because I've been tired from things that usually doesn't affect me at all, but it takes more energy when I'm in a new place and acknowledging that and allowing for more rest than normally I think will benefit me and my overboiling brain in the long run.

There is so much more I feel like writing about, but I'll save it for later. Probably I can put up some more pics from the excursion soon!

New chapter - Moving east

Dear Austria,

I would like to thank you for the very warm welcome you have given me since my arrival here three weeks ago. Yet again you have proven that time indeed is relative, as experienced in new relationships.

I came here to study, but that has so far not really been taking up a lot of my time. I would like to study more, but I only have a few classes per week and no course literature. My university claims to be "flexible", although all international students know that it's just a nice way to say "completely unorganised". It's quite funny actually.

So since I got here, I've spent a lot of time with my new flatmate, Stefan. I'm trying to make friends, but it really takes time and effort, as anyone moving to a new place knows. My efforts may not have been as intense as they could have, but honestly I just miss my old friends. So I've spent more time skyping and emailing with people as well, which is a great, and I'm receiving a lot of love! And being able to give my loved ones some well-deserved attention.

But to be honest, I've been up to quite a lot here. I've been to a festival and saw the local band A basement in bloom (yay!) and went to the museum night, bought furniture and brought it to my place (took a wardrobe and later on a chair on the metro), built an IKEA bed on my own, biked out to the surrounding forest (Wienerwald), visited the garden of Schönbrunn, had a few nights out with Nathalie and Stefan, went to a couchsurfing meeting in a boardgame bar, joined a bookclub and went to a meeting, read 3 novels and watched quite a lot of a TV serie with Stefan...

 Nathalie is helping me move a closet!

 Sunset from our apartment

And that is not even including this weekend, when Stefan took me to his parents' farm in upper Austria where we were helping out with the cows, and hiked up a mountain. The excursion started early in the morning and was by far the most challenging one I've done, passing on the ridge of a mountain and using hands and feet to get by. I admit I was pretty scared, but it was well worth it! Both for the view and the fun and adrenaline-induced experience of pushing my boundaries.

 

Then it's also all the small things of finding my way around a new place. I've found a place to go running (not so easy in a big city), a market to buy food, places to go dumpster diving, which way to bike to university... It has all been so much nicer thanks to the excellent weather, allowing me and Nathalie to have a coffee outdoors in the sun after class. Warm welcome in a double meaning, that is.

Snapshots

From my first weekend in DH (Den Haag) - my fabulous flatmates Charlotte (left in stripes) and Kelvin (guy on my right) took me to a festival arranged by a neighborhood. Dance dance dance to lovely mexican/peruvian/spanish band Chupacabras! 

Dancing made me happy. Friends made me happy. Good vibes.

And, Kelvin is the person to thank for the capturing of this moment!

From Rurrenabaque with love

“You would have to be half mad to dream me up.”

It is the morning of our last full day in Rurre, tomorrow we’re taking a flight back to La Paz again. Our stay is much overdue but I’m not at all ready to leave. Met so many amazing friends, saw so many beautiful things, dreamt so much, got drunk, danced, cried, laughed.

I will write a separate entry for the two excursions we did, one was to the pampas as I already mentioned and the other one was to the jungle. Mesmerising.

In Rurre, we have as I’ve written earlier spent a lot of time writing on our thesis. So much that all out friends and acquaintances are commenting on it – but you are working so hard! You cannot work all the time! We have spent much time at the hostel, but also at a restaurant called Casa del Campo, where the owner has become like a second mum to us. Delicious food, but slow cooking!

We have of course also spent time with Miguel, the couchsurfer, almost everyday (Rurre is so small you are bound to run into each other at least once per day). We were also excited guests at his sister’s birthday party, when she turned eleven last week! A lovely experience, and interesting to see the differences from a Swedish celebration. First of all, all guests arrived (as expected) two hours late… and the TV was on all the time, since there are no games, just dance. And the dance is performed to the latest hits, which are in Latin America quite often performed by a man surrounded by women in bikini. Interesting, as in Bolivia the women will wear clothes even to go swimming, and we are often stared at for wearing a swim suit. On the contrary, any mother will breastfeed her child in public at any time! Confusing…

The last two days we have spent with Elin and Pontus! Pontus is a friend of mine from Sweden that I see maybe once every year together with his cousin Marcus, who is one of my closer friends. And now they are on the road, apssing by Rurre! We’ve had a really good time here although the weather turned from 30 degrees and sticky sweat to icy rain… We’ve been eating out a lot, and laughing a lot as we share the same cultural sense of humour. And Elin and Pontus are really funny – they are a perfect match! We wish you all the best for the rest of your trip, and we hope to get invited to your wedding so we can give you a chocolate fondue machine!

More friends who had a big impact on us were Sami, a French guy living with energetic Edwin. Both had such a lovely energy, cannot help but smile when around them! And our jungle guide, Leoncito, a really special person. As well as Cheo, the young artisan that is so passionate about life and nature.

This is such a special place. I think the strongest reason for that is the intense presence of the wild nature – the Pachamama, as mother earth is called in Latin America. You have to be senseless not to feel anything here, which is why I’m secretly planning my return to get a longer stay in the jungle. Maybe next year…

Thesis writing is serious business!

“Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!” 

So, we decided to stay in Rurrenabaque (RBQ) and write the main body of our thesis here. Yesterday we could finally start writing, and it feels fantastic. Our first time here was dedicated to other things – we did an amazing trip to Las Pampas for three days, and two days of field trips for a contract job that Tess is doing for the environmental consultancy U&We. These were fabulous experiences and it was relieving to stop thinking about the thesis for a while – even the best of brains need a rest at some point.

So this week, we have started to revise the interviews. It is a hard job indeed, reading the transcriptions in Spanish, I select the important parts and then I translate them for Tess. The texts are hard to deal with since spoken vs written language is so different, and they can be very confusing… a funny thing is that in Spanish, ‘no’ can sometimes mean ‘yes’, it depends on the intonation, which we of course cannot see in the transcriptions! Cochabamba feels like such a long time ago, and even though we mentally started processing the material already when we did the interviews, there are many things we don’t remember. Especially for Tess, who never fully understood the material when we did the interviews.

When we did our data collection, I got to practice my skills as an interviewer since Tess does not manage the Spanish that well yet. This learning process has become very obvious to me now, as I see the varying quality of the interviews. And although my Spanish is good, it is still my third language and therefore I can be thrown of my feet if the informant is using a confusing rhetoric. And I swear, Spanish-speakers can be so confusing!

Now, we try to write as much as we possibly can. I miss our kitchen table in our old apartment in Malmö very much – RBQ is great in many ways, but writing here is difficult. It is very warm, which makes our mid-day writing sessions very sweaty. We still don’t have a proper table where we live, which makes writing not ergonomic at all, and this is a noisy place (although the hotel we are at now is pretty good in that sense). Still, I would not want to be anywhere else.

To go for a swim in the river whenever we get too hot, walk barefoot, some of the new friends we met here, the hills, the pace of this place… I was lying in the garden a while ago, looking at the sky and the bush with orange/pink flowers next to me. The colours are so vivid! That is something I really miss in Sweden – everything is a bit …duller. It of course has its own charm, but this lively colours, especially the green of the plants in contrast to the sky, it fills me with energy.

Las Pampas ... will tell more about that another time!

Arriving in Rurre

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Oh, Bolivia.

A week ago we left La Paz in a little propeller plane, which was by far the most beautiful flight of my life (and I’ve done quite a few…). Since the plane was so small, we flew between the snow-covered mountains and then down towards the lowlands, the green hills, the rivers.

When we arrived at the airport of Rurrenabaque, which was basically just a house next to a field, we were greeted with the phrase “wellcom to paradais!” (imagine a Spanish intonation here), and he was so right. This is so incredibly beautiful, it’s like living and breathing a documentary from national geographic. The landscapes I barely dared to dream of are now surrounding me.

So we got into town and called our couchsurfer. In this remote (yet touristic) village, there is only one couchsurfer, who of course gets heaps of requests. However, after 3 years in the CS community and this being my 40th time surfing, I have some practice in writing requests by now and know how to make people understand that I'm genuinely interested in meeting them and not just want to stay for free at someone's house. Miguel, or Lechu as he is nicknamed, picked us up and then drove us to his grandparents place, where he picked a coconut from the garden and served me. In the afternoon Tess was feeling a bit ill, so Lechu and I did a little excursion to a remote beach to go swimming in the river. Lechu and I get along so well, he is fun to hang out with and we have a special kind of humor largely based on teasing each other. He is not at all the typical Bolivian, since he lived in Venezuela for five years and has travelled a lot. At some point, I think travellers merge into a people who have more in common with each other that their countrymen – we are in a certain way a different species, with our own variety of course. And yet, after a while, you can pick out distinct types of travellers so easily... will return to this topic later!

Couchsurfers and a shared piece of beach art!

How to write an essay in CBBA

“It was much pleasanter at home," thought poor Alice, "when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit-hole...and yet...and yet...” 

It's pretty hard to get efficient here. Things take so much more time than you expect them to! It would be easy to complain about this, but hey, this is what makes you realise how privileged we are back home. 

We were promised an office space with wifi, which we thought would be a great place to write. Well, it wasn't. Wifi does not work, people are running in and out, the street outside is heavily trafficked, and the table is way too high for the chairs. Then our room has only one electric outlet, and if we sit for too long on our bed, our bums starts to hurt because it is so hard. We do have one chair, but no table. This is not meant to whine, just describe our reality and the reasons why writing a thesis in Sweden is much more convenient. So what do we do? Well, we have found some places that have wifi. This is a Mexican restaurant: 

And this is Tess, as a great coffee place where we hang out with the other foreigners who like western style places:

Back at our place, I built a table in the courtyard to be able to sit outside to write and read. But I'm afraid it will fall over if I make it any higher, so when I write, I have to bend over until literally have my chest against my thighs. But then I also like having my face pretty close to the notebook when I write.

On the other hand... we have around 25 degrees all the time, which is the perfect temperature even for my picky body. We are surrounded by the most helpful people I could ever imagine (more on that another day). I get to speak my favourite language all the day. We learn new things all the time. Being here is such a great process of self-development  getting to know different sides of myself, getting a lot of new ideas and having to deal with myself. We are honestly not that distracted by our surroundings, since we don't have that many friends here, boyfriend is far, not much going on in this city anyway... We are living our essay and I honestly do believe we will finish it on time, even if many other students who get this scholarship do the writing after they get home. And we are so rich here that we can afford paying someone else to transcribe our interviews, which saves incredible amounts of time and work!

In total, doing a field study is inconvenient, but it rocks. Actually, my life in general is generally not that convenient, but it rocks.

Hard work hopefully pays off...

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” 

We are two hard working women indeed!

Last week were as I’ve already written ups and downs, but when we reached the weekend, we had managed to conduct seven interviews in five days. And remember, we cannot just walk up to any random dude on the street – these are all representatives of an organisation or institution, which requires a bit more formality.

Our plan has been to do the last interviews this week, adding up to 12-15 in total. As the transcription is a VERY time-consuming process (I listen, translate to English and then Tess types it) we are gonna try to hire some linguistic students at the local university to help us with that. It shouldn’t be too expensive considering how much time we would actually save. Next week we intend to finish the work in CBBA, to be able to leave next weekend.

We are getting a bit tired of this city… the climate is lovely indeed, but it is very polluted (one of the most contaminated cities in South America according to a professor we interviewed) and noisy. The mountain range is beautiful, but too far away! So, from here we are heading to Rurrenabaque, which is in the Amazonas region where Tess is gonna do a consultant job for U&We and then we are hoping to do some Eco-tourism in Parque Madidi! 

Plaza during demonstrations

View from our rooftop room