Archive for August, 2009

Human Rights Blog and School

Friday, August 14th, 2009

I’m terrible at writing these days, and I’m terribly sorry about it.

I’ve been thinking lately that I want to start another kind of blog, in addition to this one. My plan is to make a human rights blog, and it will be named “The Freedom Blog”. I will try and update it once a week with various causes that I burn for. The idea isn’t fully developed yet, but I’m working on it. :)

Anyway, it’s only three days until school starts again, and I’m quite excited. Who will I go to class with? How will my time table look? Will my teachers be nice/good? Will anyone give me the swine flu? I really don’t want it the first weeks of school. But honestly, I think the hysteria about it isn’t really worth it. My school now says that if you have a headache and a fever one day, they want you to stay home for 7 days! I think it sounds crazy, but I guess it’s ok to be careful so that only maybe a few get sick instead of the whole school.

It will be nice to start up again anyway, because the last two weeks have been quite boring. I’ve been sitting around just missing my boyfriend far too much compared to what’s healthy, so it will be good to actually not have time for that anymore.

So as I’ve most likely said before, I will have all my subjects in English this year, because I’m taking the International Baccalaureate (IB). It is a quite special school system, where you can choose all your subjects yourself. There are six groups, and you have to have a subject inside each of them: Mother Tongue; Second Language; Scientific; Mathematics; Social Study; and Artistic (or another scientific, social or lingual subject).

The subjects I chose were: Norwegian HL, English HL, Biology HL, Mathematics SL, Psychology SL, and German HL.

As you see, I put a HL or SL after all the subjects. The HL means that it’s on a higher level than what’s normal in gymnasium, while SL means that it’s at a standard level.

My last choice of subject, the German, was unfortunately not available, so now I’m having Chemistry HL instead, which also will be quite interesting.

I still need to learn German if I want to study in Switzerland, so I will go to an evening course instead. I think that is a good solution.

Well, I’m looking forward to get back to school again, for some reason, and I hope that feeling will last for a while. If I know myself right, I’ll be tired again after a month, but then it’s not far from autumn holidays anyway. :D

Hope you all had a great summer!

Juno

My Holidays

Saturday, August 1st, 2009

I’m finally back from holidays now, and starting to get used to being home again. To be honest, I miss Switzerland and my dear Casp a lot already, but I am happy we got as much time as we did together this summer.

So, a (long) little report:

We flew to England in quite beautiful weather, and were lucky to enjoy a lot of sun while we were there. It took us a couple of days before we found me a Nikon D40 at the Argos store in Carlisle. The last one they had in stock! Lucky :D After that I didn’t really do much else than taking pictures, while we were in England. I took quite a lot of insect pictures in the garden, because the bumblebees and bees were really slow and lazy. I also tried to do some landscape photography, but didn’t really succeed.

Here are some English bumblebees, bees and hover flies for ya!

Bumblebee_hoverfly

 

Bumblebee1

Lovebee

We also went to an abbey we’d never been to before, but I can’t recall it’s name. Here’s a picture of what once was its tower:

Abbey

And here’s a cute lamb from a field next to the abbey :D

Lamn

Except from that we didn’t really do much out of the ordinary. We met up with our friends over there and also had our yearly trip to the “ice cream farm”, Abbott Lodge, who make the best ice cream ever! It is fresh out of dairy milk from their own cows! Here’s a cute little calf from Abbot Lodge:

IceCow 

After one week in England, we were going to fly to our next destination: Sardinia.

I have to say I expected a lot when I was going there. I mean, it’s Italy. I wanted good food, great scenery, and a lot of fast-talking Italians. Everything was up to my expectations, except from one thing: the food. Wherever we went, the food was pretty tasteless. The only thing I really liked on the island was pizza from a pizzeria near our apartment. But when that’s said, everything else was just perfect. We had the perfect view from our apartment, pretty much the perfect apartment too. It was big, clean, great air-conditioning and a huge outdoor area in the front with nice outdoor couches and chairs.

I forgot to take too many pictures, but at least I have some of my very colourful bedroom and bathroom:

sommer09 (1175 of 1872)

 

sommer09 (1177 of 1872)

We did a lot on Sardinia, travelled to see different places, but in the end I didn’t take too many pictures because I was filming with the camcorder all the time. I regret that now, of course. What I did photograph on Sardinia too, was insects. Always insects. Yesyesyes.

Here are some of them:

Fly1

hmmm

sommer09 (1076 of 1872)

sommer09 (928 of 1872)

 

sommer09 (1019 of 1872)

 

sommer09 (1209 of 1872)

So yeah, that’s what occupied my time on Sardinia! :D

 

After another week, I was going to part with my parents and go to Lugano, Switzerland to meet my boyfriend. It was really strange, because I have never been away from Mom for more than one week before, and now I would be away for almost a month. We said goodbye at Olbia airport and I boarded a tiny plane going to Lugano. It was only two seats on one side and one on the other. I have never been in such a small airplane before, and it felt a bit uncomfortable. The service was great, though, and the flight was quite comfortable as soon as we were in the air.

When I landed in Lugano, the weather was beautiful and boiling hot. It was wonderful to meet my dear Caspar again, as we hadn’t seen each other in a couple of months. He had borrowed his mother’s car, a cabriolet, so we could enjoy the fresh air while driving back to Zürich (the drive is about three hours). And the car has the coolest colour ever: green! :D

sommer09 (1241 of 1872)

I won’t write detailed about what we did every day for three weeks and three days, but I’ll give you a brief summary: First week we spent a lot of time with Caspar’s friends and family. They are all very nice people and I enjoyed spending time with them, but the next two weeks we tried to keep a little bit more to ourselves because we do not have much time together during the year. There was a lot of bad weather as well, so we stayed home many days and played xbox. We played Army of Two, Gears of War, Fable II, Prototype and a few other games.

To mention a few thigns we did: We visited Montreux for the jazz-festival (even though we went to a hip-hop concert instead), we crashed with the German border trying to get to a really nice waterfall and we went to Alpamare, a water fun park with a lot of fun slides and so on. We also were to town a few times, enjoying the cute streets of old Zürich most of the time.

sommer09 (1524 of 1872) sommer09 (1289 of 1872) sommer09 (1672 of 1872)

We went to the cinema twice; once to watch Ice Age 3D (in german :S) and the next time we watched Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was really nice, especially on Harry Potter when we had luxury seats (more like a big nice couch) :D

Except from that we just tried to relax as much as possible, because that’s what one’s supposed to do when it’s holidays. Three weeks and three days went far too fast in the end and now I’m suddenly sitting here in my room again. I already miss my love a lot, I’ve even started missing Switzerland a bit, but I guess it is nice to be back home too.

 

sommer09 (1346 of 1872)

The lemon-man of Zürich hopes you had a lovely summer!

 

-Juno :)