A complete change of environment is often a good, sometimes even a necessary endaviour. I have changed mine from living in a perfectly-cosy appartement in a beautiful city in the heart of the alps to living in the heart of Swedish student life, a corridor room in Flogsta. An experience indeed, one cannot but observe some things that are clearly in connection to such a change of environment.
Examples:
- Opening one’s window every evening at precisely 22:00 to simply scream as loud as possible, sometimes motivated by joy, sometimes motivated by frustration. Motion Picture. ADD: newspaper article.
- Waking up and sitting down for a coffee one early Saturday morning, watching out of the window, as usual, but observing a massive stack of newspapers, set on fire and still happily burning, from what must clearly have been a, too, massive party last night.
- Seeing a strange person running in and out, like a shadow, your kitchen now and then and after two weeks realizing that this shadow is actually a person from Kyrgyzstan living next door to you, but for some reason never bothered to say ‘Hi!’ or whatever ‘Hi’ might be in Kyrgyz.
- Motivated to have a look at the Halloween-party the building next to yours but being restricted from entering by a police officer. Finding out later that the whole thing turned out to be quite too big, that is, 400 drunk and dressed-up people (think robots) browsing through a single house, topped by the fact that some idiot managed to break a pipe of the central heating and thus literally flooded the whole stairway.
- Waking up the narrow staircase where someone apparently dropped a pesto jar one of those days; its contents beautifully spread onto the wall and the most interesting thing was to observe its change of color and shape. Passing by it at least four times a day, one could be astonished by a conversion from tomato-red, to start with, to dark-red, after about a week, to green-brown-blackish, after two weeks. The class splitters were removed after the contents turned black, finally, but the pesto is still to be found on the wall. I’ll keep you posted if, eventually, something grows out of that stain.
- Coming home that same Saturday evening and noticing that the massive stack of newspapers is still out there, still burning. Quite simply, nobody seems to care.
This list has potential to go on and on, but I get tired typing now. Living in the Flogsta höghus is widely considered an essential, if not the essential experience of being a student in Sweden. And after all, living with twelve random people also has its very nice parts.
