The Nations! (And Fika!)

Hmm, I am terrible at updating. As if that's a surprise. But that's not very interesting, what is interesting is:

Student Nations!
There are thirteen student nations at Uppsala University, each one representing a different district of Sweden(Stockholms nation, Uplands for the province of Uppsala, etc..). As a side note, there are more than 13 districts in Sweden; just not all the nations were created at the same time and some have merged together to form one larger nation. If you want a list of them, go here. They were originally created as a method of controlling the unruly student populace; as was the norm in the Renaissance, all the students at university were very wealthy(and therefore often petulant) people. Therefore, the city and university made nations and forced people to join the nation of their respective hometown as a way of ensuring that the information got back there whenever they did a misdeed. I think it's a pretty clever way of controlling the students, to be honest. People no longer are forced to join any nation now, however; they choose which one they want off what the different nations offer.

I joined Uplands nation, the local nation of Uppsala and the surrounding region. It has around 2600 members, making it a medium sized nation; the largest has over 5000 and the smallest around 800. The only person that I can think of that is of international renown that was part of the nation is Arrhenius, the chemist & physicist. But I digress; Uplands nation has various clubs within it such as movie club and a game club which are pretty awesome. They also jazz night and a kashmiri restaurant, both of which I've heard good things about. All the nations have their own pub, almost all have a nightclub, different hobby clubs(almost all have a band and some sort of theater group), offer housing to their members(housing is very difficult to come by in Uppsala because it is a highly regulated market), and often will give out scholarships as well. Overall, the nations are the backbone of socialization in Uppsala; their really isn't much to do in the city outside of the nations.

Fika
Most simply, Fika is coffee with a sweet pastry. It's a social event which all the swedes participate in with great regularity(which is something because in the winter they aren't even vaguely sociable). At Fika, one will have coffee, eat pastries, and socialize with friends usually by candlelight; it creates a very nice and relaxing atmosphere. Fika is also practiced in the summer, merely minus the candlelight(as it's no longer necessary due to the long days). It doesn't seem overly unique of an action to me, just the devotion to it is more of a Swedish thing than elsewhere.

An Introduction to Uppsala!

From now until June 6th, I will be student at Uppsala Universitet! It's one of the premier universities in Scandinavia, as well as the oldest, having been founded in 1477 by the Catholic Church, though it has long since broken from those roots. It's now associated with the Church Of Sweden, a Lutheran denomination. It's had quite the storied history, with scholars such as Celsius and Linnaeus(he created the dual name system used for naming plants that is still in use). I'm not going to really ramble on about the history, but you can read more here(it's quite interesting, to be honest).

Uppsala

I'm going to skip talking about traveling here, as it was a wholly unexciting experience. Instead, Uppsala is worthy of conversation! It's a city much like Ann Arbor, MI but much calmer because people always ride bikes instead of insisting on attempting to drive everywhere. It's a fairly lively city, though the college students are usually fairly contained by the Nations, which I will explain in more detail later. Since the university itself exists from 1477, one can correctly presume that the city itself dates much older than the university itself; it was once one of the main centers of paganism in Sweden, as can be seen in Burial mounds north of the city. A Catholic Bishop was installed here in 1164, and the Cathedral was built in the 1400's. The cathedral is magnificent:



Some say it's not as nice as other Cathedrals because it's built of local stone instead of imported quarry stone; I think such a concept is absurd. It's of amazing style and I think the brick makes it more unique looking, it's the only cathedral I've ever seen in that style and the brick colors give a textured look.

The other thing of note in the city is how colorful it is: large volumes of the buildings are colored in pink, yellow, or green. It's not the occasional building either, it's the majority. I'm not sure why, though I would guess it's because you get somewhat desperate for color in the middle of the winter, as it's more often cloudy here than not and at the current moment there is right around five hours of light. And that's a month after the winter solstice, mind you. So I can't really blame them in that respect.



The Swedes have different ways of dealing with the dark, which I'll explain in my next post with the Nations :)