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 :)
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