Lapland Day 1 & 2

Over the week, Kenelm,  Xixi and I took a trip up to Kiruna (North of Sweden) in an attempt to catch the Northern Lights. It was a 6 day trip, and there were lots to do and see.

We had "crashed" the trip with Uppsala University, so we were the outliers from Stockholm heh. It was still very enjoyable to meet these people, and doing things together made making small talk a lot less difficult.

DAY 1
T'was a SUPER long (19h) bus ride from Stockholm to Kiruna. Couldn't really sleep well, waking up every hour. Frankly, at the start I was rather ambivalent about catching the Northern Lights. You never know what you've missed, how good or how bad. But after the ridiculously long bus ride I was like "I HAVE to see the Northern Lights because I'm never putting myself through this painful journey evaaaa".

DAY 2
We reached Kiruna the following morning. There was a tour about Kiruna, which is basically where iron is mined. But the more interesting parts were snowmobiling and dogsledding!! :D

Idk if this can be seen clearly, it's basically a video of Xixi & myself on the snowmobile. It felt a little bit like driving a bumper car, except that if you crashed you would have to pay 8000SEK (~S$1600). Also, snow flies in your face heh. Quite fun, though I wanted to go faster.

Somehow, when I posted this photo of instagram, the reaction was that I looked cute - which is kinda sad because the intention was to look cool. (hmm)

Up next was dog sledding!! I've been looking forward to this even before exchange, and it did not disappoint.

The dogs pulled us (4 of us + trainer), and basically what you would see a lot are the dog butts hahaha. Kenelm mentioned that he could see the dogs pee & shit as they ran (LOL), and the dogs in front of me were fighting while running. The trainer mentioned that the dogs were confused when we started singing, because they would be distracted from his commands, so we couldn't sing on the sleighs.

The vastness of the white snowy fields made it look like the journey the Pevensies took when they travelled across the ice lake in Narnia to see the Snow Queen haha. 

                                   

These were the people that I've been around with for most of the trip!
From top left: Pavitra (from US), Tom(Germany), myself & Jan(Czech)
Bottom left: Kenelm, Xixi, Estela(Brazil)