Pancakes and pea soup.

Let me preface this by saying I successfully managed to pull a muscle the FIRST TIME I WENT TO THE GYM! My left arm can't naturally extend past about 45 degrees for a couple days now. Excellent. I also did my laundry, which turned out to be more interesting than I had thought, and had a traditional lunch of pancakes and pea soup which is served on Thursdays on months that have an 'r' in them. I'm not making that up.

The laundry here works by signing up for a four hour time slot in which you can do your laundry. You have thirty minutes after the start of your time slot to get in there or someone can just take the machines because you waited too long. Anyway, I loaded my clothes into two washers and proceeded to stare at the foreign language scrawled across my laundry detergent trying to estimate how much to use. Eventually I went with the just-dump-in-a-random-amount method. One of the machines started fine, the other one I had seen someone switch to English, so I tried to and wound up canceling the washing cycle and I had to punch at it remorselessly to get it to start back up.

I came back down to put my clothes in the gigantic dryer that they use here, which looks like a small metal storage crate with two sets of racks and a little generator-looking dryer at the bottom. I loaded my clothes into this contraption, turned the thing to 90 minutes and went upstairs. 90 minutes later I came back to get my clothes. Turns out this type of dryer is very similar to hanging your clothes on a line to dry and then spraying them with all the starch you can possibly find. My clothes feel very much like paper now, and are crazy wrinkled.

So yes, it is traditional to have pea soup and pancakes on Thursdays on months that have an 'r' in them. I was at a meeting at a television station owned by Bonnier when we grabbed lunch and brought it back to the room. Everyone had courteously switched to English during the meeting, but back to Swedish for regular lunch chatter. After a while someone started to speak to me in English. I got so excited I slapped my knife, which was covered in whipped cream and some sort of berry jam, on to the floor, and then proceeded to look at the guy who was talking to me in shame. Other than that the meeting went fine though, and I actually felt like I had some input which was nice.

Hopefully I'll get a haircut this weekend.

-Brandon