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Ha. I definitely didn't learn from last time when it took me three months to update my blog. This time wouldn't be considered worse though, because it only took me 2,5 months.

I can't believe I'm only 3,5 weeks away from the end of the semester, which means the start of the three-month-long summer holiday! Three months, wow. We really do deserve it, because the summer holiday is the only holiday we get. Our two-week-long Christmas holiday shouldn't be considered as an actual holiday, because right after that we had to hand in a paper and pass an oral exam. Lovely. I didn't try both the first time, but by now I passed the paper and am waiting for the oral exam. During the past few months I passed another paper, graded seminars and finished group assignments about methods. The last ones were undoubtedly boring and pretty useless. I feel pretty similar to before I started the module about methods, which mainly consists of being confused. But the good thing has yet to come: we have to apply the methods of our choice to the minor thesis we have to write in the upcoming weeks. Luckily it's a group project, so I don't have to write all those 10.000 words by myself and it should feel amazing to know you have two lovely group members who can enlighten you about methods. Unfortunately, my group members - and pretty much my entire class - have the same feelings about methods as I do.

Maybe I raised a previously undiscovered interest in methods among some of you. Feel free to do some research, but I'll go on with my life now. Way more exciting university news is the fact I got nominated for exchange studies in Turkey! This means I haven't actually been admitted by the host university yet, but the chance of rejection is really, really small. I'll be moving to Istanbul in January or February, I'm not quite sure yet. And now I'm talking about mysterious foreign lands anyway (though I've been to Turkey before, but I have to admit it was around this place called Marmaris, which is all about lazy tourists wanting to swim and get a tan); I'll be spending two weeks in Armenia in late July-early August for a volunteer project. I'll be working in a botanical garden in the capital and during our spare time we'll be able to go on plenty of excursions. Hopefully we'll also be able to travel to the capital of Georgia, which is a relatively short and cheap bus trip away.

What else, what else? Well, in March I welcomed my first couchsurfer! Audrey from Indonesia had contacted me through a special ''AFS Couchsurfing'' Facebook page, which is full of people who went on exchange through AFS. I went to Finland and she went to Norway one year after me, she even knows this Dutch girl I once met in the Netherlands and who'd also been on exchange in Norway. Such a small world. Audrey stayed with me for a few days and I showed her around Malmö during one of those days when you eventually find out it is a very, very bad day to go sightseeing. It seemed like a beautiful day when we left my apartment. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, but after some time we noticed the wind was, well, quite present. After wandering through different parts of the city for hours, we figured it'd be better to head home. I took her with me shopping in Rosengård and we ate some kebab. One of my friends was pretty disappointed to discover I hadn't taken her to my hairdresser, because that's ''quite the place to see in Malmö''. Maybe next time then.

A few weeks ago I saw my mum again for the first time since my Christmas ''holiday''. We went to Copenhagen to see the Finnish folk metal band Korpiklaani. It was the third time I saw them playing live and definitely the most extraordinary one. It's an understatement to say the audience was different compared to the Netherlands. You'd think of all these ''heavy'' guys, considering Scandinavia is ''so Viking'', but I can definitely confirm we have way more Vikings in the Netherlands. The crowd was very fascinating, to say the least. I won't deny my mum and I do not look particularly ''heavy like a Viking'', but this was the case for over fifty percent of the audience. Everyone was also rather calm. People had a hard time creating mosh pits. Well, I don't even think people put any effort in it. I know Scandinavians are extremely humble, but I hadn't really prepared myself for the fact even Scandinavian metal fans are humble. But oh oh oh, Scandinavians are to tiny! This wasn't my first concert in Scandinavia and from a Dutch perspective I can most definitely confirm it's way nicer for a short person like me to go to concerts in Scandinavia. In the Netherlands, I always have to stand right in front of the stage or stand on my toes and stretch my body real far in order to get a glimpse of the band. In Scandinavia (or well, at least in Sweden and Denmark, I'm not that experienced yet) I don't have to do any of that. During Korpiklaani's concert I wasn't even that close to the stage and I could see e-ve-ry-thing. Amazing! All this joy did get badly influenced by the fact it was extremely hot in the venue, they definitely have to fix the ventilation system. It was a relieve to be welcomed by rain once the concert was over.

Another day I would've loved to spend with my mum, was the last Queens Day on April 30rd. Unfortunately, I was here in Malmö and my mum was back home, three hours north of me. I enjoyed the day nevertheless, spending it pretty much entirely behind my computer, watching a live broadcast. It was quite an event and it really made me get in touch with my Dutch self again. The king replaced his mother, now princess, after her being queen for 33 years. Quite some traditional events happening that day did seriously make me emotional! It made me feel kinda stupid, but eventually they kept on filming all these people who were bawling their eyes out, which made me realize I wasn't doing so bad after all. I mean, I was emotional, there were tears in my eyes, but I didn't actually bawl my eyes out. I promise.

Talking about Dutch things... May 1st marked the day of May Day, a day that's very inconvenient for a Dutch person to spend in Sweden or actually any other place in the world. In the Netherlands, May Day is not even a public holiday. People go to work and won't notice any difference from any other regular day, apart from some leftist political parties organizing minuscule events. So, that day I kept on making plans, subsequently finding out basically entire Sweden was closed. Lovely. Eventually I decided to try the hairdresser, hoping he'd ignored the big national holiday. Thank God/Allah he did. I ended up spending quite some time there, because he was the most talkative guy I had yet encountered at the hairdresser and after cutting my hair he even offered me a cup of coffee. After talking about a wide range of topics from the mind-boggling high amount of 1SEK coins existing in Sweden to the fact he had cut Zlatan Ibrahimović's hair a couple of times, my brains nearly passed out from the amount of Swedish I had to use. This sadly highlights the amount of Swedish I use in my day-to-day life. Usually I only talk Swedish when I'm in a shop, which doesn't really require a big vocabulary. I never have entire conversations with people in Swedish and can only have reasonable ones when the other person is patient and polite. Luckily this guy was. Of course I also had to show off my Arabic skills. The reaction was especially funny when I used it again when I was leaving, said goodbye and included ''thank you'' in Arabic. Another guy had just come in, merely for a cup of coffee it seemed, and his reaction was pretty priceless.

Relatively speaking, that visit to the hairdresser was not so extraordinary. I don't think any visit I'll pay any hairdresser in my life will beat the one I had back in March. I was casually entering the salon, greeted by an annoyed hairdresser making some vague gestures that - in my perception - resembled ''turn around''. Turn around in the sense of, well, just turn around, not actually having to leave the salon. I was still fulfilling the action of turning around when he knelt down and started praying. Fair enough. I should have left right away, but the situation was so absurd and unexpected that the whole smart thought of leaving didn't come up in my mind at all. The whole situation became even more hilarious when this guy I had ordered my kebab from a few days earlier stepped outside the restaurant next door to have a smoke and looked at me in a pretty confused way, probably wondering why I was visiting the hairdresser just to stand at the door and look outside to enjoy the beautiful sights of Rosengård. After about one painful minute, an obviously annoyed voice behind me asked if I could come back in 5-6 minutes, followed by ''do you understand?''. I will not deny he looked just as annoyed as he sounded. So I ended up going for a short walk around the flat while pondering about the fact I wasn't even that surprised, because I had never experienced a normal visit to the hairdresser since moving to Sweden. Also, apparently the salon didn't completely switch owners after all, because this was the guy who had cut my hair most and had been there right from the start when he initially didn't even want to cut it. When describing him to others, it always pretty much comes down to ''picture the stereotypical image Swedes would have of Arab ''gangster guys'' in Rosengård and you basically know how my hairdresser looks like'', resulting in one of my friends seriously imagining him as the scariest person ever and me ensuring her I tend to use some exaggerating humour sometimes. Nevertheless, it does make clear he doesn't exactly look like the person you'd happily disturb during prayers. Of course I would've been more than happy to return to my apartment and get my hair cut some other day, considering the rather embarrassing situation I was facing. The good soul in me didn't want to make him even more annoyed than he already seemed by not returning though. Although he merely raised an eyebrow and asked if I didn't speak any Swedish after I apologized for all that had previously happened in English, he seemed to be more at peace than I actually expected him to be. He's one of the most unfathomable persons I have ever met in my life, so it's really hard to imagine what's really going on in his head. One thing that amazed me, especially concerning the circumstances, was the fact he spoke more English to me than ever before. I'd always wondered if he simply didn't want to talk English to me or if his skills were seriously poor. At least now I know he really does speak poor English and that he apparently cares quite a bit about his ''cool image'', because this was the first time I was alone with him and I think that played a pretty big role in him finally speaking English to me. I hope the Egyptian guy from last year didn't get into a fight after he spoke some Dutch to me. That must have been excessively uncool.
Anyway, eventually I ended up with way shorter hair than I wanted, because he kept on cutting it for about 30 minutes. Having agreed on cutting it only two centimetres was pretty irrelevant by the time he was done, which was amazing, because getting to the point where we knew how much two centimetres exactly was took forever and would make you think it's easier to memorize it. I was smart enough to suggest two centimetres without actually knowing how much that is, which is not very helpful when your hairdresser is apparently just as maths illiterate as you are. After some time of creating several different spaces between our fingers, we agreed on what two centimetres was in our perception. Expecting to pay 100SEK for my haircut like last time, figuring they probably increased the price, I had only brought a 100SEK note which apparently was pretty inconvenient when it turned out I only had to pay 50SEK and the guy had to go to the restaurant next door to get change. It seemed like a pretty massive deal to change my money and because Sweden loves to make a lot of coins you can barely do anything with unless you save them all up for a longer period of time, I decided to save everything for my next haircut and be amused by his reaction of which I can totally draw a picture in my mind. Unfortunately the next time there was a different guy who actually charged me 60SEK, though for some reason he made me pay 50SEK in the end. Okay. I'm kinda confused by the fact that by now, three different guys in the exact same salon have charged me three different prices. Funnily enough the one I can imagine being most inclined to charge me more just to annoy me, keeps on charging me the least of them all. Apparently all was still well when I was waiting to pay my groceries a few days ago and had this feeling you sometimes get when you think someone is looking at you. I looked around and the guy was passing me, greeting me in his ''cool reserved way'' as usual. Subsequently, when I was biking home, I almost killed him when he was crossing the biking path right in front of me. Maybe he will charge me a bit more next time after all.

So now the last few weeks of the academic year have arrived and I must say it went so damn fast! I can't believe I've been living here for nine months now. I haven't been to the Netherlands ever since I moved here and soon I will break my record of ten months from when I lived in Finland. I have no idea when I'll be back in the Netherlands, but I do know it probably won't be this year. It feels really weird and it becomes even weirder when thinking about the tons of people I know who've been there ever since I moved to Sweden or are planning on going there soon. When it comes to the last few weeks of university... I'm definitely not looking forward to them. We decided to write about Buddhist nationalism in Burma for our minor thesis, which I think is incredibly interesting, but it just sucks to work on such a big project in the end of the academic year and in such a short period of time. Luckily I have a great group and we're having so much fun together, but at the same time it doesn't make us as productive as we should be. I wouldn't say learning how to say ''I have five nipples'' in Wolof is completely useless though.