Nation Membership!

Monday, January 24th -

Today after lunch I went down to V-Dala Nation to become a member!  V-Dala's building is large, but not to my architectural tastes.  I'll add a picture once I have a good one of the whole building.  But I didn't join because of the architecture - rather, because I've enjoyed their events, they seem to have a good slate of future events, and their international committee seems to be quite good.

Thus, after paying membership dues and filling out the application, I received my temporary ID.  Now I can attend Nations' events until my new one arrives in the mail!  This new temporary ID is important because you need it to attend many of the Nations' events, and even if you don't need it to attend, it may get you a discount.  For example, V-Dala's brunch is 50 kronor for V-Dala members, 60 for other nations' members, and 70 for the general public.  The reason nation membership is required for some events, other than to ensure they are for students and not any yahoo who wanders in, is that the nations enjoy some special tax privileges as a 'closed society' that is serving its own members rather than the public at large.  Thus, some of the Nations' events could be considerably more expensive if they were open to the general public.  This is also part of the reason that it is much more affordable to eat out at the Nations than at most restaurants.

After getting my membership, I decided to walk back to Flogsta.  So far I'd been taking the bus into and back from town all the time, but if I'm going to be going by bicycle at some point I'll need to know how to get there and back.  Since it was lovely weather today, still bright for a couple hours, and I had nowhere to be soon, I figured, why not?  - even if I get lost, I should be able to get back to a bus stop before dark.  And the route was surprisingly straightforward.  There's basically one long walking/biking path all the way from Flogsta to the street next to an Asian restaurant I recognized from seeing it many times from the bus.  I hardly had a chance to get lost, and was back in my room 33 minutes after being at the back entrance of V-Dala.  For now I'll probably still take the bus to class, as class is pretty far past V-Dala, about twice as far.  But it may be fairly reasonable time-wise to bike down to class, and might not take all that much longer than the bus depending on the time of day (8 AM seems considerably slower than 10 AM for the bus based on my limited experience thus far).

Speaking of the weather, it's been nothing short of fantastic here compared to what I'm used to this time of year.  Back stateside the general consensus was I was going to be going north to some sort of arctic snowglobe area with sun six hours a day, and while the sun part wasn't that far off, otherwise it's been really nice here - much nicer than Columbus and nicer than Richmond as well.  Of course now I've probably jinxed myself and it'll hit -20 (Celsius) tomorrow.  But it's been just about freezing almost the whole time, only a few degrees colder than night than at day, and above freezing at times during the day.  No significant snowfall, and while there's been cloudy days, there's also been sunny days, and more sunny days than an Ohioan is used to this time of year.  Right now it's 8 degrees (Celsius) warmer than in Richmond and 10 degrees warmer than in Ohio, and from what I've heard, it's warmer right now in Ohio than it has been a good part of the past week.  Not all the internationals are finding the weather quite as excellent as I am, so perhaps I'm just used to lousy weather in the winter.  And the Swedes have said that this is unseasonably good weather.  But, so far, going north hasn't meant going into the tundra.