Halloween - Umea Style

That is, there really isn't much of a celebration. The children dress up and 'beg for candy,' but adults do not participate at all. Today was a beautiful day in Umea. We woke up early to make sure we didn't miss the big delicious hotel breakfast. It turns out today was daylight savings in Sweden so we were an hour early! After eating a variety of traditional Swedish breakfast foods, we rested. Nikole and I decided to go walk to Västerbottens museum. http://www.vbm.se/ It was a beautiful walk and the museum was really nice and there were some great works of art and it was free. Something both Nikole and I noticed at the museum (and also at dinners and cafes) was how parents handled their children's behaviors. The children are always reallybeing children, such as running around the museum, playing in restaurants under the tables. The interesting part of that is the parents seem to enjoy watching their children play and appreciate their behavior rather than reprimand them. Also, the other adults in these public places have the same mentality towards these playing children. It seems as if everyone just knows they're kids and that is how they behave. This makes me even more interested to see what the student-teacher relationship will be like in the schools where we're teaching.

Since it was so beautiful out we decided to grab our laptops and sit in the cafe to people watch and work on some school stuff, and work on my Swedish!

We found out that everything in Umea closes on 4pm on Sundays. After the museum we went to the grocery store to buy some water and noticed everything in the mall was closing. The restaurants, shops and even street venders were closed for the night. We did find an 'American' sports bar where we could have dinner. It was a good dinner, but the rest of the night was boring as there is nothing to do.

Tomorrow we move into our international norms. We are all looking forward to this, so we can finally unpack and start grocery shopping so we can cook some meals. Also, we're planning some day trips since we don't have anything until Nov. 4 at 10am.