One thing I forgot to tell you guys about Week 3, was that we didn’t go to work on Friday. It was midsummer weekend (midsummer being on Saturday), a nationwide celebration here in Sweden. As I have learned through conversations with Swedish natives, midsummer is a celebration of the fertility summer brings. On Midsummer, it is a tradition to have a gathering around a maypole that is raised in honor of the celebration. Afterwards, people would make circles around the maypole and dance to the “little frog” song or Små grodorna. I wish I was there to observe it, but as a group, we decided to take advantage of the long weekend and go to Copenhagen. 

(picture credit: Carolina Romare/imagebank.sweden.se)

On Saturday morning we hopped on a bus early in the morning and left for Copenhagen. It was a pretty long bus ride, and I am glad I was able to squeeze a nap in. We arrived at around noon and walked to our hostel. Along the way, we stopped at an Indian restaurant to grab lunch. I had lamb curry and it was really good even though it was a little spicy. Once we checked in at the hosel, we left to explore the city. We walked to Christiana, freetown in the middle of Copenhagen. I didn’t quite know what it was at first; I thought that it was like a skatepark of some sort. But as we wandered in more and more, I came to the realization that Christiana was actually the underground market for Cannabis. Moments later, there was a raid by the police, and POOF all the sellers were gone in a matter of seconds. With the police all around, we left Christiana and wandered around the city.

I find Copenhagen to be a very beautiful city with a body of water resembling a river running through the center of it, and canals dispersed throughout. In that sense, it is very similar to Bangkok, my hometown. 

Soon, it was time for dinner. Scott’s O-Week mom suggested we go to Reffen, a street food market by the water. I was not disappointed. The place was filled with some of the best street food from around the world: Mexican, Singaporian, Thai, American, Italian, you name it. Because I kinda miss Thai food at the time, I went for the pad thai. It was on par with some of the best pad thais I have ever had. I, was happy. 

 

That night, some of us went clubbing late into the night, but I chose to sleep early so that I could wake up in the morning and see what Copenhagen was like at sunrise. Boy was it beautiful! I think the picture can speak for itself. 

Later that day we took the bus back to Gothenburg. Because we arrived quite late, I had to rush to do my Week 3 blog, and try to get as much sleep as possible, which was still not enough as it turned out.

The next few days were really tough. We are asked to wake up at 6am every morning, then work a very physically demanding job all day, then go back at around 7pm, then cook dinner, eat dinner, shower, take classes from 8:30-10pm, do some homework, and by the time we are done, it was already midnight and I could manage 6 hours of sleep max when I am used to sleeping 10:30hr per night. We did this days and days on end. It was one of the most physically and mentally exhausting things I have ever experienced in my life. It left me on the verge of a mental breakdown Thursday evening. Without the safety net of a support system like the RCC because we are not on campus, it could have gone horribly wrong as you might have imagined. This is something that really has to change if there were to be future iterations of this program. 

I know in a few months, I know I will have forgotten about these bad aspects and only remember the good ones. Hence, I have to put my struggles out there in writing, hoping that no one else will have to experience what I had to go through. 

Fast forward, it is now Friday afternoon and we are about to wrap up iSEED 2019, but all I could think about was the sleep I was about to get that night. The strain we had to endure throughout the whole week ruined what would have been a beautiful moment. I wish it wasn’t like this, but it is the way it is unfortunately…

Our last week in Sweden has come to a conclusion, and it feels like the time flew by. We were not able to stay through the completion of the Dare to Build project, but it was an amazing opportunity to have been a part of. This past week was when we really started getting into the building and making more visible progress, which is super exciting to see.

Team Wilderness, the team I am a part of, finally got our precious planks delivered so we could start making to the top of our storytelling circle and actually walk on it and everything! We were all a little anxious at the beginning of the week because the planks were a major part of design, and although we had some other details to work on, we couldn’t really make much progress without those rough sawn planks. The guy we were ordering them from said they would come Thursday, but those times estimates are often unreliable so we weren’t too optimistic about getting them by Thursday. But wait, a miracle happened, and the planks came! I don’t think I’ve been more excited about something so random before, but given the context it was an amazing day. There was a lot of back and forth with ideas for laying the planks as they had to make a curved shape, but on our final day, after our last fika ever, we blasted through a curved section and figured out our game plan. I never worked on such a large collaboration project before and having so many different opinions was definitely a little hard to work with at first, but it was a cool learning experience.

 

Over the week I also felt as though we were going closer to the Chalmers students and learning much more about them. At lunch everyday we have a “lunch talk” where someone is chosen to speak about them themselves, a project they worked on, or really anything at all. That helped us learn about people outside of the context of this project.

Unfortunately, everything in Gothenburg closes pretty early, so by the time we get back from working at the site, there isn’t too much to do. We are pretty tired most of the time so we end up just resting up a lot. This week we went back to Haga to do some souvenir shopping and enjoy the city some more. There was also an Italian food market set up near Haga and there was so much good food so we ate there twice this week.

 

On Thursday, we gave our final presentations for engi 200 in front of the entire team. Then, we went to the lake after work and enjoyed some time to relax with each other. We got a lot of pizza, some people went swimming, and we played Kubb: a Swedish game in which you try to knock down the other teams wooden blocks by throwing a stick. The lake was super pretty and it was a nice way to end it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last day of work was very packed as we tried to get as much done as possible before we left and it was only the Chalmers students left. That night we went back to Slottskogen park and ended the way we started: playing four square.

 

 

I was in the Fika group on Monday, and I found it was not an easier task than on-site construction. In the morning we went to the grocery store to buy all the food needed. We planned to bake some cakes for the morning Fika and cook pasta for lunch. Right after the morning Fika, we started to prepare the lunch. I was responsible for cooking the spaghetti, and other group members were preparing the sauce. It took me a long time to cook all the spaghetti as we were preparing lunch for over 30 students that were extremely hungry after morning’s hard work on site. I really enjoyed the lunch we cooked, and felt a great sense of fulfillment from it.

On Tuesday, we continued on the construction of the woodpecker path near the circle. We built from the front of the structure by filling the space in the frame we built last week with more logs. To fix the logs filled in, we added some sticks between them and other logs that have already been attached. We also tried to arrange these sticks in triangle or parallelogram grids so as to achieve a stable structure. Furthermore, we dug a whole about 5 meters away from the rear of the frame and filled in with gravels to build the back section of our structure on top. Basically, the back section was similar to the front section that we would have logs of different heights attached together and also a log bridge to connect with the front section. Since every log and stick have different lengths and diameters, it was a very time-consuming task to fix the logs and attach them with sticks in right positions. Throughout the day, we have finished the first one-third of the structure at the front, and also almost finished the structure at the back section.

 

We kept working hard on our structure on Wednesday. In the front section, we attached the highest log of 2.2 meters, and also several lower logs higher than 1.2 meters around it. We finished the back section as well with fixing a highest log of 2 meters. After school, I spent several hours working on the presentation as we would have the midway inspection on Thursday.

On Thursday morning, we had the midway inspection. All the Rice students presented their project. In my presentation, I mainly talked about the motivation of the project, the problem we would need to solve, the design criteria we set, the conceptual designs, the prototypes we have built so far, successes and limitations of our design, and some future work to do. After listening to all the presentations, I got clearer about the designs and current progresses of other groups. After the inspection, we went down to the site and started to work, as we were expecting to finish both the front and back section of our structure except for the integration with the storytelling circle at the front. Finally, we managed to achieve this goal. By the end of the day, we had the front and back section done, and we set up and fix the log bridge that connects both sections. After class, we went to a lake near the site to have fun together.

Friday was my last day in the Dare To Build project. On this day, we finished the last part of our structure, which was the integration with the circle that we had some logs of the same height of the circle attached to our structure. Moreover, we started prototyping other designs. Specifically, we built a prototype of the sound creation tool that applies biomimicry to imitate the pecking sound of woodpeckers. We also built the gripping structure used for attaching a log on trees for woodpeckers to perch. Although it was a pity that I couldn’t stay until the end of the project, it was still an incredible experience for me to work with those excellent architects and engineers, and it definitely strengthened my capability to collaborate well with people from another field.

On Sunday, after I finished the ENGI 355 midterm, I went out to explore Gothenburg more. I went to the Skansen Kronan Fortress. It is built up on a small hill within 10 minutes’ walk from our hostel. I climbed up the hill, and saw the fortress constructed with stones which has a golden crown on top of the roof. The fortress is the highest point in downtown Gothenburg. Viewing from the point, I got a great view of the city with buildings of white walls and red roofs. Later I went to a self-service Chinese cafeteria, and got some authentic Chinese food. This was my first time here to have some food from my home country.

The construction phase of Dare to Build officially started on Monday. We mainly focused on some preparations on this day. Together with several other students, I was tasked to build a sawhorse as a log cutting station. We came up with a rough design, and began construction. However, it was much more difficult then I thought when we moved to building. We had to make sure that the legs of supports of the sawhorse had equal lengths, and that the connection of two legs was wide enough for a bolt to secure the screw through the hole at the connections. We spent a long time to build the first support, and after we got more familiar with the construction, we sped up and adapted the pipeline technique. Specifically, a group of people cut the wood, and another group chiseled the cutting to create the connection. Finally, we succeeded to make four supports for two sawhorses, and we tested by cutting one log on them so that they were strong enough for the intense log cutting task in the following days.

On Tuesday, we worked on prototyping the woodpecker path next to the circle. In our design, there would be several logs of different heights connected together from the height up to 2 meters to the height of the center circle so as to create a descending path for woodpeckers to land from the trees to the circle. As a group, we cut logs of 1, 1.5, and 2 meters together and tried to connect them with rope. However, since the ground was not flat, even though we could fix the logs with rope, we were not able to stabilize the whole structure as it would fall to one side. After a group discussion, we figured out a solution that we would have several logs as the frame of our structure, and they would be connected with each other by sticks screwed onto them. Then, we would fill in the frame with other logs screwed to the sticks as well. By this way, we would have a stable frame with only a few logs which we could build on it afterwards.

Wednesday was an exhausting day. In the morning, we specified our design that we would have gravels underneath the structure to provide more support to it. In the afternoon all the groups except for the Wilderness stopped their construction and helped to unload the gravels to the site and dump them on the paths. I switched between roles of shoveling the gravels to wheel barrel and moving the wheel barrel to specified spots of the site. With doing the work all the afternoon, I estimated that I might have unloaded more than 200 kilograms of gravels myself. This was absolutely an intense workout.

On Thursday we were still playing with gravels. We unloaded more of them, and spread the rest of them evenly on the path down to the site. After we finished this, the whole circle and the paths except for the plants were covered with at least 5 cm of gravels. This was a really a tough task for us. After lunch we worked more on the woodpecker path. We screwed some shorter logs to the frame, and also added more support to the frame by screwing logs to some sticks placed deep in the ground. We had some interesting games to help know about each other better as our finishing of the week.

Friday was the midsummer holiday. However, the weather was not as great as I expected. In the afternoon I went to take a look at a huge sailing ship which I saw one day on my way to the site. I felt very disappointed that it was not a museum. I also passed a museum with several warships and a submarine on my way back. Unfortunately, it was closed as everyone was enjoying the holiday.

Saturday was the exciting day. We set off early to Copenhagen, Denmark. It took four hours and a half on a bus to get there. After lunch we went to explore Copenhagen. We went to freetown Chrstiania, which was a place with some weird things happening. We also had some drinks in a historical area not far from our hostel. There were much more tourists in Copenhagen than in Gothenburg, and many people were enjoying themselves on sailing boats along the complicated canal system there. After that we went to a place with many food trucks to have dinner. It was an awesome relaxation for all of us after the intense building week.

On Sunday morning I went to the famous Little Mermaid Statue, and it was one of the most disappointed and overrated places I have been to. The statue was much smaller, and there were much more people than I thought. It was kind of awkward when more than one hundred tourists were holding their phones and cameras against a statue of a girl’s size. Just next to the statue, there is a fortress called Kastellet with a shape of star and is separated with the land by a moat. I walked along the boundary of the fortress and got some nice pictures. Then I went to the Amalienborg, and watched the royal guards switching. There is a large square surrounded by several palaces and a magnificent statue stands in the middle. Watching the royal guards switching was fun experience. The guards were wearing traditional uniforms and swords, but were also carrying modern automatic rifle guns. Later on, we went to the Statens Museum for Kunst to see some European style art paintings, and went around a botanical garden nearby. We set off on the bus at 5 and arrived in Gothenburg at 9:30. Even though we only stayed in Copenhagen for one day and a half, we still had some awesome experiences here, and I love this city very much.

Monday-Thursday June 17th-20th

The first official week of building had begun. When we first arrived at the building site, my team had to decide between our two circle structures. We had narrowed down the structure of the base to a design with about 32 piles in the ground which rested on a stone slab and were then surrounded by gravel or the raft technique where the horizontal logs would be stacked upon each other. While we dug 5 holes of the appropriate depth quickly, we ran into many roots while digging the holes and continuing with this strategy would have been too harmful to the environment. Luckily we made this decision early in the building process and switched to planning out how we would implement our backup strategy. To accommodate for the uneven terrain we would level out the ground by layering  gravel upon geotextile. After placing down the outline of our circle with the geotextile. Over the next few days we spent lots of time shoveling, moving, then laying the gravel around the circle and a few other paths. Once all the gravel was down, we planned out the placement of the bottom logs of our structure based on two different sized semi circles and two straight sections. During this process we were also deciding what to do with the top of our structure which the people would be walking on. We could have made the whole top look like a raft by having a path about 6 logs wide wother the gaps filled in by branches, or we could make the surface flat with planks at the expense of a more natural looking structure. Eventually, we decided on trying some rough sawn planks to make the surface mostly flat and to avoid a too neat style.

Friday-Sunday June 21st – June 23nd

After a long 4 days of working on site, we got Friday off for Midsommar. Since it seemed like most of Gothenburg was out in this Country side homes for the weekend, we took this day to relax and walk around the city.

On Saturday we left for Copenhagen on the 8:45 flixbus which was surprisingly enjoyable given the on bus wifi and USB charging between the seats. Once we checked into our hostel, we walked around the city for a while. The city is beautiful and with all the canals, every street was a good spot to take pictures. We walked into Christiania which was one of the most interesting places I have been with the graffiti and art everywhere.  For dinner we went to Reffen, which was a street food spot made up of a bunch of different vendors in their own shipping containers. We did some rock climbing, watched some dank scooter tricks at the skatepark right next to Reffen, then took an extended scooter ride back to this ice cream place with churros.

On Sunday, I scootered over to Mad & Kaffe to meet up with my Oweek Advisor Amy who happened to be researching the biking in Copenhagen for the next two months. We had a good time catching up about life since school had been out and a great brunch too. After brunch, I met up with the rest of the group to see the Danish National gallery and the botanical gardens.  Our time in Copenhagen was coming to an end so we did some souvenir shopping then walked back to the bus station for a long ride back to Gothenburg.

 

This week was our first week of building! We were on site everyday, setting up material, prototyping, and moving forward in our design process! A bunch of logs and gravel that we ordered came in so a lot of the time was spent doing some heavy-duty lifting and moving the gravel and logs down to the site as well as cutting logs. We had pretty nice weather the whole week which made the days better!

On Monday we moved fencing down to the site and outlined where we would be working as well as marked out more of our paths. On Tuesday, I was part of the food and fika guru team so we had to go grocery shopping and cook for the entire group. We decided to make tacos and they were a hit! We underestimated a bit and ran out of food for ourselves, but it was a lesson learned for future groups. I’ve never cooked for a large group of people before, so it was definitely and fun and different experience that broke up the work we were doing on-site. We also got some cookies, fruit, and coffee for our two daily fikas. The rest of the week we enjoyed some really good Thai food and on Thursday to celebrate Midsummer, we had some traditional Swedish Midsummer food! It consisted mainly of bread, potatoes, and pickled herring of different flavors– I didn’t even know flavors of that existed, especially not earl gray flavor! On Midsummer we went out for lunch and went to the park at night.

 

During the week we got a good amount of work done on-site. We laid down and leveled pretty much all of the gravel and began placing the logs down for the base of our path. We are hoping to get almost all of the circle path done before we leave this week and I think we are on track for that. We had to change our design a lot to adapt to the changes in plans and environment, but having to redesign on the spot and think on our feet was a cool and applicable experience. Having to change plans and reach an agreement between the mechanical engineers, structural engineer, and architect was tricky, but made the process challenging and exciting. By the end of the week we had a lot done and were more than ready for a relaxing three-day weekend.

Over the weekend the group took a trip to Copenhagen for two days. It was super fun and definitely quite different than Gothenburg. It was a lot busier and more touristy, which was a fun change. We went to Christiania, or Freetown Christiania, where everyone is pretty free to do what they want, as the name implies. Then we saw Nyahvn and got really good street food at Reffen. The next morning we saw Rosenborg Castle, The National Gallery of Denmark, and the Botanical Gardens. We finished our trip with some good ice cream and headed back to Gothenburg for another week of building!

The last week came quick, but I hope it’s the most productive one yet!

After we ended our first week of Dare2Build, we decided to take Saturday off as a rest day. All of us went to the archipelago off the coast of Gothenburg. It was really convenient for us as our bus passes allowed us to take the ferry for free. We left at around 11am from our hostel. We took a decently long tram ride to the shore where we then took the ferry to the islands. The first island we went onto was relatively large, but the section we went on to was really small and there wasn’t much for us to do on the island. Since it was about lunch time, we decided to have lunch at the island as we waited for the next ferry. The place we had lunch at was a small seafood-focused restaurant. The atmosphere was really nice as we are able to look out towards the sea. I ordered fish and chips. It tasted good, but the portion was disappointingly small. I guess that’s how it like at touristy places where our choices are limited.    

 

After we finished lunch, we hopped on the ferry to arrive at the next island. This island, although not as big as the previous island that we were on, was easier for us to explore and find things to do. We explored the island, walking our way through the paths and occasionally off those paths as well. After a while, we found a nice dock where we could jump into the icy cold water. Megha, Daniel, Scott, Christian, and Ben all jumped in multiple times before I finally caved and decided to join them. The water was numbingly cold, but it felt awesome!

On a side note, I felt that that experience got me really close to nature, something I didn’t really know I missed, or needed in life. I will try to go out and explore nature more for sure.

Back to the island, after we were satisfied with jumping into the cold water, it was already pretty late in the day and we knew it was time to go back. As the temperature dropped, and our tummies got emptier and emptier, we decided to go to a cafe to wait for our ferry back. There, some of us got dinner, while the others had coffee to warm up their bodies. When the ferry came, we all hopped aboard and traveled back to our hostel. As soon as we were back, we continued on our midterm project. Most of us had a lot left to do and not much time to do it. We spent that night and most of Sunday working on that midterm. Although it was really long and strenuous, the end result, seeing the centering clamp work, was really satisfying. After a long day of doing Fusion 360, we headed to bed early knowing we have a long week ahead, and a long week it was.

We spent the entire week on site, prepping our paths, cutting logs, laying down gravel, and experimenting with prototypes. It was a very tiring week, but it was also very productive and necessary due to the short amount of time we have. Overall, Week 3 was a really long week; we did a lot of things, both fun and tedious, and I can’t wait for Week 4, the final week of iSEED.