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.
