It’s been another packed week in Gothenburg, and this time Copenhagen as well! Let’s take a look back at the work we’ve done and the three day weekend afterwards.

This week was the first week of, well, the build part of Dare2Build. A few people stayed in Hammarkullen on Monday morning to finalize the schedule, material list, and drawings. The rest of us, excluding the food and fika teams, immediately got to work. I, along with a few others, started the day off by seeing how well the strategy of putting logs in holes works. We quickly found out that the ground was incredibly spongey, making this strategy impossible. Because this was at the core of my team, the frogs design, we spent the rest of the day coming up with something new. We eventually decided to dig a little bit, place the logs, and add connections in the form of wooden poles between them. I also helped the wilderness team to come up with a new plan of using rafts, as seen below.

Tuseday was very different. I was the food and fika guru, along with Megha, Sagar, and Walter. We cooked tacos with chicken, cheese, vegetables, and salsa. The quality of the food was very good, however a lot more people came after the fika so we didn’t have enough food for everyone. The chicken went especially quick, in hindsight I would’ve bought much more meat.

Wednesday and Thursday were very similar. I had an officer role on both days, Wednesday I was the communications officer and Thursday I was the safety and efficiency officer. I took a lot of photos Wednesday and conducted one interview as well all for instagram (that’s the communications job), but most of the day was spent helping the project manager, Ben organize people because we had a big turnout that day. On Thursday I was checking that everyone was using the equipment in a safe manner, but spent the majority of the day getting the log cutting stations to work efficiently. When I had the time, I helped the frog team level the path, lay down geotextile and gravel, and cut logs. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, a lot of progress was made this week, as seen in the second picture below.

Friday was a national holiday called Midsommar, which celebrated the longest day of the year. Everyone in our group was still really tired from the work week, so we took it easy during the day. I slept in, went for a run around Liseberg, the theme park in Gothenburg, got brunch with Megha, Scott, and Christian, and spent an annoyingly long time trying to plan a trip to Copenhagen over the weekend. That night, we went to the park for a few rounds of four square. Ben and I then decided to scooter to downtown Gothenburg to check out the Midsommar scene. Upon realizing that everyone was in a club (which we were too young to get into), we were forced to scooter back. Instead of going directly back, we went to the top of a hill I had ran up last week. It was pretty then, but I have to admit that nothing beats it in the middle of night, looking down upon rows of city lights gleaming below.

That’s it for Gothenburg. Now the exciting part begins. On Saturday morning the seven of us took a bus to what would be an awesome weekend in Copenhagen. I started the day off by getting some tandoori chicken at an Indian restaurant before we checked into our hostel, the Generator Inn. We then walked around the center of Copenhagen, which I immediately fell in love with. I’ll scatter some of the photos I took but they give you an idea of how pretty this place is.

The next place we went was an island known as Christiania, an awesome community where hippies are everywhere and rules are extremely relaxed (photo below is a statue in this area). We did some hardcore parkour in a skatepark, and then everyone except for Ben, Scott, and I left Christiania. We sat down in a park to enjoy the atmosphere, and were approached by a man named Peter. Peter had a guitar and an amplifier with him, and offered to play some tunes for us. Essentially, we got our own concert and had some great conversation with him as well. Ben offered him some money for playing for us, but he refused and said that true wealth is measured in friendship. Needless to say, that moment was special.

Peter had to go after a few songs, so we explored Christiania a little bit more. We stumbled upon a beautiful lake, which is shown in the picture below. This lake happened to have its very own rope swing, which all three of us used and somehow didn’t fall into the river.

After that we headed out of Christiania and joined the rest of our group closer to downtown Copenhagen. It was time for dinner, and Scott’s o-week mum who’s studying abroad in Copenhagen this summer. She recommended a place called Refshaleoen, a place on the other side of Copenhagen with a bunch of food trucks. We scootered there, and found it that it had a rock climbing wall as well. We all gave it our best effort on a number of paths, but I was only able to make it to the top of one of them. We then checked out the area and found a hundred food trucks all in one area. It was right next to a skate park,  so I enjoyed some delicious tacos while watching some kid showed everyone up on a scooter.

On Sunday morning I went for a run around the city, which was nice because I saw landmarks we didn’t have time to see otherwise, such as the famous little mermaid statue (which came out way better in other people’s pictures than mine).

After a quick brunch, we spent the rest of Sunday in the art museum and wandering through the botanical gardens. Our bus left at 5, and with that our awesome little trip to Copenhagen was over.

 

Good evening gamers. This week was our second week in Gothenburg as part of the iSEED program, and our first week of Dare2Build (a project that counts for us as Engi 200). It was a big switch from only CADing last week and we’ve made a lot of progress so let’s sum it up.

Monday was the first day of Dare2Build. We started off with a couple of introductory presentations that introduced the project and our roles in it. We were to create an interactive learning environment for children in the wilderness that’s eco-friendly and inspired by five characters: the woodpecker, the frog, the plants, the mushroom, and the wilderness. Each would be a team, and the first four teams created a path to a story telling circle that the wilderness team creates. We were also told that we would need to hold positions of authority for at least two days and also coordinate food and fika with three others for two additional days.  Below is a map of the site we would be building, with a circle in the middle and four paths coming towards it.

I requested to be on the frog team because I thought it would be more fun to create a path that children could jump around on. I was put on frogs, and got to know my team members: Kung, two Chalmers architecture students, Myrto and Poppy,  and two student summer workers, Walter and Iman. We spent the morning getting a better sense of our goal, and came up with some preliminary ideas.

That afternoon, we got our first look at the site. It was smaller than I expected, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While checking out our area we realized that our path was dry and the woodpecker’s was muddy, so we switched with them. We then laid out some sticks to make a basic path from the river to the circle, and measured it to be around 10 meters.

The next two days were spent listening to guest presentations and getting a more firm idea of what our design was going to be. Our initial idea was to use logs to make three separate paths with one being easy, one being medium, and one being difficult, and color code the logs. We then realized that this could divide the kids and would limit their fun, so what we ended up deciding was to have a general trend in logs going from small and close together to bigger and more spread out, similar to a tadpole growing into a frog. At the end of Wednesday we made a model of this design to get a better idea of how it looks, with the only difference between this and what we’re going to do is that we aren’t color coding anymore.

We also came up with a few additional things we could add to the path: a place where kids could observe frogs by the river, a device that would make a frog noise when you slide a stick across it, and a tent that kids could hide in and watch their friends jump across.

Thursday went a bit different. Instead of planning, the entire day was spent getting the site set up. I spent most of the day helping getting logs from where they were stored a brief drive away to the site. I’ve been pretty tired all of this week but when I got back to the hostel after Thursday I was exhausted, and was glad we didn’t have to do anymore manual labor Friday.

Friday was our final day of prepping. I spent most of it working with Iman to create a schedule and later a Gantt chart to plan out the three building weeks, while Kung worked with Walter to get a material list and Myrto made a drawing on AutoCAD.

Those five days involved a lot of working, so I was extremely ready for this weekend. We capitalized it by taking a ferry to some of the island off of Gothenburg on Saturday. We got off on at two stops, the first was a built up island that was a little too crowded for our liking (but we did find a restaurant that served some pretty good pizza). The second was much more remote, and luckily had a couple of diving boards which we jumped off of and into some very cold water. The pictures below show the ferry, Kung caught in the midst of an epic gamer moment, and our group right after jumping into the water.

The last thing I’ve spent my time on this week is our midterm for our computer aided design course. We had to make a centering attachment, aka this bad boy right here.

I worked on it a little bit throughout the week, but did the bulk of it Saturday night and all of Sunday. I took a timelapse of the timeline, which can be seen in the link below.

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All in all, a lot of work but a good week nonetheless. I’m looking forward to the second half of our trip.

It’s been a whole week since we arrived in Sweden! Let’s take the time to look back at it.

I flew in to Gothenburg from London last Saturday. I had spent a week with my grandma and saw all of my other relatives, and got over jet lag in the process. In the photo below taken at the very beginning of my trip from London to Gothenburg, you can see the town my grandma lives, Stanmore, on the top-right of the image.

 

Since we didn’t have class until Monday and I flew in really early Saturday, I had quite a bit of time to kill. I immediately went on a run all around the park right next to us, Slottsskogen, and was amazed how expansive, forested, and hilly this park only two blocks away from our hostel was.  I took the picture below at the start of my run, at the top of a hill in the Southern end of the park. Those of you who have explored the park will know it as right by the small castle.

Besides getting ahead on sleep and reading a lot, most of my first weekend here was spent getting to know everyone else doing the ISEED program. We went out for dinner Saturday night, and again on Sunday evening, but with Dr Wettergreen as well as some of the professors running the Dare to build program, or the equivalent of Engi 200 which we start next week.

Class started on Monday at 9am, which meant I was in for a rather painful 6am wake-up since I wanted to get my run out of the way in the morning. I did this every day this week, and eventually got used to it (though next week we start an hour earlier so that’s not happening any more). In class, we dove straight into CAD with a little bit of TinkerCAD, and a whole lot of Fusion 360. Although it can often be tedious and frustrating, I really like how I can tell I’ve made a lot of progress this week, and have a far better understanding of CAD than when we were exposed to it in the final project of Engi 210.  It was hard work since we were working from 9 to 6 and sometimes had homework afterwards, but luckily a fika a day keeps the migraine away.

I spent most of the week in class,  running, and doing homework, but there certainly has been some highlights. Thursday was a national holiday, similar to 4th of July but as Swedish as you could get ( the story of it included a cross country ski race for christ’s sake). We had the afternoon off, and spent it checking out the zoo in the park next to us and later all riding scooters together to the mall in downtown Gothenburg.  And this Saturday, we joined a block party that felt more like a Rice public than a gathering on the street.

Even with all of this going on,  some of my favorite memories this week have been on my runs. It’s a great way for me to see parts of the city I would never go to regularly, and explore the parks nearby.  I’ve put some of my favorite photos from these runs below; most are near the top of hills that look out into the city. The last one is along a ridge in the massive forest next to us that I explored on my long run yesterday.

All in all, it’s been a great week.  I really like this city and the people I’m with on this trip. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the next three weeks have in store.