SEP Arrival

Doha International Airport

Approximately 6 hours of flight from Changi Airport to Doha International Airport, 2 hours of transit and 7 hours of flight from Doha International Airport to Copenhagen Airport Terminal 2, I've reached the destination.

The place where I'm going to do my exchange, Lund University in Sweden, is so near to Denmark that the easiest way to reach there is to take train (Öresundståg) from Copenhagen, Denmark that travels across the sea between these two countries, or in other words, Lund is a very southern city of Sweden.

Kastrup Station

We just touched this foreign and unfamiliar place with unfamiliar languages and customs, and these definitely made us wondering where and how to get train tickets to Lund.

A lot of us just stood inside the airport and some of us went out of the airport to taste the temperature - cold, really cold, it's like when I was in China.

Well, back to the train tickets, Wei Ming has bought 14 of us train tickets from Kastrup Station, the station beneath the airport to Lund Central Station, which cost about SEK140 each. Yup, Scandinavia is expensive to live in.

Our very very first photo with all 14 of us the NUS exchange students in (at least for my camera)

There's toilet (or you may call it lavatory) in the train, good that you don't have to rush for toilet before hopping on the train.

The train route is Kastrup - Hyllie - Triangeln - Malmö Central Station (Malmö C) - Lund Central Station (Lund C) and it took roughly 30 minutes.

After alighting, we're supposed to find some mentors in blue Lund University T-shirt as they'll be picking us up and fetching us to the AF building for registration, and we did found them, or were noticed by them.

I forgot which track but the track where we alighted doesn't have elevator, too bad we had to carry our heavy luggages through the stairs.

The mentor that drove me is a Chinese girl, who speaks Swedish, apparently sort of like a local student in Lund University.

Registration and Housing
Registration was fast, sitting on chair forming a queue and being issued a welcome package with free SIM card and some letters containing our university WiFi login ID and password.

For housing, I queued for a while and got my room key, whoohoa.
I don't know why but it took freaking long after my turn and till the end, everyone was waiting for Aletheia.
The reason, she couldn't get an accommodation because her contract of staying in Sparta starts in February.
I really did feel sorry for her, but... nothing could be done, the person in charge for private housing was out for lunch, seemed like she had to think of some other ways.

She ended up decided to stay in Min Khai's room for the first month, as Min Khai, Aletheia and I are staying in Sparta while most of the rest stay in Östra Torn.

We then waited outside the AF Building for some mentors to drive us to where we're going to stay, which eventually took more than an hour.

During that hour, I ran up to the AF Building and registered for SUSA01 - Swedish: Introductory Course for Exchange Students 1, which I didn't plan to take because I'm not interested in Swedish and didn't intend to map this back to NUS, but these just lost to peer pressure.

My room (E307) at Sparta

My housing rental is the cheapest among all others, lucky me, and it's very very near to LTH (Faculty of Engineering). There's even a supermarket (ICA Tuna) downstairs, thank God!!!

However, bathroom and kitchen are shared (for Sparta International Corridor), I'm ok with that because that's what hall's like.

My room, I can say that it's bigger than any hostel room you can find in NUS, but one fluorescent light tube is spoilt, and you can only review on that but can't get it fixed by the caretaker, so have to fix by yourself.

There're also stuffs left by the previous tenant like mirror and table light, so I'll just utilize them.

Spent some time to unpack my luggage and set up all the plugs, extension and LAN cable. The bed's springy, the table's big, the wardrobe's spacious enough.

It's 3pm and I should be meeting Min Khai and Aletheia but I've been straying around at the entrance there and I couldn't find them, the sucky thing was, we couldn't contact each other as we didn't have each other's number, and we have to top up first to make calls. I was going to give up and walk to AF building to meet the rest by myself but Gareth told me that the Östra Torn people were at ICA Tuna shopping for stuffs. Well then I walked back to ICA Tuna since it's where I'm staying.

Dinner

Our first dinner in Sweden was pizza at Olympia Pizza & Café, just next to ICA Tuna (at that point of time I was just considering myself as the luckiest one to get to stay in such convenient hostel, haha...).

We ordered three huge pizzas and each of us paid SEK40, which is cheap. And as new arrivals, we'll automatically divide the price by 5 to get the rough conversion to SGD.

Pizzas are common and relatively affordable in Europe, we're definitely gonna be fed on pizzas for countless times in Europe.