Mushrooms, fika and dancing the night away...

Those of you who know me well must know much I love words... I've long had this dream of being published by the university newspaper but I hate being told what to write by snooty editors! The readership of my blog may be extremely limited but at least I'm free to write about whatever I like :)

Temporarily freed from the shackles of essay writing, I can finally write about Saturday 1 October. Morning: mushroom picking, afternoon: fika (coffee break) with friends, night: pretending to be Cinderella at my first ever ball!

With the mushroom expert

Mushrooms... yay!

And my new friends!

The weather was gorgeous... We've been really lucky this past week with the temperature hovering around 20 degrees. It's so cute to see the Swedes lining up for ice cream and acting like it's summer. I must admit I also had ice cream on Friday - one scoop of saffron and one of apple and cinnamon :)

But I digress... The International Desk at university arranged an excursion to pick mushrooms. It's something I've always wanted to do and was a bit like hunting for Easter eggs. Quite difficult at first but I got better over time! The best part was chatting over coffee and cake with my new friends Misaki, Sonomi and Misato :) It brought back all my happy memories of Japan...

After fika, I went home to quickly cook my mushrooms and get ready for the ball. The night began with a formal three-course dinner. I was seated at the end of the table with an Italian, German and Belgian (below, left to right).

We proceeded to the ball at midnight. A real ball with a real live band playing jazzy music... I'm afraid I didn't take as many photos as I should have so I'm sorry these will have to do... I just didn't think to take more at the time!