Surprising to hear from me so soon, I know, but I did promise my mom a post about last weekend. However, to avoid my English falling into the dark pit of oblivion, this post is NOT going to be in Italian (but it's gonna be mostly pictures).
So, basically this last Saturday (March 28th) all exchange students living in Karlstad/Värmland and surrounding areas had an adjunct AFS-YFU (YFU is another exchange organization) field trip, first to Karlskoga, to visit the late house of Alfred Nobel, now Nobelmuseet, then to Boda Borg, a very unique amusement park.
Karin, my host mom, came too, and she drove me and Ulrike. So in the morning we picked her up, then we met all the others at 10 to finally leave at 10.15/10.20. After forty minutes we stopped at a McDonald's to get lunch; if you're even passable at maths, you'll have figured out that it was 11 in the morning, no one's favorite time to eat McDonald's. Well, it's not true, since everyone else actually ate; I honestly couldn't. Call me picky, but I'd had breakfast at eight in the morning and I has absolutely no intention to eat something greasy and to be sincere not even good three hours later.
At McDonald's. Ulrike was trying to push her tray in front of me so that it'd look like I was the one eating.
Anyway, after that we finally came to Karlskoga, where Alfred Nobel lived the last three years of his life. Now the house and the lab/workshop Nobel had built there, are a museum. And not a common one; Nobelmuseet was probably the most fun museum I've ever visited, and it was all thanks to the guide.
When we came in, we were received by a guy who looked like your typical museum guide, complete with tweed jacket and turtleneck. We were introduced into a room with rows of chairs; in the front stood a desk with a chair, and on the chair sat a wax figure of Alfred Nobel. It was so well done that when Ulrike pointed it out to me I told her I thought it was a real person. The guide started talking: he got to "and he lived here until..." when the "wax figure" jumped up and say that he would narrate his own story. Gods, that was freaky. Laura was shocked and "Alfred" tried to reassure her. He conducted the whole guiding using the first person and he knew a lot of facts about – well, I guess it was his own life.
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| The museum |
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| Ulrike and I in Alfred's lab– she's pretending to be thinking, I'm not even trying |
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| Laura and Ulrike |
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| Laura and I |
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| Alfred :D |
After visiting the museum, we went to Boda Borg (here's their website). Basically, it's an old apartment complex in a not particularly nice area of Karlskoga, that someone decided to turn in an original amusement park. Every apartment form a quest; in the quest there are different rooms (the apartment's rooms). You need to complete a room before moving on to the next; if you fail, you have to go back and start at the beginning. Every time you complete a quest, you get a stamp on a piece of paper you received before starting. There are green, red and black quests: the green one only require that you use your brain, the black ones your body and the red ones both.
Our team was made of me, Karin, Ulrike, Laura and Kerem, a turkish AFser. In about two hours we managed to complete three quests, which we thought was extremely bad, but the we met another of the teams our group had split into, who were like way into it, and they only had completed one more, so. Not bad. The first one we completed was a green one, and it was about art, especially Leonardo's. It was a pretty fun thinking game, we got it right on the fourth. Then we failed a couple other quests, because they were more physical and we all were tired (there was a weird one about sailing and ropes, one about ancient Egypt – maybe, one that was just really random and had a room that consisted in throwing fake letters up different post boxes, a haunted house of sorts...) and we went back to the first one we'd tried, The farm, which we found out we hadn't managed to complete because the last room wasn't the last; to move on you had to go down the latrines. We completed that, which was red, and then we completed a green one, Rock it! (I think); you had to "mix" a song (push the buttons until all the lights were green), then dance on a dance floor pausing when the song playing told you to (the singer sang: "Now dance/and pause") and then play a melody in a piano following the lamps that lit up on the keyboard.
We gave up after that, and we left after leaving Kerem with a team of other exchange students, since he wanted to play more. We were all really tired (and my blood sugar levels had dropped a lot – I hadn't eaten since breakfast), so Karin drove Laura home and then Ulrike came and ate Ceasar salad with us for dinner (that stuff's good). At 21.00 we went downtown to see a dance performance for Earth hour – it was weird, but overall pretty cool – then we drove Ulrike home.
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| All the exchange students there Back row (from left): Kerem, (Turkey), I, Ulrike, Laura (Belgium), Ruben (Germany) Front row (from left): Moe and Isana (Japan), Aliénor and Marie (France) |
