Viking sports

Last weekend the Young Scandinavians Club arranged the annual Viking sports weekend at their cabin near Clear Lake, a few hours drive north of San Francisco.

The weather was great, the water fairly warm, and we could sleep on the lawn under the stars. There was an interesting mix of people. The party organizing old time YSCers, a bunch of au pairs from Sweden and Denmark, a Danish electronics engineer who had just moved here from Copenhagen, an orthopedics PhD from the east coast who had done his post graduate studies in Lund and was fluent in Swedish.

YSC Cabin, Clear Lake

The weekend was passed sunbathing, swimming in the lake, drinking beer and competing in the "Viking sports". We competed in: waterskiing, wakeboarding, diving, beer chugging, giant twister and Irish Christmas.

I regretted not having contacts since not easy to water-ski with glasses, but I entered the chugging, twister and Irish Christmas instead. It went quite well. I placed third in the beer chugging. Just missing second place because of spilling slightly too much in the last round. Interesting to note that despite there were 16 contestants, only a few of them Danish, both first and second place went to Denmark.

We also went "tubing". An activity where you tug an inflated donut shaped rubber tube after a speedboat. It was cool to see that falling of that thing at around 50 knots could cause a person to actually bounce on the water before falling in. I was less inclined to go after that. Johan, one of the Bergman’s found out later in the week that he had broken a bone in his wrist while riding on the tube. Ouch!

The Clear Lake event was a great opportunity to meet some more random people outside of work. I think there are too few of those times, so I collected peoples e-mail addresses and started "the Palo Alto Scandinavian Outpost" party mailing list. This weekend we hosted a BBQ at the Bergmansion, inviting all of the YSC people from last week. It was a good party which I am currently relaxing after :) And there are more upcoming parties in the planning.

Other then that work is progressing nicely. I am content, my boss is happy with my work and I am in the processes of extending my Visa.

About the elections in Sweden, I might say that I was also glad to see that we are having a change of government. It’s nice to know that I had part in it since me and the Bergmans went voting a couple of weeks ago at the Swedish consulate. It will be interesting to see what comes out of all that.

Take care, all of you back home.

Robert