Here’s what the average school day is like as an exchange student in Chalmers University.
I usually wake up an hour or two before my morning lessons to wash up and have breakfast. Maybe even squeeze a little work in before leaving for school.
Pucko chocolate milk seems like the most household/popular option for chocolate milk in Sweden. Fun fact: you can even try some yourself by heading down to your nearest IKEA store here in Singapore 😉
My usual outfit for the wintery months would be a Heattech base layer accompanied by a turtleneck + long pants. Outer layer would be my waterproof(ish) winter jacket as it rains almost every other day in Gothenburg during the winter months.
Lecture halls are equipped with sliding blackboards, an endless colored chalk supply, and a blackboard cleaner that you can wet to quickly and effectively clear chalk marks from the blackboards. The lecture hall tables there are also pretty cool, as they’re entirely wooden and slide up from the chairs in front of you instead of the typical plastic tables you can rotate up from the side that are found in most of Singapore’s lecture halls.
Fried herring, mashed potatoes, and lingonberry sauce. Can’t get more Swedish than that (maybe other than meatballs)! I love having lunch at the Kårrestaurangen as it is relatively inexpensive, the menu changes every day, and honestly it is the only way I experienced Swedish cuisine.
The library has many little work pods like this one where you get your privacy and don’t have to be facing strangers when you’re doing your work. Each pod is equipped with a little lamp and charging sockets, which is really all you need! If you’d like a place to do groupwork instead, you can book discussion rooms that exist in almost every building across the entire campus. Chalmers is pretty well equipped with study/work spaces, making it pretty conducive for doing both individual and group assignments.
I know Willy’s is cheaper but somehow the variety at ICA Maxi just appeals to me more. Don’t @ me. I just prefer ICA Maxi. (Unintentional rhyme)
No filter, it actually looked like this in real life. Pretty damn amazing. Gothenburg’s sunsets are unreal.
We mostly cooked Singaporean fare while we were there, which I think helped when the bouts of homesickness would occasionally hit. This was French beans with hae bee (dried shrimp) that we got from the Asian mart, minced meat potatoes, and fried eggs with rice that we cooked with our very indispensable rice cooker from Facebook Marketplace.
Chalmers is home to many many pubs, and this pub crawl was organized at the start of the semester, I guess to welcome everyone to the new semester. It’s not a typical thing that happens super often, but I just added it in because *student life*.
And that’s it! Hopefully it was not too boring and still provided a little insight to the little day-to-day things one would experience in Chalmers and in Gothenburg.
