I usually say my favourite season is summer, but I’m beginning to reconsider. It’s true, summers are nice and warm and very often involve a vacation. And when the summer goes away everybody calms down a bit, gets into the normal pace of life, and autumn comes.

I lost my bike keys a couple of days ago. I’ve still not given up on them, I hope they might appear out of some corner behind the cabinet. In the meantime, I have to walk. This must be one of the best misfortunes I’ve had the pleasure to have. The temperature in Uppsala is still nice: sunny T-shirt days. When you have 40 minutes to walk to your lecture, you get creative and listen to an audiobook. The way to BMC involves a lot of apple trees. So my mornings have mostly been happy strolls among the bright green and red and yellow leaves, listening to ‘Kafka on the shore’ with an apple in hand. There isn’t a better way to start your day.

Things are finally sorted out so I moved to Kantorsgatan today. My first impression: much calmer, not really the party place, but on the bright side, I have a bathtube. Nothing beats that.

It seems that now everybody’s somewhat more settled. People aren’t worried about finding friends anymore, which makes it so much easier to talk to them. Party lines such as ‘What do you study?’ and ‘Where do you live?’ have been substituted for ‘I really like cat videos, especially the nyancat. And no, it’s not unmanly’ and ‘Look, I’ve taped wine bottles to myself; I’m Amy Winehands!’

My course is getting better and better. I think the moment I just gave up on my expectations (I mean, they gave us a business project to do, marketing a protein engineering idea you have to make up yourself, it was a difficult sutuation to accept) I just started to truly appreciate it. It’s totally not like Edinburgh; Edinburgh lectures are full of glamour and there’s 300 people in the theatre listing to a sometimes great performance with lost of gestures, explanations and a powerpoint that awaits you on WebCT. The lectures here are more like ‘This is what I decided to tell you today.’ Our course labwork (which is pretty much your own plan, there is no schedule to do things, depends on how you want to solve the final problem) has finally started and you see that the lecturers are quite experienced. They are very approachable adn happy to tell you anything you might want to know. They bring us coffee and tea every day, and on the lab blackboard we have a list that says which person is bringing a cake/cookies/tiramisu for the coffee break. You just put your name on the list for, say, Tuesday, if you feel like making banana bread on Tuesday.

Basically, autumn is pretty laid back. It is the time when you don’t have to plan something amazing to just truly enjoy life.