I saw this article earlier this week on Facebook. I’ll save you reading the entire thing with this summarization: most of Sweden has been completely overcast for the entire month of November. Lund is no exception, though I did see a bit of bright light through the clouds yesterday for a few minutes! But it quickly went away. Anyway, I’ll continue taking my vitamin D as it seems I won’t be getting enough sun exposure for the rest of my time here…which is just one more month from today!

This week I completed my first programming project for a computer science course that I’m taking. It’s actually pretty cool – it’s meant to emulate ELIZA which was one of the first stabs at “artificial intelligence”. Basically, you talk to Eliza (who is supposed to be a psychotherapist of sorts) and she’ll ask you questions and make you think you’re talking to a real person. So if you tell Eliza, “I need pizza!”, she will say something like, “Would it really help you to get pizza?”. It works for a while until you realize her responses are pretty mechanical. The next project has to do with music, so I thought it would be a breeze, but my partner and I didn’t make much progress at all after spending a few hours on it yesterday. Oh well.

For my African economics class (it’s almost over, it’s almost over, it’s almost over…), I’m currently preparing a presentation about “African agency in the early colonialism period (1890-1930)”. Riveting stuff, right? It’s actually pretty interesting, but the class is based all on discussions and I’m one of those people (as you may know) who will not say anything unless I really have something to contribute. That means I feel like I’m not contributing enough but the professor hasn’t said anything to me yet so I suppose whatever I’m doing is enough. My presentation is on Monday.

Next weekend I head to Berlin! It turns out I could have gone on Thursday as opposed to too early on Friday, but I couldn’t have known that when I planned it. I’m looking forward to going, but not really looking forward to catching the 5:17am train out of Lund.

This morning I walked past a store that was advertising Thanksgiving turkeys! Here’s a picture:

That equates to like $6 per pound, which I’m going to assume is a lot for a turkey? The coffee shop I’m in now is also playing Christmas music, so that’s making it quite hard to work on a presentation about Africa (and since I’m writing this, it’s not going well).

Random, but I finally listened to the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn this week. Carve out 17 minutes and give it a listen! There’s also an orchestral version if that floats your boat.