I booked my ferry ticket to Finland a long time ago and I knew it would a very long trip. First I would start with five hours in a train from Malmö to Stockholm and then continue with the ferry from Stockholm to Turku for the next eleven hours. I thought it would a nice trip that would let me calm down after the stressful time I have in university. However, Mother Nature decided to make my day slightly more interesting...
Let’s go back little bit; I had been working on the Theme Studies presentation (UN Security Council: Permanent members’ failure to promote and protect human rights) for the past month and at the same time I did my mid-term paper for the Academic Writing. However, during the past two weeks all my time and energy was put into the Theme Studies and while we met up for over 25 hours last week, I had really no time to work on the final paper. Luckily I had done the research and also the graphs that took me actually a whole day to finish. On Monday morning I woke up at 4am to give a final touch to my presentation notes (read as starting to make my notes) and I was at school before 8am. We had a final practice with my group and I was pretty hyper by then as I had not slept enough and had not eaten anything. Besides I was so nervous I was almost shaking; I still hate speaking in public and having a half an hour presentation was not something I was excited about. Quite the opposite. Despite the nervousness, I think our examiner was quite happy with the overall work we had done. And it was also nice to hear some of our classmates telling us that our presentation was the only one when they had stayed awake. Thank you H, M and B!
After the presentation I allowed myself an hour to calm down, eat something and try to set my mind for another attack of panic. It was 2pm and I had to finish my paper by 11pm; however, I had also planned to go to my friends B-day party, do the three-weeks-dishes and pack for a month. I started writing at school but I could not concentrate there and decided then to go home. But Skånetrafiken was in chaos and I had to wait for 20 minutes for my bus as it kept being delayed. Then five of them came at once, however only one of them actually continued towards Rosengård. One was missing a driver (at Centralen they change shifts and the driver who was supposed to take over was nowhere to be seen), the other just stood there without any lights on, third one stood there as well but didn’t take any passenger and the forth one just went by without stopping at all. By then I was utterly frozen and a thought of sitting in a warm bus was very pleasant indeed. However, the bus got so packed I had hardly enough space to stand and in the end it took us 50 minutes to get to Rosengård instead of the usual 15-20min. And all I could think about was that my essay was not writing itself!
When I finally got home, the panic kicked in again and I was not able to get my thoughts together to start writing so instead of that I sent the draft I had to my friend and had her peer-reviewing it while I did the same to hers. When I got the fixed version back, I realized it was total crap and I had to do the whole introduction and discussion part again. In the end I worked with it for four hours and I am still not sure if it was worth anything. But at least it was better than the draft I had had. It is just that I missed the party and I ended up packing around 12pm and doing the dishes at 2am.
And after sleeping 1h 30min I woke up at 4am again and got myself ready for the trip. During the night it had been snowing a LOT! Fresh snow was covering everything and I don’t have to explain how it was like to drag that suitcase in snow for several hundred meters. Then at the train station the schedule announced that the train had been replaced with a bus to Alvesta due to the fact that Skånetrafiken can not handle WINTER! After 3 hours in the bus, we finally arrived in Alvesta and got on the train. And I am still sitting here...One more hour to go before Stockholm.
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti