I'm in the arctic circle!

I realize I've been writing some longer blogs, so here's the one that will compensate for it. We just arrived in Jokkmokk today, and I'm officially living in the arctic circle. However, I have found it to me far less oppressive than I was led to believe. The low for today was -8 (Celsius, mind you), there have been overcast skies for a week, and there is *only* 3 feet of snow on the ground. in fact, here is a picture of me without a hat or jacket coming back from the pizza place tonight just to prove that I'm north of Hudson Bay and am too hot with a jacket.


We did have another 8-hour bus ride today, which all of us are starting to get used to. I don't really realize it, but the distance from Umea to Jokkmokk is about the same as Chicago to Minneapolis, which is also about as far as Umea is from Uppsala, which is only a half an hour away from Stockholm, so really Sweden is much larger geographically than I had thought. But cloudier, and not as cold.

I did manage to find a few things entertaining in the midst of all my travelling. Some fun things I have learned is that the sun sets quickly, but they sky remains a dark blue for many hours as the sun spins behind the horizion. It gets BLACK at night. There are no major mountains until Norway, and the terrain here looks exactly like the Iron range, but with fewer hills. The street lights are still the red, yellow, and green we know in the US, but right before a light changes to green both the red and yellow lights turn on to signal the drivers. Swedes call moose elk, and their antlers are much smaller because they live in the dense forest. Reindeer are the same species as caribou, just a different subspecies. Double decker buses are really common in Sweden, especially in the well-used and well-kept public transit systems. So are roundabouts, which is almost sickening when you're riding on a double decker bus. These double decker buses also double as space ships- or so I think. The cabins are sealed by automatic doors that open with a button, and all the lighting is green (usually of the rope variety) but turns red when you're getting off the bus. Lastly, I found this 'monument' of sorts quite odd. I took this picture at a bus stop in the middle of knowwhere on the ride to Lulea, the last major city on the northern coast of Sweden:

That's all for today, but soon I will have some more information about the Sami fair coming up in two weeks, as well as more pictures and experiences at the Sami school in Jokkmokk. Thanks for all the correspondence! I will be able to keep up better now that I have a stable internet connection.