Skånish

Waking up one seedy morning in the last week at Deutsche Akademie, I realised that I had a full 12 days between my "graduation" (complete with certificate) and the commencement of the Freie Universitat academic semester. So, despite only arriving a month ago, I decided my plan of action was to leave Germany altogether. Destination: Sweden. A pleasant nine hour voyage on U-Bahn, bus, ferry and train. Flying is quicker, more comfortable and probably cheaper, but as I'm very time-rich recently - and rich too, thanks to K-Rudd's stimulus package - I decided the slow-food equivalent was the way to go.

So now I'm here in Lund, a beautiful university village in Skåne, southern Sweden. It's closer to Copenhagen than to Stockholm -here it's not uncommon to receive Danish TV and be light-heartedly racist towards the Danish. It's also the location of my first exchange experience, those fateful, crazy months between August 2006 and January 2007. But most importantly, it's now the home town of my friend Penny.

I met Penny on my second day in Lund. I was hunting around the second-hand bikes that a few Turkish men were selling out of the back of a truck, trying and failing to find something that was priced at what it was worth. I heard the unmistakable twang of an Australian accent and saw a flash of red hair. I went across and introduced myself to her and her companion, a dreadlocked, op-shop clothed man called Google.

Dougal (as it turned out to be) and Penny became some of my best friends on exchange. After I returned to Australia Penny stayed on and learnt Swedish, found love, wrangled a Personnummer from the Swedish bureaucracy and enrolled in an attractive postgraduate program. She's now living the Scandinavian life in Lund with her Swedish boyfriend Linus.

Linus and Penny live in a beautiful bedsit very close to the central station. They share their kitchen and bathroom with a bunch of hippies who fail to clean the common areas, play trance loudly and leave the kitchen smelling of Govindas. But despite the tension this causes and the occasional stressful exam periods it seems to me that their life here is pretty idyllic.

During the last few days things have been blissfully low-key - Linus is writing his thesis, Penny is applying for jobs in the APS and I've been reading, recovering from my cold and being dutiful with the German. At the moment I'm alone in the bedsit sipping tea and catching up on some administration. Hopefully today we'll go to the Kalbadhuset in Bjarred for a Swedish sauna and a skinny dip in the Baltic Sea.

On Sunday I went for a stroll around to visit the old stomping grounds, burial sites and battle grounds from my first exchange. I didn't need a map - despite Lund's layout being far less than intuitive, I doubt I'm ever going to forget my way here. There's all these names that dredge up memories that I forgot I'd kept - Sparta, Ulrikedal, Sporletorp, Vildanden, Ostratorn, Mormors, Systembolaget, Martinstorget, Kalmars, Sydskånska, ICA. It may look like Swedish gibberish to most people but for the veterans these words are heavy with meaning. All of this to a soundtrack of Justin Timberlake, a musician who featured prominently during our time here.

My first exchange was a heady time, spent mostly within the pressure-cooker of the international student community. On this second visit of Lund I'm realising how insular that community was, and how much I must have missed. I have a feeling that my time in Berlin is going to be completely different - it's bigger, less organised and slightly off-the-rails but it gives you so much more choice.

I have another day in Lund before Penny and I take the bus up to Gothenburg to see our friend Brooke. Then we're all coming back to Lund for an Easter weekend feast where we will paint eggs and glue feathers on sticks (don't ask me, it's Swedish). In the meantime I'm going to try to stop speaking German to shop assistants, eating so many Stor Felafels and visibly wincing when I pay $10AUS for a beer at a restaurant.