For the last five years I’ve visited Uppsala at least once a year. Often the reason has been to do research together with my friends/colleagues. This mean that I spend most of my days at Uppsala University, sitting in a room without windows and trying to figure out what the data mean. As you might guess from the pictures below, this part of Uppsala University are old military buildings that have been converted to lecture halls and offices.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about working in these buildings, they are pretty nice and have a certain “character” … but I spent one year of my life in buildings very similar to these doing my military service.
One of the big advantages of being in Uppsala is that I get the chance to take a closer look at Uppsala when I walk to/from the university from place where I stay. And this walk is something I really enjoy – I usually leave my hotel early enough so that I can go and buy a sandwich and something to drink, I take this with me to the park where I sit down and eat breakfast while watching people and boats passing by. A really nice way to start the day.
As I mentioned earlier, I spend most of the days in this windowless room but once in a while we leave it to take a walk or to have lunch.
Walking back from the university in the evening is also something that is really nice. The river Fyrisån runs through the center of the city and there are a lot of restaurants both along and on the river. There are also some rapids that challenge some people.
Then there is the Cathedral and the Castle that looks especially good in the evenings (in my opinion).
This year we also took a dinner cruise to Skokloster, a really nice relaxing trip. It took about 3.5 hours to go back and forth to Skokloster, I just wished we have had some more time at Skokloster – we only stayed for 15 minutes so it was barely time to take quick walk around some of the buildings.
