Eventful Day

Hello,
     Today was an eventful say, as most of my tuesdays are. Tuesday is the day that I have the most to do but I finished early today, meaning I squished everything into 3 blocks.
As most tuesdays, we started with stalltjänst (7 30 AM). Stalltjänst (pronounced: stal-shain-st) is stable work, taking the horses out to the paddocks and mucking the stalls in the morning and bringing the horses in and feeding them for the afternoon shift. Today during stalltjänst I got run over by one of the horses I was leading. A man was carrying a ladder and the horse decided that it would be a good idea to run into me instead of around me until I fell over and then stepped on me. I'm fine, but I will have bruises tomorrow and i have some scrapes on my legs.

This is supposed to me a spooking horse

I also had a jumping test today, and it was supposed to be during the last block but my teachers decided that it would be a good idea to do it during my Unghäst lesson. Straight after stalltjänst I went up to skolstallet and got Ruzzin ready and off we went (9:15 AM). I did my test at 10:00 and it went well. We jumped 90 cm, or 3 ft. It was nice to get some height in jumping as in Canada I was jumping 3ft6 and 3ft9 weekly. Ruzzin is not an adjustable horse and she needs to go forward in jumping otherwise she tends to chip into the jumps. This also means that when we get a long distance into a jump and she is going really forward it is hard to get her to shorten her step and get back quickly. There were two lines in the course, a 7-stride and a 6-stride. In those lines we got 6 and 5...

Next lesson was Unghäst (young horse) on Jasmin (10 45 AM). We rode in the Ny Ridhus (new indoor ring) which was great because Jasmin is the biggest 2 year old and needs lots of space. Normally we ride in the Små Ridhus (I'm guessing you understand small indoor ring) which is 40x20 m. The ny ridhus is 80x30m, so much bigger. Jasmin usually has a hard time going forward because of how small the ring is that we normally in, and I think that she feels a little claustrophobic and like she can't go forward. Today she was going forward and really moving in front of me! There were cones and poles in the ring to challenge the horses as well, we jumped the pole and she tried to go around the cones instead of through them (there were 2 set up close together to go in between). In the end she was sweaty and tired!

After lunch we had ridteori. At the beginning of the year we were assigned topics to write about and present. My topic was the difference between riding in Canada and riding in Sweden. Today I presented. It was a lot of fun, and I spoke swedish. Of course the presentation wasn't only in swedish as my swedish is not that good yet but I tried and the class understood and I got a big applause at the end.

I am starting to really feel a part of this school and feel great about my swedish!!

=D

Week 2 away: Flyinge

I got back to Bollerup at 10 30 PM on Sunday night from being away since the Friday a week before. You would think that finally arriving would be great and I could just crash on my bed and not worry about the next day. You would be wrong.
Once I got home I had to quickly change the clothing in my bag to what I would need for another 6 days away from school. I was off to work at a Stallion show at Flyinge.

At 6 AM, only 7 and a half hours after arriving back at Bollerup, I was off to Flyinge for 6 days. Flyinge is a school similar to Bollerup, only without the boarding. As far as I know it is primarily focused on equine studies, whereas Bollerup is also very big on their farming program.

The show I was working at all week was a stallion show. People bring their Swedish Warmblood horses to try and get them certified as a Stud, basically to say their genes are good enough to pass on based on their performance. This means that the horses are AMAZING!!

Here are a few photos, I did not take as many as I wanted but anyway:

                                     This is where we all slept       This is the Färs och Frosta

                                                                                              Stallet office

                                  This is how busy we were most         This is the coffee machine 

                                  of the time in the office                       that kept me alive

Some of the jobs I did were: whipper-in, ringmaster, and working in the office at Färs och Frosta Stallet.

We had shifts that could start as early as 6 AM, and end as late as 10 PM. Most of the shifts were about 2 hours long and you would have several per day doing something different in each one. Working in the office was pretty chill, we just wrote down which horses went out, what time and when they came back. The rest of the time we would go on the computer and check out the horses on the internet, or go on facebook. When we exhausted those options we would play solitair, or Harpan as it is called here. The week on the whole was great! I spoke a TON of swedish, really improved it and I used a lot of words I was afraid to use (because of being unsure of pronunciation or if it was the correct context) and I learned many new words. Here are a couple of horses that I loved from the show:

Sohn der Sonne

Luxus CML (SWB)

Zidane (SWB)

Zidane was my absolute favorite, unfortunately I could not find a photo of him under saddle in movement.

Anyway, hope you like the photos! Until next time!

Sportlov

It has been quite a while since my last post.
I have been away from Bollerup for 2 weeks, and before that it was all the same things here.

Week 1 away from Bollerup:

I had one week off from school for what we call sportlov. During this time I visited friends in two countries! I spent my first few days away from Bollerup in Berlin with an old family friend. It was really fun. I did a free walking tour my last day there because Tehya and her boyfriend were both working. It was a lot of fun and reviewing Berlin history was interesting.

    

                            Me at Brandenburger Tor                     Holocaust Memorial

                                        Fernseturm (TV Tower)                   Reichstag

My time in Berlin was made slightly more stressful as my phone does not seem to work outside of Sweden at this point. I had a great time walking around Berlin with Tehya and Cole. On the Sunday I was there Tehya and I went to Mauer Park Market where I bought a cute necklace and a nice scarf which I made good use of in the cold weather. As you can see from the photos it was super nice weather, which in winter also meant that it was super cold. It was almost like being back in Vancouver with all the different foods from different countries; mexican, indian, thai, and much coffee from Starbucks. Next I was off to Prague!

I was in Prague visiting another friend for a few days. My lack of use of phone was also quite stressful as on a couple occasions we got separated. My train to Prague was a couple hours late and so I missed meeting my friend at the station, and apparently there are no pay phones in train stations anymore. Pay phones have gone into extinction.

My first day in Prague I did two walking tours, also very freezing because there were no clouds to keep in the warmth. The city is really beautiful and I learned a lot! Walking around town on my own was also challenging as the map I bought was not great. The street that my friend, Lisa, lives on was not on the map.

We also spent a couple days outside Prague at her dad's house in Hluboká:

 

As you can see from the last photo, we went riding there as well. The first photo is looking down the street from the castle. The second is the castle and the third is the stables where the horse I was riding lives.

After the few days in The Czech Republic I spent 15 hours on a train to get back to Tomelilla.

Next post will be week 2 away from Bollerup! Enjoy the photos!