So, what is Core Course Week? Essentially, it’s a week off from all your classes, except for your core course. You spend a week doing activities and workshops, going outside of Stockholm to other cities in Sweden, and fika-ing with classmates. It’s a good time to bond with your core course.
I went with Affective Neuroscience to Gothenburg for our short study tour. It’d just snowed a ton the day before, so there were crazy delays in public transportation. Which made getting to the train station just a little more stressful than usual. For the first time, the metro was so packed I couldn’t get on. But amidst travel delays, we all got to Gothenburg and checked into our lovely little hostel.
We spent 3 days there, visiting an SSRI lab, exploring the Universeum, doing an improv workshop and a music therapy workshop, and my personal favorite — seeing the Hunchback musical at the Gothenburg opera house (in Swedish!). We also got a lot of time to bond as a class. We ate at least one meal together every day, and even did an escape room!
Gothenburg, the second largest city in Sweden, is quite distinct from Stockholm and has its own life. Besides being more rainy than snowy, it’s more windy, and much of the public transportation runs above ground.
Unfortunately, other than one morning, we didn’t have much time to explore Gothenburg. I did manage to go with a few friends to see just what the rainy city on the west coast of Sweden has to offer in the winter though.
I also ate my first semla (a delightful creamy pastry filled with almond paste) in Gothenburg. It wasn’t as sweet as I was expecting, which made it even better to dig into my hot chocolate!
And then it was back to Stockholm for us. As half of us missed the train back, a word of advice: when trains are “delayed” in Sweden, they can still leave early.
Back in Stockholm, we went to Karolinska university to visit a genetics lab and an internet psychiatry lab. And to conclude our core course week, we ate together as a class at a Thai buffet, and presented on psychological disorders.
Semester in Stockholm 
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