Archive for July, 2008

The Royal Residences in Sweden

When talking about Sweden all the time somehow comes to my mind IKEA, Volvo, Saab, ABBA, blond girls, nature and why not modesty. It looks that after visiting some of the royal residences the word modesty is not the most appropriate for this selected Swedish family.

Below you’ll find some pictures with the castles/palaces owned by the Swedish royal family and believe me you won’t find inside any IKEA decoration :grin: .

Drottningholm Palace

The Drottningholm Palace is on UNESCO´s World Heritage list. It is the most well-preserved royal castle built in the 1600s in Sweden and at the same time is representative of all European architecture for the period. The Palace is also the present Royal Family’s permanent residence. The rooms in the southern wing of the palace are reserved for this purpose. The rest of the palace and grounds are open to the public year round.

Gripsholm Castle

Gripsholm is known as Gustav Vasa’s castle, since he decided to build the castle.

At Gripsholm you can take a royal stroll around the romantic castle grounds or meet the royal deer at the Hjorthagen nature reserve. Gripsholm Castle is also home to the oldest national portrait gallery in the world. It is also one of the largest, with around 4500 pieces, primarily oil paintings. The earliest portraits date from the late 15th century and the collection includes contemporary works.

Despite these nicely decorated locations, in Sweden there other nice destination like Vaxholm. Vaxholm is, despite its small population, for historical reasons normally still referred to as a city. According to Statistics Sweden, however, only localities with more than 10,000 inhabitants are counted as cities. The name Vaxholm comes from Vaxholm Castle, which was constructed for defense purposes, by King Gustav Vasa.

Graduation/Celebration -> Working/Traveling

I guess the title says all :wink: .

Time is passing by so fast that we don’t even realize how fast the seasons are changing, I still have the feeling that the university started yesterday:

From now, for the moment no more homeworks, no more assignments and ***ty essays :cool: .

The semester ended with the final presentation of the business project. The business project is an obligatory part of the CEMS MIM curriculum and is supposed to be a real life learning experience for students. Basically student teams solve a real business problem as a one-semester part-time activity tutored by the company and a professor in parallel. The project results are evaluated by an academic and corporate supervisors. Sounds quite easy, but when you have an academic supervisor like ******** P.O. it is just intolerable. For example in the official curriculum of the CEMS organization is said the we need to write a report of about 10-12 pages, but Sweden would be all the time an exception, and is better to write a report for at least 50 pages…never mind, the most important thing it was a great opportunity to meet new people, make friends, was really a very pleasant team to work with - I guess this is the most important factor when you do a project like this.

…good mood before the final presentation:
Emrick (France), Barbara (Austria), Gergely (Hungary), me (Moldova), Jakub (Sweden):

…maximum concentration before the presentation:

…I know it is not polite to show with finger :oops:

…and good mood after the final presentation :smile:

…all the negative energy and effort during the whole preparation was recompensed with some (you would think champagne) natural orange juice :grin: