A Librarian Abroad: day one

After an early start at Gatwick Airport, a flight to Copenhagen and a beautiful train journey across the Øresund Bridge to Sweden, I arrived in Lund, my home for the next two weeks.

Mostly good impressions of Lund so far, although I was a bit surprised to be directly asked for money twice. The first time I had my guard down cos the guy didn't look dodgy but the second one looked quite trampy and got waaaaaay too close! And to think when someone was asking for money on my local train on Friday, I naively thought I'd be escaping all that when I came to Sweden.

Aside from the begging, Lund is a beautiful city. According to the Lonely Planet it's "Sweden's answer to Cambridge" and this is certainly true when it comes to the number of bikes around.



Of course the Cambridge comparison is also due to Lund's University, which is the reason for my visit here. I applied for Erasmus funding for this trip last November and was delighted to be selected, so it's very exciting to finally be here. This is the second time Erasmus have funded me to experience another European university. As part of my first degree, I studied at the University of Verona for a year. Scary to think that was ten years ago! I think this is going to be quite a different experience :)

I am looking forward to meeting the staff of Lund University Libraries over the next couple of weeks, finding out how they do things over here and telling them about what we do at the University of Westminster.

I'll be blogging and tweeting while I'm here so if you're interested in finding out what a librarian abroad gets up to, watch this space!