Handling four currencies in a day in the process - one of those uniquely MESPOM experiences - I arrived in Lund on an overcast, gray afternoon. This is a bit unfair to Budapest, of-course. While equally beautiful, much bigger and hence with many more sights to behold and marvel, Budapest did not get a blog entry when Sachin first set foot there last year. But then, this website did not exist and Sachin does not write blogs on lesser websites! It will be a bit of cheating to write first time experiences having spent an year there. All I can write now of there are anecdotes dripping with tearful nostalgia. It's a slightly touchy topic since I'm still recovering from the parting. Will have to postpone it until it sinks in. No, dear old Budapest will just have to wait until a third batch MESPOMer obliges. (Take a hint, guys!)
Back to Lund then! All that can be said against it in comparison is that this is not a capital. No sir, this could not be the capital of Skane, it is so small. The distance from my dorm to IIIEE is less than that between my CEU hotel (can't call it a dorm lest it be confused for the parallel that Lund offers) and Örs, our closest Metro station there.
That said, this place is ideal for work. You will know what I mean if you recall my preferences from the entry about the CEU Hotel. Trees absolutely dominate this town!. If Mytilini brings back the chewy texture of an Octopus tentacle, and Budapest reminds one of Egri Bikaver, then I expect the one smell that I will forever associate with Lund is that of moist leaves and bark. It will certainly not be of a food item because the decent kind is quite simply too expensive to have often enough to leave an imprint on the memory! To be fair, this is where I found the best brown bread I ever had. (White remains Mumbai.) What is thankfully cheap is fresh air, or rather er.. fresh wind.