University starts with a "Bang"

Yesterday university started for me. The semester is divided into two study periods of each 8 weeks in Sweden. At the end you have a week of examination before the next study period starts. In my first study period I will take two courses, one called "Intoduction into computational language processing" and the other one "Mobile Graphics" which deals with real time graphics on mobile devices, as for example mobiles or the Playstation Portable. The language processing course includes topics like speech recognition and - to give an example everybody knows - the automatic spell checker in Word.
I was very suprised how quick the courses start and how much there is to do in the first week. I have to hand in two assignments until next Wednesday. So until there are only 8 weeks of lecture during the first study period, the professors don't lose any time. Both courses seem to be very challenging, especially the Mobile Graphics course will be very hard, since I don't have all of the expected previous knowledge. But yes, we will see if I can make it anyway.
The last days after the party were not that spectacular, I spend the morning with the language course and the rest of the day by reinstalling my operating system. I had some strange errors during the previous days: crashes, 100% CPU load, strange error messages... . Sounds like a virus, but I didn't find anything. Well, anyway right now everything works as expected, i have installed a firewall since I am no more behind a secure linux server.

Right now I am not that happy that university started right after the language course, the LTH is the only university in Lund starting one week earlier as the rest (but from my earlier schools I am used to it...). Annina has free until Monday. I feel a bit tired right now, the last two weeks were very interresting, funny and full of new things but also challenging and straining, because of all those changes and the impressions you have to handle. I hope I wont suffer from the fact that I had hardly any holidays to recharge my batteries during the last 6 months.

Short note

As you might have noticed, the last post is from Annina. So right now this is not only "my" blog, it's "our" blog. The reason for this is that we do a lot of things together during this year. Using the same blog is on the one hand less work for each of us and on the other hand we will we be able to cover a wider field of view and more topics than before. I hope you'll enjoy it :)

a petty theft

On thursday during the night some thieves burgled our corridor and stole our X-Box, all the games and a BMX-bike standing on the floor. As you can image this really sucks and my corridor-mates are really frustrated about this. Do give you a better understanding you have to imagine our corridor. One door leads from the staircase to our corridor. The corridor is in about 20 meters long with doors to the rooms on every side of it and one door leading to our living room/kitchen. At the end of the corridor is a french window which can be used for smokers to carry out their addiction. You can very easily climb up to the french window, since it's no more than 1 meter above the ground. But this door was definitely closed during the night. So the only solution is that the thieves came in through our main door. One of my corridor mates had a party at the balcony which is attached to our staircase. So the went in only 3 meters beside the party, picked up all the stuff and went back out with the stolen X-Box and a bicycle, just beside the other guys, having their party. I can't belief it! I wondered why the door to the corridor is normally locked, in my opinion this was only annoying, because you always have to carry your key with you but from my current point of view it is necesarry.
Since that I am even more worried about my bike. In Lund there are so many rosty shit bikes locked with the same lock as I have. Last year they stole the bike of one of my corridor mates, 2 guys went up and talked to him, while a third guy broke the lock and stole his bike. Can you imagine this? The only hope I have are the iron holders where I can attach my bike to and my Lock which is not the worst. We will see, maybe I am to pessimistic.

Right now I am trying to fix my computer, I found had some strange Microsoft-Errors. Searching the net for solutions wasn't that helpful, but I installed some patches and hopefully it will work now :/
That's it for today. We have to take advantage of the very nice weather and so I will go out now for a small bicycle-tour with Annina to a nice forest. Maybe the action will help me in getting away my hangover from yesterday too :)

Welcome Party, Sunday shopping and Malmö Festival

hej, once more!
I was quite busy during the last few days, so it took a bit longer then expected until this blog entry. First of all I would like to show you some of the pictures taken from my room. As you might already know the furniture was already in the room when I arrived here. The fotos are "as it is", which means I didn't care to clean up :D.








During the saturday we joined an excursion for the exchange students trough the southern part of Sweden. We had good weather and visited two places of interest. One was a very, very old castle and the other was a stone monument from the viking age. It formed a viking ship sailing to the north. Maybe this doesn't sound that great but it was quite interesting. But of course my personal highlight was a visit to the really beautiful beach. I love the sea so much, I always relax myself when I am close to water! The guy behind Annina is Hermann, our new friend from Salzburg.



As I mentioned before on Saturday night there was a big Welcome-Party for all international exchange students. It was located at one of the main buildings at the LTH (Lunds tekniska högskolan = Lunds Technical University), which is my university in Lund. I would like to have such partys at my university in Graz too. They sold too few tickets, so a lot of room was left during the party. This was the only drawback, because alot of students didn't get any tickets. I have some fotos from the party too:



On sunday, the day after the party we were really tired. The first week was cram-full of new impressions and we didn't sleep that much. Anyway, we decided to go to IKEA to get some basic stuff for our rooms. In Sweden a lot of shops have opened on Sunday too, for example the nearest supermarket is opened every day from 9h to 22h. Nico would like this :)
I didn't know what I had expected, but Ikea was so fucking crowded, I think every single family in whole Sweden was at Ikea on this day, shopping furniture and other stuff for their children. I bought some stuff like a blanket, a linen, a dustbin and some decorative items for my room.

On Monday I joined a friend from my corridor, who went to Malmö to the so called "Malmöfestivalen", which is a very big festival, lasting for about 2 weeks. There are many live-bands and all the concerts are for free. At least until I drank my first beer, after that I realised it is not for free :). Yeah, but I guess I have to get used to this. Even the beer from the supermarket is expensive in Sweden. If you want to get drunk, the only way to do this without spending a lot of money are the so called "Nations".

I will explain the idea behind the nations in my next blog. I hope you enjoy this entry, including the pictures is a lot of work, right now. But I guess, there will be easier and better ways writing his own blog than the online user interface. As I realized, the picture-layout isn't very good, but I don't have any time to fix this right now...

Arrival day, my room and the fight against the dirt....

Since my last newsletter a couple of days have gone by. You have heard nothing of me, because there was simply no time to do so.

On Wednesday there was the big Arrival-Day, we were already a bit nervous about all the upcoming things. Arrival day means, all the incoming students meet each other at the main university building to get a "starter package" which includes all the relevant information material which is necessary to have a good start. But maybe the most important thing was the housing contract. After signing it, we got the key for our rooms. How will the room look like? Where will it be? How expensive is it? Will we (Annina and I) be in the same dormitory? All these questions occupied our mind for the last few days...

Since we were up early, we only had to wait for about 30 minutes until it was our turn. After picking up our keys, registering for the Swedish language course, buying the tickets and booking a trip trough south-east Sweden we were finished and very happy to see the pickup-service. This is only one of the excellent services offered from the university. They pick you and your luggage up and drive you to your dormitory or flat. This was done for about 1000 Exchange Students!

The first impression that I had, when seeing our new home was: Wow! It's huge, but hey, it's very nice with a lot of green space, park benches, tables, barbecues and so on. I am living in a so called "Corridor-room". This means I live together with 9 other people on one corridor sharing a kitchen and a living room. Every room has it's own shower and toilet, whereat I am very happy about. I have also a little hall with a wardrobe and a garderobe. My "living room" is about 14m2 big has a really huge desk, a big rack, a small bed and a little table with two scruffy chairs. At the beginning the room was quite dirty, but since I put all my stuff above the dirt I can't see it any more ;)

Later on, I will post some photos and recapitulate the last two days but right now I have to go to sleep. Tomorrow is an Excursion, mentor group meeting and the big, big, big welcome Party with maybe a thousand exchange students. Hell will gonna burn ... :)

Välkommen!

Hej!

I would like to welcome you to my brand-new blog. The main aim is to give everyone of you a good impression of what is going on in Lund/Sweden and my life, wherever I might currently be. I have decided to write my blog in English. One of the main reasons is to get used of writing in English. Having my own Blog in English is a good oppertunity to do so. Another reason is that during my stay in Sweden, some of the readers might be other international Students or even better, Swedish people. But since I am not a native speaker I am absolutely sure there will be some mistakes. Sorry for that :)
I will try to update my blog on a regulary basis and keep it as funny as informal. There is so much going on here and currently my life is really exciting, although I am only for a few days here.