time is an illusion

title-copyrighty (c) by Martin ;)

Two days ago it has been 3,5 years since Annina and I are together. Those kind of jubilee's are always welcome and I hope we will have more of them in the future :D. We celebrated our jubilee with a great meal prepared by Annina and a good bottle of wine. It is amazing how fast the time passes by but that's a good sign in my opinion since this happens only if you are having a good time.

Dublin reloaded

After a few days of geeking for university I am back on track and therefore have some time to write my Dublin report. Although I already wrote something about Dublin I will summarize the whole time and shorten the parts I already reported about. Here we go....

Our travel started on Thursday 16th at the local (Malmö) airport. It was the first time for me flying with only hand luggage and therefore the Check-In was a bit faster than usual. We even passed the strict (and stupid) new luggage checks. The flight was my first one since London 2002(?) and I enjoyed it. I hope I will never get used to those feeling when the plane starts to accelerate and you get pressed in your seats. It love it!
After 2 hours, we finally arrived in Dublin and saved our first money by taking the normal public transport bus instead of the tourist-express bus. I really was surprised how cheap the bus was (only 1,7 Euro, for a one way ticket, compared to the 15 Euro we payed in London). Really nice! The first thing I realized when we arrived in the center was that we are back in urban life. People all over the streets even at night, shops open during the whole night, noise, lights and a frightening amount of traffic. I felt a bit like a culchie (Landei - lustigerweise ein irisches Slangwort..) coming from Lund to the big city of Dublin ;). But anyway, we searched our youth hostel and found it only 5 minutes away from the center of Dublin, left our luggage there and went out for a first exploration that showed us that the reality is even better than the posters. Enjoy:


As mentioned in my first Dublin post we visited the Guinness brewery. It was both interesting and very touristy, but the student price was fine and the Guinness in the so called sky bar was awesome! The Guinness brewery was the biggest brewery in the whole world since about 1960 but is still one of the biggest. The area of the whole factory in Dublin is unbelievable huge and covers a whole district of Dublin (more than 240.000m2, you have to see it to realize how much that is). Even if you don't like Guinness, you will love it when you are there! It really fits perfect to the cold weather and of course it is a lot better there, than everywhere else. Especially in the Sky bar!

on the way, to the brewery...

Finally, the view from the Sky bar, astonishing isn't it?

It's really filled with Guinness!!!

The second "alcohol stop" was in the Jameson distillery, again one of the worlds most famous distillery's. The funny thing was that they asked for volunteers at the beginning of the tour. Those volunteers could compare different Whiskey's with the help of the tour guide, that explained why they taste so different. And guess who volunteered? Hehe, yeah it was me :D

a whole lot of different Whiskey's...

...the old distillery...


...some of the barrels that are used to store the whiskey...

...and a vessel that is used to distill the whiskey...

...the five different whiskey's...

...our funny tour guide...

...Brice an I drinking another Jameson on our tour to the national park of Wicklow...

Since I don't want to strain you (and me..) too much, I will write the second part in the next days, with newer stories and other great pictures

back in Lund, back in life

Hej!

After 5 wonderful days in the capital of Ireland I am finally back in Lund. Unfortunately I have a lot of work to do for university in the next few days, but I think that's a fair price for 6 days away from everyday life and university. I don't wanna say to much about Dublin right now, except that we really had a great time. A more detailed report will follow as soon as I find some time (maybe during the weekend or next week).

As my Mum said on Skype today: my current life does not seem to differ that much from that at home. Of course, I meet a lot of nice people from all over the world, and of course I do travel a lot more that at home and I really enjoy my time up here, but I can't negate that fact that I am here with an university program and therefore have to study as well. And right now is "high season" for the next 2-3 weeks, but that's totally fine for me. I have some very interesting courses and benefit a lot from all my work I do here. I did have much time for doing other stuff during the first study period and I will have more time in a few weeks as well but I just feel it's the right time for pushing university a bit. The weather is much less than charming, it's getting dark early and it's quite cold outside, so I try to get as much work done right now to have some credits to burn in the spring term when the nature will be more inviting.

I am currently starting to think about our trip to Lapland this winter. I hope we will have the opportunity to try dog-sledding, snow shoe tours and maybe cross country skiing. I really would enjoy staying in a lonely hut surrounded by wood, snow, ice and hopefully northern lights. But we will see what life has reserved for us!

Dublin, first update :)

Although, the Internet is damn slow, here comes the first update:

So far everything went pretty fine, the flight was nice, we have GREAT weather (not the standard in this time, cold but no rain!) and the beer is as good as expected ;)

First day, we were basically heading to our youth hostel (pretty nice!) and walking around in the city center, enjoying our time and testing the first Guinness in a real Irish pub and falling asleep afterwards. It's kind of strange, you work hard the whole week, trying to get all the stuff done, that has to be done, drive to the airport, 2h later you are in another country, all the work behind you and just 5 days in front of you, no plans everything just spontaneous. But it's great, I start loving Ireland, the people are so friendly, they have 700 pubs inside of the city, that's just amazing. They really know how to enjoy their time!

So far we have been walking around in the inner parts of the (compact) city, visiting a very interesting, traditional university in the heart of Dublin with a very old, beautiful library and some fascinating books that are over 1000 years old, with beautiful drawings. Amazing, that they survived all the fires and other dangers...
Yesterday we visited the Guinness brewery which was a fascinating experience as well. Although it was very, very touristic there, we enjoyed the exhibition and the Guinness in the so called "Sky-Bar" with an amazing overview over the whole city and the sunset at this time was just great. And the beer was good as well ;)
Today we got deeper insights into the production of Irish whiskey at the Jameson distillery and I got a official certificate as a Irish whiskey tester, since I was one of the volunteers to try 5 different whiskey brand to get to the insight, that Jameson is the best ;). But don't get the impression we are only studying how to produce alcohol and test it afterwards, we mainly enjoy the time here, get to know nice people (the youth hostel is full of them, although most of them are French :P) and just have a great time. Tomorrow we will go on a tour to the countryside to see more of the Irish landscape. I am really looking forward to this, seems to be a great place for hiking as well!

But for now, that's it, we have 2 T-bone steaks waiting in my back bag to get cooked, with tons of other great food and I am already starving, so time for doing something for my stomach. See ya!

P.S.: Photos will follow when we are at home, the Internet connection does not even let me think about pictures.

Taking off....

Time has come for my first trip outside of Sweden. I will be in Dublin from Th, 16th till Tue. 21th for drinking lot's of


YEEEHAAAAA :)

It looks like we have free internet in my hostel, so I will try to post some updates from there.

weather changes

To give you an impression how fast the weather changes here in Lund I took a few photos at different times through my room window.

The first one, at the morning, after I got up. Beautiful, time for a run, isn't it?


Luckily I had breakfast before...

Same place 10 minutes later:

Afternoon: Nice! Hail! First time in Lund since I am here. I feel like running to my car and pet(streicheln) it :/


Finally, that's how it looks 80% of the time, if it's not raining. Grey and colorless. Not very inviting, but how would ever complain about the weather? Not me ;)


This was a rather short post, but I don't have that much time, since I have to prepare a lot of stuff for Dublin (mainly university stuff..).

See ya!

one of the greatest achievments of humanity...

....is my new jacket. I will give it my personal "tool of the year" award very close before our tent ;). I can't imagine how humanity could survive for thousands of years without such jackets.



Currently we have mild weather again but rain, almost everyday.

pushing hard forward

Hej!

I minor update right now, since I did not have much time for the last couple of days. Annina is going to write more about our Göteborg weekend so I will skip this right now and move on to the stuff happened since that.
During the week I am almost busy for 8 to 10 hours a day since I take much more courses this period. I have 15 Swedish credits(this time really SWEDISH credits, since all courses are taught in Swedish - hi hi) which is in about equivalent to 15 SWS at home until Christmas so a lot of work but it is not that bad as it sounds. 5 Credits are a language course that are only in the evening and from which I already know a lot of stuff. So only 10 credits left for normal courses and I will be able to handle this although it is some work. But all the courses so far are very interesting and I feel that I can benefit a lot from them. Today we had a funny laboratory session where we had present our assignment. It was like:

Hej I know you guys you visited the mobile graphics course, didn't you?

Ähh, yes, you know us?

I have seen the presentation of your game, I don't expect you had any troubles with the assignment?!

Ähm, not really no.

A few painted diagrams and answered questions later we were finished and could go back home :)

I keep feeling that I spend to much time for preparing stuff in advance that needs no preparation...

Before this we had a meeting with our professor for the language processing course. It was very productive as well and he seemed to be quite satisfied with the design for our project which is good, since we started working on it during the breakfast :). Today I feel a lot more comfortable than yesterday since those two meetings went pretty well. Although I feel that I need a short break, since I did not have that much time to relax since my mobile graphics exam. Pushing forward can also be challenging.

But those break is very close: My flight to Dublin is very close. YEEEHAAAAA :) . Only 9 days left till Brice and I will rock the Guiness brewery ;)

Another topic, the funny, crazy Halloween - St. Lars party this weekend with a lot of funny pictures will be covered in the next post. Stay tuned :)

random Note: The dictionary wants to replace Annina by angina :D. It seems Google is watching her ;)

wahahah - SNOW :)

random quicknote:

2 weeks ago, I wrote about autumn. Now it seems to be time to write about winter...

It is snowing ;)

I knew that in the northern part of Sweden winter has arrived about 4 weeks ago (currently they have 1m+ snow and cosy -20°C) and from the weather forecast you can see it coming a few 100km south every week. This weekend in Götheborg the air was so cold that I really felt winter is coming very, very soon. And now it is snowing in Lund. It probably will not last for very long because it is still too warm but the weather forecast for the end of the week is about 0°C. BRRRRRR! I am really happy to have my winter jacket ready to wear!

*EDIT*
It's not only snowing there are also severe storms making it very hard to pedal. Notice to myself: Never ever go outside again without having your gloves and your hood with you! The icy winds are so strong that your fingers become a unfeeling clump within minutes.