A goodbye to Lund

After a loooong break without real updates it's time for a final note from Lund. For me it's still unbelievable that it has been almost a year now since we are here but it's a fact that we are leaving Lund on Monday morning. My feelings about that are mixed as usual when a period goes to an end. On the one side I am looking so much forward to the next three months of awesome holidays but on the other side I am somehow sad to leave Lund. Don't get me wrong, I love you guys home and I miss all of you here in Sweden but this year being over means the end of one of the best times I had in my life. Meeting so many new people, finding new friends and settling down in a new country in a new city, studying at a different university and traveling around in northern Europe was an amazing experience. And all this together with Annina without troubles like almost all other couples had where only one went abroad, it's just perfect....
But it was also a quite successful year at university. I have been taking exactly 60 ECTS credits throughout this year, which is equal to one year of full-time study, I had a lot of really interesting courses and I learned really a lot! As it looks now, I will get around 45 ECTS credits for my Master at home, so this year here did not even "cost" me a lot of time for my study. And by the way: I passed my KORE-exam at home with a 2 and I do not have an oral exam. So all the efforts I spend in this stupid exam have been worth it :)

I feel like I have grown a lot as a person during this year abroad. Meeting so many fascinating people from all over the world leaves it's fingerprint on you. Although it's quite sad to leave all these people behind it will also be a pleasure to see some of them again. We have now friends all over the world and a bed or couch is waiting for us almost everywhere.

I want to use the opportunity to say thanks to my parents and my grandparents that gave me great personal and financial support during this year, thanks to all of you who read my blog and left comments from time to time, it was a pleasure for me!

But now we make a 180° rotation from the past to the future. As the most of you might already know we are staying in Scandinavia for quite a while. Annina's parents arrived yesterday in Copenhagen and will come to Lund tomorrow. We will drive with them along the south east coast up to Stockholm and stay there for a few days. They are leaving on Saturday next week from Stockholm airport. Annina and I are probably staying a bit longer in Stockholm. From the 6th till the 13th of June, we will be Kayaking in a national park in Arvika which is between Stockholm and Oslo. I am looking really, really forward to that, Kayaking is something I wanted to do for my whole life and now is the time for it. The place should be one of the most beautiful kayak places in Sweden so we will have an awesome time there.
After that we are driving further on to Norway, more precisely to Rondane national park, around 250km north of Oslo. We will be hiking in the Norwegian mountains for around a week and probably celebrate the midsummer night there.
Those who are still not green with envy (vor Neid erblassen), back up now! We will meet Aaron at the 29th of June in Bergen/Norway and take the ferry to Iceland where we will stay for 7 awesome weeks, exploring one of my personal dream destinations, hot springs, lava, volcanoes, glaciers and a lot of untouched nature. Yeah, yeah, yeah! We have been planning this trip since more than half a year and now comes the time to get the credits for that preparation.

Since we won't have a regular internet access during the next 3 months it will be a bit harder to reach me. But I will try to publish an update on the blog about once a week. I think we will probably publish some kind of diary or newsletter from Iceland as well here, so stay tuned and check out what is going on here

T-1 day

While I am struggling to get the last things for my exam tomorrow into my head I am also looking very much forward to the days I have at home after my exam. First of all seeing all my friends and my family but also enjoying the atmosphere and hopefully some warm and nice days. The weather forecast at leasts states around 22°C and not too much rain. My schedule tomorrow will be pretty tight (but nice after 19h):
6.00 or earlier getting up, turbo-breakfast, biking to the station
7.30 arrival at Copenhagen airport
9.05 - 10.40 flight to Vienna
11.00 getting my luggage, buying train ticket and "Vorteilscard"
~16h hopefully arrival in Graz, driving further to WG to put my stuff there
18.00 either owning exam or getting owned by exam.
19.15 beer with my study-colleague Kandi
20.30 more beer
22.30 even more beer
0?.?? falling death into my bed
11.00 going to the dentist- death or alive

T-1 day google-image search-image :) WTF??? I will be at around r/3 after leaving from r/2+R/6 ->fucking g33ks

Good times, hard times

Hej!

After a quite unspectacular time on my blog it's time for an update. The time is passing by in rapid speed and I am mainly busy working for university. Since I did not find so many courses that fit into my study plan at home I was planning the second half of the term as a bit calmer "end-study period" that should allow me more time for other things. However I had in mind that I could use some time for learning KORE (an economic exam I should have done in my second term), depending on how much work I have for my other courses. I hoped that the department will be a bit flexible concerning my exam since I study abroad and have a different schedules to fulfill here. However it ended up that my thoughts were wrong. Since I already started learning I was left with two options: Either push hard forward and take the exam on the only occasion that fitted into my schedule or take it in September. Different reasons led my to choose the first option as a kind of a payback that I have 3 months of holiday this summer(after having 5 days last summer). The important part for you:

I will be home in Graz between the 10th of May until the 14th of May. I take the exam on my first day and have 3 days off afterwards to see my family and my friends.

Nevertheless is it a pretty good time right now, spring has finally arrived in Lund which gave us an amazing number of nice sunny days and at least a few hours spare time for sun-bathing. Within the last three weeks everything turned into a nice and fresh spring-green, all the trees and flowers flourish around our building and temperatures start rising.

I even had my first sunburns from lying around on one of our sand-beaches that are close to Lund (YES we have sand-beaches!). Enjoy 20°C and 12h of sunshine a day in southern Sweden:


With rising temperatures the only shop that produces fresh ice cream has long queues and the parks fill up with young people that catch up every ray of the sun. After the never ending autumn and the cloudy and cold winter this seems to be the payback for all the cloudy gray days.