A Year in Lund/Sweden

leap in time

2007-09-21T16:46:00.001+02:00

I didn't find a lot of time recently for blogging so one could say my blog is out of date. This is especially - unbelievable - true for one particular post that should have been written months ago. It's about the visit of my Mum and her friend Irene to Lund. While I was busy in Lund I did not really find time for a while afterwards folled a time where I did not want to write a shitty short entry and finally I felt the post being out of date. My Mum (understandably..) got angry about those kind of ignorance so here - finally - is the report(prepare for a leap in time now!):

My Mum arrived with Irene on Friday night in Lund which was a bit of a hazard since they lived in a bed&breakfast accommodation with an older woman(who stressed a lot!). She was also shocked when we decided to go for a drink at around 23h what we finally did. It was surprisingly hard to find a place to go in Lund on a Friday night without ending up at a nation :)

Saturday: We start the big Lund round tour, visiting all major attractions including the Dome, the university, all outdoor-shops and the whole inner city with it's beautiful buildings. Luckily we have nice weather! In the evening we all have been very tired, so we went to an Indian restaurant to get some excellent food and joined our bed right afterwards.

The main university building with us three

Irene(left) and my Mum(right) in front of the architecture building

Since we had only this weekend we got up early and explored the major attractions in Skane.

a nice castle close to Lund

The lovely city of Ystad where police officer Wallander from the books of Henning Mankell works.

After a walk through Ystad we continued along the coast to "Ales Stenar" a nice spot directly on the coast with big stones that form the silhouette of a viking ship.

The Sweden gang at Ales Stenar

Our last stop was the small national park Stenshuvud on the east coast with it's lovely sandy coast. Unfortunately it got windy here and we did not have much time left since my Mum booked a hotel in Copenhagen for this night. So there was not much more left than driving home and showing them our lovely mental hospital :)

Sandy Beach at Stenshuvud national park

On Monday we meet once more for our last day together which we spent walking around Copenhagen. Unfortunately I haven't brought my camera that day. On Tuesday my Mum and Irene left again back to Austria. We had a couple of really nice days together!

yearly- come back home anniversary

2007-08-12T21:08:00.000+02:00

I just realized it has been exactly one year since we left Austria to head to Sweden. It's amazing how fast time passes by. I am really looking forward now to be back at home in 2 weeks.

West-Iceland

2007-08-12T18:23:00.000+02:00

I just realized that my last blog entry is almost 3 weeks ago. So it's really time for a update.

Heimay

After our long trek along the Laugavegur we took the ferry to Heimay a small volcanic island south of Iceland. And when I say small I mean small: it's just 5*5km. It's a wonderful place and, we had awesome weather. Even better it's one of the main breeding grounds for Puffins which are really cute and not really shy. You can get up to a few meters until they decide it's time to jump off the cliffs. Puffins are really funny animals, although they are birds it's hard to believe that they can fly long distances. When they fly it always looks as if they are just about to crash, it just seems as if their body would be too heavy for their short wings. The rest of the time we climbed on the two volcanic craters that almost destroyed the whole island in 1976. The ground is still hot enough to bake bread on some places there.
The only REAL bad thing is that my camera(Canon Powershot A80) died here. It's a real pity, but the lens does not retract any more and it just gives error messages. I was so angry about that, you can't imagine. I don't think there is a high chance that I get it working again, since it's 4 years old it's not worth a repair. However I want to blame canon: It's seems this is a common problem for my camera and they don't give a damn about it. I found a blog with some repair instructions but none worked for me. Even still we will have plenty of photos since Aaron is still photographing like a maniac.

Reykjavik

After 3 weeks out of civilization it was good to be back in a "real" city - the capital of Iceland. We spend a couple of days there walking along the shopping malls, visiting the national museum and meeting relatives of mine. The weather wasn't that good, but we made the best out of it. Reykjavik is a nice city but it did not meet my - high - expectations. Going out in Reykjavik is surely funny but since we are not swimming in money we skipped that part. But what we did instead was a visit to a really good Icelandic fish-restaurant. In our 7 weeks it will be the only time that we went to a restaurant since it's simply to expensive. But anyhow the food was delicious we all had a lobster soup and different kind of fish and mussels and we also tried whale-meat which was surprisingly tasty.

West-Iceland

After Reykjavik we went on to the western parts of Iceland. We weren't too lucky with the weather here but still we explored huge volcanic caves and we have been on some very nice sand-beaches. And we also tried another Icelandic-speciality: Hakarl. It's rotten shark. It's one of the few animals that has no kidney, so the meat is toxic when you get it. But since Icelanders were always fighting against starvation they found a method so that they can still eat it: They bury it into the ground and leave it there for a few months until the earth has soaked up all the toxic substances from the meat. After eating it we are "real men who never ever have to prove their bravery again" (Lonely Planet) :).

Laugavegur trek

2007-07-26T15:21:00.001+02:00

Hej!

A long time has passed and we have been highly active in Iceland. The last 10 days we have been hiking the beautiful Laugavegur in both directions. We read it's one of the most beautiful hikes in the world and I couldn't say anything else. We started each packed with equipment and food for almost 2 weeks, so our backpacks weighted a whooping 23kg, but got lighter every day since we left food supplies for the way back on our way and ate the rest :). The hike is really amazing, we started at sea level, went up to 1100m along unnumbered beautiful waterfalls, crossed the mountain just in between two huge glaciers, went back down into the valley where big glacier-rivers flew down and made a nice delta-mouth(??). Then we passed through a very sparely overgrown plain until we reached a black-sanded dessert. After the dessert we were back in a very fertile mossy valley. We climbed up another mountain and came into a region that was very active in a volcanic meaning. We saw steaming (smelling!) springs and rhyolite-mountains that have all kind of colours from yellow to red. Later that day we reached a region that was fully covered with obsidian-stones that look like black-glass. The next day we crossed various treacherous snowfields and came to a huge block of black lava before we finally reacher our destinations at Landmannalaugur.
It's a really magical place and - you won't believe it - there is a natural hot pot. The water flows below the lava-field that is still cooling down is warmed up and pours into a basin where it mixes with cooler water. So within those basin you can have all the temperature you want, depending on how far you are away from the hot source. After 5 days of hiking there, we were really tired and so we spend 1.5 days there relaxing in the hot-pot before we hiked the same way back. Although I did not feel unlucky with the weather on the one way it got even better on the way back.
After 10 days of hiking it felt good to be back at our caravan, have a good(!!!) beer and put the backpack in the car instead of carrying it around, drink some milk, eat cheese and have a good steak!

2007-07-07T17:43:00.000+02:00

We survived the ferry-journey over the Atlantic to Iceland, so we are finally there after traveling a month in Norway and Sweden :). The ferry was was huge as expected and very fast, so we only traveled for about 1.5 days until we arrived in Iceland. There isn't so much to report right now, it was mainly raining until now we did our first hike yesterday, along a uncountable number of impressive waterfalls with not much around expect high mountains and many, many sheep's :). Today we enjoyed the first time of wonderful Icelandic Hot-Pot which was quite necessary, after some freeze days...
I will write a more detailed report in a few days.

photos

2007-06-26T14:22:00.000+02:00

My internet is about to collapse in a mather of seconds, but I managed to load up a few of the pictures from Rondane national park and from our canu-week.

Hiking in Rondane National Park

2007-06-26T13:29:00.000+02:00

16th of June till 22nd of June:
We have been hiking in Rondane national park/Norway for 7 days. Again we have been here at the perfect time, just before the main season starts and we had marvelous weather except from our last day. And most important we really enjoyed our time here, it has been a long, long time for me without mountains and any real hiking. So I was really eager to enjoy the scenery and we did not get disappointed. I did not have any real expectations, I just knew they had enough DNT-huts and several tops above 2000m and that Rondane is one of the national parks with the least snow in Norway, that is why it is accessable so "early". The real season does not start before July and lasts until the middle of September when the first snow can be expected. So we drove with the car to a parking-place close to the national park and made a round trip from hut to hut. Some of the huts are staffed in the main season, but since we were there too early all the huts were so called self-service huts. This means that there are cooking-facilities, beds, stoves including wood and proviant in case you forgot something or did not bother to bring food.
The first three days we went a circle from hut to hut around higher mountains but avoiding the peaks. The landscape all around was very nice, of course much more alpine than in Austria and we could not use enough sun-protection. The path was sometimes not so easy to follow, big snowfields had to be crossed, rivers to be passed and the waymarks were sometimes not too easy to find as well. We spend around 6 to 7 hours a day hiking and at the end of each day a nice hut was waiting for us, each with it's very own character. After a very long almost 9h walk on the third day we arrive in one hut that is somehow the center of the national park with all high peaks in day-distance around it. We are a little strained from our backpacks and plan to have a break-day but then in the morning when the weather is extraordinary nice again, no wind at all we make a day-trip instead leaving our backpacks in the hut. We head to our first peak over 2000m, walking up a very steap almost 1km long snowfield and then make our way through big stone blocks to the final peak. On the other side it's so steap, we don't dare to go nearer to have a closer look, but it's going almost 500m straight down. The view is marvelous I we see the neighboor national park Jontunheimen with it's even heigher peaks, all snow-covered of course. But we are sitting in T-shirts and enjoy our lunch :). On the way down, it get's even better! Once we are at the snow-fields we pick out our plastic-bags that we carried around for one purpose only: "Sackerlrutschen"(bag-drifting in engl maybe?). So instead of walking down the step snowfield we sit on our plastic bag and let gravity do the job. And it's unbelievable funny! We get faster and faster, the snow spreading all around us, the slope perfectly steep. We come back to the hut and feel perfectly relaxed and happy.
Next day we head further north but we make slow progress, Annina has some blisters that get more and more nasty, we get of the way (Abkuerzung....) and are altoghether tired, so finally a real break day. In the hut we meet two nice Tchech's and have a nice talk after being alone in the previous huts. The weather is getting worse the next two days, the forecast even worse, so we have to change our plan and skip two peaks that we had planned for the next days and head back to our car instead. The 7h walk with heavy rain and wind is the first real test for our rain-protection, but we keep dry. So finally no mid-summer in the huts there but rain, rain, rain.

From Arvika/Sweden to Lillehammer/Norway

2007-06-26T13:25:00.000+02:00

13 and 14th of June:
We return the Kanu and the rest of the equipment and have a clean up day. We wash all the equipment, buy food for our next tours and I get bloody oily whilde doing some maintanence for the car. On the 14th we leave Arvika to head to Norway. Not until short before the border do I realize that we are REALLY leaving Sweden now. After Iceland we will be shipped to Danmark and drive home from there. I get a bit sad about that but we had a great year and especially the last two weeks made me remember why I love Sweden. It's kind of a shame that I liked the landscape more than the surrounding of Lund wherever we were driving. Once in Norway I check the petrol prices first. Diesel is currently between 1.2 and 1.3 Euro, Super more expensive of course. Still expensive, but I expected it to be worse. Well, maybe in Iceland then... ;).
We go on to Hamar, one of the three city's that hosted the Olympic Winter Games 1994 together with Lillehammer and Gjovik. It's a nice little town with an especially nice winter stadium that looks like a turned around viking ship.
Only one thing that I haven't written about so far really makes me wonder: There are so many pimp-my-car guys in Sweden and Norway it's unbelievable. After living a year in Lund, I almost tought the Scandinavians are just too smart to spend a whole lot of money to show their own lack of penis-size. But I was totally wrong, Lund seems to be an unreal, lucky island with that many(poor) students and only well educated people. And even more particullary, I am annoyed by the type of car those guys drive. It's not the Austrian VW-Golf kind of guys(@Kaufi; haha!), they mainly own huge American Pick-Ups, Hammers(!) and other cars of that size where you don't get anything more per Liter fuel you waste than in a normal car(even valid for cars in that size!). Considering the fuel prizes in Norway are the highest in whole Europe(together with the UK), I keep wondering how people can afford that lifestyle here.

15th of June:
We go on to Lillehammer, again a small but charming little town. Our main purpose here is to get more informations about our hiking tour in Rondane national park. There is a local office of the Norwegian mountaineering association here where we get all the required information, a topographic map and good advice for our tour. We become members and we buy a good topographic map. The landscape around Lillehammer is quite nice and beautiful, it remembers me of good old Austria(mountains!). We spend the evening planning our tour and finally decided that we will hike We around for probably eight days and we will also celebrate midsummer in one of the huts there. I just hope that will be fun and we will have good weather. They had unbelievable good weather here the last two weeks with sunshin all day long and up to 30°C(!!) but it recently snowed up there. But anyway there should be not too much snow left and I hope we can make it to one of the peaks there that have more than 2000m.

Kanu tour around Arvika

2007-06-13T12:43:00.000+02:00

5th of June till 12th of June:
We set of for our kanu-tour. We booked the kanu for a week, the whole tour is around 110km, so we should do 15km a day. But no worry, everything is planned so that you are not stressed. With all the equipment we have with us we are quite heavy loaded, but our instructor says we can load up to 400kg in the kanu. He also says, the kanu is quite stable, 3mm thick aluminium, unsikable - like Titanic - he adds. I am still not sure wheter that is a joke or not. Anyhow, we start the tour with great weather and water as calm as possible. Kanu is a typical team-sport so you are lost if you don't work together. At the beginning it takes some time to get used to each other but after a while everybody knows what to do. On a good day with calm water and no wind you can row about 3 to 4 km within an hour. So we really had enough time to enjoy the landscape around. Our whole tour leads through almost uncivilised nature and a national park. The water is clear and you can drink it from most of the lakes. There are so many lakes in the surroundings here, many of them connected or only a few kilometers from each other away. If you are interrested try searching "Arvika, Sweden" in for example Google-maps and you will see it. But back to earth, the landscapes consists mainly of forests, sometimes you have small cottages for weekends or holidays that can often only be reached by water. And also quite common are huge rounded stones with a very smooth surface (dt: glatt geschliffen) where you can sit, cook or just lie there in the sun and let you warm up. All the lakes have many, many small islands that are just waiting to be discovered. And we did. Some of the islands are so small that only one or two birds can sit on them, others are a few kilometers in length. So we were just looking for a nice place in the evening, preferable on one of the islands to put our tent on, surrounded by water with almost no noise around. And sunshine till 22.30h. One should not complain but on the last days I was almost happy to have a few clouds back. We have been using sun-protection with a factor of 20, but with 18h of sunsihne a day and on the water that was almost to weak. So we got a light sun-burn on the first days. For the whole week we had around 20 to 24°C during the day so we could sleep with open sleeping bags during the night. Sleeping with so much daylight around in the tent is quite confusing. You wake up at 03.00 and think you have to get up because it's so bright outside. And then I wake up in the middle of the night, it's bright outside. I am not sure wheter I have been sleeping 1 hour or 7 hours. The sun does not say a shit about it.The more straining part about the tour was not the kanuing itself but more the land transports. We looked for a tour where we would end up at the same place as we left. So we had to carry the kanu and our stuff from lake to lake where there was no natural connection or it was blocked by a power plant. So we did 8 land transports. It's acutally not that bad, but it takes some time. We got a small transporter that was basically a metal construction with two wheels on it where we could lift thekanu up. Then you just had to push hard enough until you reached the next lake. But since since we had enought time that was alright. The rowing itself was only hard on the two last days: high waves and strong winds from the front (the wind always comes from the front....) made us row twice as hard to be half as slow as normal. With a weather like that even 2km become really hard work. But we did it, reached our last island with a small light-house, surrounded by water, enjoying the evening sun, eating a good meal with desert made an awesome connection of Barilla, Knorr and Primus. Life as it should be more often.

Trip to Stockholm along the Swedish south-east coast

2007-06-13T12:41:00.000+02:00

26th of May:
Annina became a Rockstar by destroying the TV in our livingroom! She felled over the ever strechted cable and thanks to the shitty, instable construction of the tv-board the whole tv fell over and smashed on the floor. It was not just a little bit broken, so that you can maybe fix it - no, no - it was completely smashed with no chance to ever, ever fix it again. The whole inside of the TV was trans:"sprinkled" over the living room floor. It was somehow ironic that Annina who saved our TV from being thrown out of the window by our Swedish-Rockstars was the one who finally killed the TV.

27th of May:
On the night before our departure we had a very nice dinner with almost all the people from our corridor, Brice and Annina's parents(Maria & Helmut). After that we exchanged addresses, emails, msn- and Skype-contacts so that we can stay in contact. This sitting and talking with all the people from our corridor was very important for me and after some sad days before our departure I finally found a positive end with everybody. It was a kind of good-bye to all the nice people I met here and I am sure I will see some of them again. So finally some sadness about leaving Lund but even more happyness for our trip.

28th of May:
On Monday the 28th of May Annina and I left Lund definitely. There will probably be a comeback in the near future to visit friends like Brice, Kristina and Marie but for now we are done with the beautiful city of Lund. By the way: The 28th of May was the 4-year anniversary of the relationship between Annina and me. So after coming to Lund together, staying here for almost a year, living in the same room for half a year and still loving each other it was somehow "right" to end this year on our 4-year aniversary. We picked up Helmut and Maria, returned the keys to our rooms and started our holidays. On our first real travel day we visited the Skane-zoo, a place Annina and I have visited quite often during our year. This time we were lucky to see trans:"Moschusochsen" for the first time. Amazing animals! After that we drove on to Karlskrona which lies on the south coast of Sweden direct on the sea. It's quite a nice town with very steep straigt streets. It was also the first time in Sweden that I recognized lot's of trans:"Auto-Proleten", tuning up their cars with stupid stuff. Maybe the reason is that Karlskrona is the main base for the marine-forces of Sweden and therefore a lot of soldiers work here.
In the evening Helmut & Maria invited us to a really great Italian restaurant to celebrate our anniversary. The food was sooo good, you can't imagine. I had three kind of steaks with three kind of sauces and potatoes. Mhhhmmm.After that we slept on an lovely place we found last autumn. It was located directly on the beach of a lake, with toilets and a campfire and all that for free.

29th of May:
We made a tour through the "Glasriket", the swedish center of glass factories. This area exists since more than 200 years and has been the center for the Swedish glass production since then. The landscape made it a natural choice since there is only wood and water, both essential for glass production. Today there exist 15 factories, all within a very short distance. Of course it is a big tourist attraction but since we are still in pre-season it hasn't been to crowded. It was the second time there for Annina and me but we visited different factories than in autumn and the glass production is still so fascinating, it won't get boring too fast. Although there are 15 factories each of them has a very unique style and produces different items.
In the late afternoon we continued further on to Kalmar which lies on the east coast of Sweden and is the capital of Smaland (the south-east province). It was a suprisingly nice city with some very old houses and a really impressive castle.

30th of May:
We did some shopping for Annina and the car ;) before we went further north to a pleasing town on the east coast called Västervik. It's a summer paradise with the a wooping number of 5000 islands around it's coast and a very nice setting. The whole surrounding is very, very beautiful with lot's of sailing and motor boats all around. In the afternoon we have to hurry up a bit and therefore skip a nice coastal-road we planned to take and take the highway to a small village of Trosa, close to Stockholm. I am happy that this was the last day with a longer distance to drive. In the evening we found a camping place in an amazing beautiful setting. Surrounded by small islands, on the end of the street, sand beach and noise at all. If only the weather could change from grey and windy to sunny and warm, I would immediately go for a swim.

31th of May:
We head further to Stockholm. Thanks to a route-plan that we printed out before we left Lund we found the camping place immediately. We take the tube into the city and walk around the center, getting an overview of the city(Annina and I have been here before) and buying some souveniers. We are all quite tired that's why we think about a plan for the next day and go to bed as soon as possible.

1st of June:
Starting our "tourist-day" with a visit into the city hall. It's quite impressive and our guide has some interesting stories to tell about it. I am a little bit worried that we can't get into the tower because you would have an awesome view from there. Anyhow, the view from the windows to the opposite river-site is nice! But we have a tuff schedule, so we head on into the center of "Gamla Stan", the old city center, to visit the Nobel-Price museum. Some might know that the Nobel-prices are awareded in Stockholm in December every year. After the awards there is a huge dinner with all the price winners, the royal(snygg!) family and many other important people that is held in the city hall, so we heard some interesting facts about that as well. Again the guide in the museum was great and quite entertaining. While Maria&Helmut visited the Fram-museum we walked around and did some shopping. In the evening we gathered up for a good-bye dinner in a great Italian restaurant.

2nd of June:
Good-bye is seldom happy but it was not that bad since we will be home in 3 months anyway and we had a great week together. As a kind of a bad joke for Maria & Helmut the weather had changed to lovely warm and sunny on their last day. We were happy anyway. After we left the airport again, we went on to find a nice spot for us for one or two days to relax. Sightseeing is always quite straining. We found a really beautiful picknik place directly on a nice lake with a great view to the Skokloster-palace(old relatives of mine!) and never ending sunshine. The daylight is amazing right now! We are quite close to mid-summer, the sun is raising at around 03.15 right now and going down at about 22.30 but very slowly, so it never gets really dark.

3rd of June:
Sleeping, sunbathing, swimming(cold!) and reading. No more but it makes my day.

4th of June(Monday):
The weather should stay sunny and warm until at least the weekend. So we decide to head for Arvika and try to get our kanu a bit earlier to make as much use from the great weather as possible. The drive is quite straining, 400km but who was sleeping the last 2 days? We get there, everything works perfect, so we get our kanu a lot of papers to read, very good topographic maps and nice instructions how to avoid destroying the kanu :). We start tomorrow, so packing our stuff, preparing everything, getting fuel for the stove calculating food supplies and so on...

A goodbye to Lund

2007-05-26T14:44:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-09T13:10:00.000+02:00

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

2007-05-01T20:10:00.000+02:00

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.

helicopter rescue in Iceland

2007-04-23T21:03:00.000+02:00

In an interesting article about rescue missions in Iceland that I randomly read they stated their three alarm levels in the following way:

Alpha means you stop having sex and hightail it to the airport.
Bravo: finish having sex, then rush to the airport.
Charlie: take your time in the bedroom, then call the airport to find out what’s going on.

Hope we will be around Xaviar ;)

report from London

2007-04-15T19:50:00.000+02:00

After some busy times I finally sat down to write a little bit about our trip to London that is already two weeks ago. The idea for this trip came up quite a long time ago, after Aaron, Morschi and Tobi said that they would come to visit us. We came up with the idea of meeting in London (Aaron and Annina have not been there yet) do a little bit of sightseeing and visit my sister who works there as an au pair at the moment. And since there are cheap flights with shitty Ryanair the trip was even affordable. I am complaining about Ryanair because they moved both of our flights (Malmö-London and back) to different times. For the trip to London it was not a problem but we lost a lot of convenience for our flight back - leaving at 6.50 from London is everything else than fun(our original flight was at 18.50) - but I stop complaining here, you get what you pay for.

Annina and I where in London before the others so we had some time to explore the surroundings of our awesome central Piccadilly hostel where we could sleep for just 20Euro/night. Later on our friends from Austria that we haven't seen since New Year's Eve arrived at the hostel and we celebrated a happy reunion in one of the local Pubs that had a very nice waiter and good food. On our first full day we first explored the inner center of London with it's places and met Marlene afterwards. And since she was eager to show us around we walked all the way to the Tower bridge and back along the Themes with it's many attractions on the way. In the night we met Marlene again to go out(first time out with my sister - wohu! I am glad she was not drunk, this would have been to much for me!) which was fun but razed our wallets.

guess what?

Trafalgar Square and the view to the Big Ben

real Spartans sitting fearless in front of a huge Lion

the gang @ Leicester square

The following Sunday was a tired one but we still managed to see the parts of the British Museum with a spectacular highlight in the evening: seeing the epic movie "300" in the local Imax. The movie was absolutely amazing in any term although the sensible one's among you might criticize the many violent scenes but since we all are real Spartans we did enjoy it very much instead :) (and Tobi is training extra hard for sure to get a 8-pack like they have...).

some of the monuments from centuries ago in the British Museum & hanging around in front of it.

Monday we split up into different groups: Morschi hanging around in one of the parks, Aaron & Tobi learning more about torturing in the London Dungeons and Annina & me about modern art in the Tate modern (Is that a Picasso?? - I knew it *ihihihi*) and a tour in the expensive London Eye with nice views over central London. I really love the construction of the London-Eye it's both modern and timeless. It also gives you an idea why those office-glass buildings that are built all over the world are actually one of the most stupid inventions ever made. We had around 25-30°C in the cabins and everybody was sweating although it was cool outside. They have to use a massive cooling system during the summer when it get's really hot - but that's just a side notice.

view at the top of London Eye to the Houses of Parliament

London eye @ night & Houses of Parliament per @ night

On the last day we have been visiting my sister and her guest-family in their nice house. They have 2 kids, a paranoid shy dog and and a very welcoming and friendly atmosphere - so Marlene is really lucky from my point of view. And to make an even better impression we decided to cook real Austrian meals starting with a "Fritatensuppe" followed by typical Austrian "Kernöl-Salat" and "Apfelstrudel" made by our fake Grandma Aaron (who has the Apfelstrudel-skills of a Grandma but is far too young ;)).

back from London...

2007-04-05T09:50:00.000+02:00

As some of you might know have we spent the last few days in the capital of the UK, London. We met there with Aaron, Morschi and Tobias for a reunification of Austrian leetness and of course for having a few very nice days with sightseeing, sunbathing and a visit to awesome legged Marlene ;) and her extraordinary nice family. We flew all further to Lund yesterday and now is the time for showing the boys around in Lund and the southern parts of Sweden.

I will report our stay in London next week when we are alone again and I have a little more time then.

Panorama picture from Nuojla

2007-03-23T09:28:00.000+01:00

Hej guys!

After a very busy week I am proud to present you my first real Panorama picture in recent years. It is from the top of Nuojla. By clicking on the picture you get to the orignal (bigger version). Hope you enjoy it. Since the software works pretty nice I will try to make more panorama photos from now on :)

report from Abisko

2007-03-18T10:09:00.000+01:00

Hej guys! We are back in Lund since Wednesday, so it is time for a report from our awesome holiday in Abisko/Lapland. Even though I was really looking forward to this trip it turned out to be far better than expected. Everything went perfect from the beginning on, the flights were in time, we had a great breakfast and our rental car was ready when we arrived. And it was a nice brand new Volvo V50 with only 20km on the speedo.

We were travelling with friends, namely Brice, Marie - both from France and Kristina from Germany. The guy in the middle is Örjan our friendly Swedish host in Abisko

We drove immediately from the airport to Abisko and started to explore the surroundings there. The landscape is magnificent, they have really nice mountains, a huge frozen lake where you can drive with snow scooters and almost 1.5 meters of snow. And even better: They are surrounded by wilderness that starts in front of the house and is just waiting to get explored. One very characteristic image is the following showing "Lappporten" - the gate to Lapland.

landscape on the way to Abisko - the mountains are getting higher and higher as we get closer to Norway.
it had around -25°C during the whole February. However we were more lucky and had temperatures between -10°C and +5°C

a lonely fisherman's hut in front of the frozen Tornetrask

a nightly view from Björkliden over the Tornetraks to Abisko (the few small lights in the background is Abisko city with it's 150 inhabitants. Björkliden is a very nice winter sport village with only 25 people living there through the whole year. Out of those 25 people my father has a friend living there which was of great help when planning the trip. But not only that, she also invited us all to here place for an awesome reindeer-stew(dt.:Eintopf) and a nice dessert. Her house is lying in the middle of nowhere with probably the best view out of the window I have ever seen (and unfortunately we left our cameras in the car...).

But, to return to our activities we did a guided Ice-cave tour at the first night. The most dangerous part was the way up with the scooter were our guide had a little accident and the scooter rolled over. The cave was the narrowest I have seen so far, we had to bend down almost all the way, but it was nevertheless fun!

Annina on her way deeper into the cave, taking advantage of her "size" ;)

The following days were characterized by many different activities like cross-country skiing, a snowshow tour to the hightest peak in the surrounding, a snow-scooter tour into the Abisko-valley and ice-climbing on a frozen waterfall.

For some of us this was the first time on ski :D

equipped with snow shoes on the way on the mountain...

on the top of the mountain :)

and back down. The slope on the other side is off-track but there is a ski-lift going on the top of the mountain and you can easily come back to the start of the ski-lift, so it's just perfect, nothing else. I kicked myself several time for not having my snowboard with me -> but I will be back one day to ride those perfect slopes.

"the girls" trying ice-climbing on the frozen waterfall

Me with a snow scooter driving deep into the magnificent Abisko valley. I have no other explanation than that snow scooters are tools forged by the devil himself. With the crawler you have endless grip even when pushing hard forward, the brakes on the other side are of no use and even though we got the "smallest" one those machine had around 50hp which was far enough to frighten us from time to time. Top speed around 100km/h on a frozen lake no problem to reach that. And it's so much fun, really amazing!

We have also just been walking around on one of the husky-trails where the snow was a little bit compressed. You don't have to walk more than 5 minutes to be in the middle of nowhere. We were really lucky and had such a nice sunset.

Annina making a "Schnee engerl"

But not only was the sunset amazing we were also lucky to have 3 days of northern lights in a row. Amazing!

The most intensive northern lights are unfortunately not on any photo because we have seen them while standing naked in front of the Sauna - brrr. But it was worth it!

But we were not only lucky seeing northern lights, we have also seen a horde of reindeers and four elks. I keep loving those animals more and more. They are huge (up to 2.4m of shoulder high), massive (up to 400 kg), calm (you can get to them up to 10m before the run away) and very beautiful. And even more amazing with their long legs they seem to have no problems to run at a high speed in over 1m deep snow - I have seen one running away from the noise of a snow scooter, it's amazing. In Sweden live about 30% of the world wide elk population which equals to a total amount of 350.000. Since elks do not have natural enemies(except the 60 wolves living in whole Sweden) they have to be hunted which leads to a total of 100.000 shot elks every year and is the reason why we can enjoy elk-steaks here.

An elk running away from our car

One in the wilderness, watching us until we came to close

One of the beautiful Husky's that belonged to our host.

A horde of reindeers in the mountains.

Except from the beautful village of Abisko have we visited two major attractions far away from Abisko: the first one were the beautiful fjords of Norway that I have seen in the summer but not in winter and the second one was the world famous ice-hotel in Kiruna. I will start with Norway here:

After a tipp from my fathers friend we drove to a nice fjord southwest from Narvik. The contrast of snow, ice, mountains and the sea is just amazing. Although the sea is warmed up through the golf-stream snow is lying the beaches.

the mentioned Ejfjorden. I found it amazing that trees are growing even on the steepest parts of the mountain so far up in the north.

A small island with a holiday hut, called "stugga" on it. Almost every Scandinavian family has a "stugga" somewhere on the country side, mainly used for weekends and holidays during the summer.

coast close to Narvik

nice frozen water can be seen almost all along the roads.

And finally (you have almost done it!) a few pictures from the Ice-hotel close to Kiruna. It is rebuilt every year and can be visited roughly between New Year's Eve and the end of April. They use a mix of snow and huge ice blocks that they cut from the local river. Those blocks are massive and weight around 2 tons each. The ice hotel has around 600 rooms and around 50 suits which are all individually designed by different artists and look really, really fancy. The temperature in all the rooms is -5°C but you sleep on reindeer skins with a warm sleeping bag, so I guess it will still be warm enough.

the ice-church in which around 100 couples marry each year. Out of whom around 80% Japanese people ;)

one of the suits

another one with Brice and Marie

The ice-blocks used to built the hotel.

of course do they have an "Absolut icebar" in the hotel. The whole hotel is owned and build by Absolut by the way. the outside of the absolute ice bar

the main hall of the hotel. Fancy, eh?

Well, that was a really long post (took me around 3h with sorting of photos etc.), I hope you all enjoyed it and it at least gives you a good impression of what we experienced so far up in the north. Of course being there is a whole different world. I don't hesitate to say that this was the best trip we did since I am here and that the landscapes up there can hardly be described in words. I am sure I will come back one day but then with a whole lot of sport equipment and more experience to rock the mountains all around. For those who want to see even more photos I can only forward you to Brice's blog that can be found here.

taking off to Kiruna

2007-03-08T13:05:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow in the very morning we start our great journey to Kiruna/Lappland. We take the plain from Malmö to Stockholm and then further to Kiruna which is in the very north of Sweden, approximately 200km north of the polar circle. The time of traveling should be perfect because it is not as cold as it used to be during the arctic night but we still have a chance to see northern lights. The sun is shining for approximately 10-12h per day, which leaves place for outdoor activities. We will stay in Abisko, a small 150 person cottage that lies directly at a huge national park and a nice (frozen) lake called Tornetrask. We will try to do as many activities as possible like cross country skiing, snow-show tours, dog-sledding, snow scooter tours, and of course the visit to nice tourist attractions like the world-famous Icehotel. It's going to be awesome!!!

In other news will I try to keep the blog updated a bit more frequently as in the last time. We both were basically busy with university courses, gym and corridor socializing. Unfortunately is the weather not very pleasing at the moment, we did have more than a single day of sunshine in the last 3 weeks, spring is already on it's way to Sweden and as a result of this it started raining almost all day like it was in autumn :(. So the weather does not really allow so much outdoor activity as I would like to do which limits the weekend activities. But nevertheless the Swedes say that the spring is normally sunny and nice with mild weather so I am really looking forward to it although we are diving deep into the winter for the next week :)

I will write a report of our journey to the north at the end of next week when we are back :)

Do give you a better impression how far we are north I took a screen shot from Google-Earth and marked both Lund and Abisko.

Oscar-night

2007-02-26T09:06:00.000+01:00

The Oscar nights are over. The only thing I would like to mention about it is that Forest Whitaker won an oscar for the best actor. He is a rather unknown actor that I like a lot. Therefore congratulations to him!

Person Wanted!

2007-02-21T08:54:00.000+01:00

PERSON WANTED

Does anybody know someone, that is flying to awesome Kiruna in 2 weeks. A place where real winter can be found, with currently -22 °C and 1m of snow. Those one will then borrow a NICE Volvo V50 equipped with spike-tires for a few days to cruise through the magical landscape of Kiruna to the even more beautiful national park of Abisko that is lying on the frozen Tornetrask lake. Those will then explore the amazing ice-caves that are located there, try snow-shoe tours, crosscountry skiing, snow-scooter driving (without spikes this time, yeha!) and maybe dog-sledding. Other plans of the searched person are ice-fishing on the frozen Tornetraks, northern-light watching during the night, Sauna followed by battles in the snow or a jump into the Tornetrask if the smash a hole in the ice. Further plans should be a trip to the amazing landscapes of Norway with a visit of some of the Fjords in winter-time and of course a visit to the world-known ice-hotel. If you know this cute person, please contact me as soon as possible :D

why dietary products kill you and I am still alive

2007-02-21T08:34:00.000+01:00

... I am not an expert, that's why I forward the interested reader to a nice article. It somehow fits into many things I have heard in the last time from Annina, Aaron and others that have obviously more knowledge about food and health than me. I am a lucky bastard that just tries to do enough sport, eat normal stuff and normal amounts and this since ever and it somehow works that I don't get fat :).

Another interesting article can be seen as one part of the explanation why we have so few snow this winter. It was published on the same blog and can be found here.

don't buy cheap locks!

2007-02-16T13:40:00.000+01:00

After Annina's bike lock caused some problems during the last month, because it was often almost impossible to open it she finally twisted the key in the lock last week.

Since we did not have the second key here and she needed her bike I decided to do my best do crack the lock. First I was everything else than sure that I can crack it but finally it was a matter of a few minutes with my normal side cutter(!). First you cut the plastic cover away and then you have the steel wire with it's many fibers. You can easily cut a few of them each time with a normal side-cutter. I war really surprised how easy it is to crack a "normal" lock. With a better equipment like a bolt cutter or something similar with a longer lever (Hebel) you can cut such a lock within seconds.

Conclusion: A lock like this does not prevent any thief, except a drunk donkey. I would really like to know how hard a better lock like mine is to crack. Or maybe I prefer not to know :/ ?

little update to life

2007-02-12T14:20:00.000+01:00

Hej!

It has been a while since my last entry, mainly because there is not so much to report right now. Annina and I are both more or less busy with studying, sport and socializing on our corridor. My courses this term are quite interesting, I have one course where I work as a coach for a programming team of second year students which is very interesting and from whom I benefit quite a lot. Another course that I take this term is called "Intellectual property right", "Urheberrecht" in German. It deals about all the fields of IPR, like patent right, trademarks, Copyright and design. Although it is a law course it is still very interesting with a very nice and motivating lecturer.
Social life is nice as well, we had an excellent Lasagna yesterday with me as chef de cuisine. Annina and Davide from Italy helped me to prepare the probably best Lasagna I ever made. The difference to all the Lasagna we made in "The kongelige WG" was mainly that we used Barilla-Pasta instead of normal one which is a lot "softer".
The life on our corridor is getting better and better, we are starting to grow together. Although it is winter and cold I would like to do some traveling soon. Lapland is only one month away, we will meet soon to discuss everything a little bit more in detail.

IT-job chances

2007-02-06T09:20:00.000+01:00

A (for me) very interesting article from heise.de about the job-market in the IT-industry can be found here. Although the article is for Germany(and in German - sorry for that) it will be roughly the same for Austria. Seems like the future looks good to me :)

going to the gym

2007-02-01T10:36:00.000+01:00

Since we missed it last term Annina and I started our work-out in the local fitness center three weeks ago. It is the biggest gym I have ever seen, very well equipped, very, very cheap(~15 Euro/month) since it is run by the university mainly for students and university staff. They offer tons of aerobic, yoga, boxing and spinning courses. But so far we stick to the gym, we got a nice trainings plan that let's me feel muscles I did not know that I have :D

But the funniest thing are the people training there. You find everything there from "oberkörpermenschen" to slim endurance-freaks to Arnold Schwarzenegger-style guys, athletes, vain("eitel") metro sexual guys that stand in front of the mirror for half of the time, scruffy("gammlig") looking people that don't care about their outfit, bunnies that just come to look at their boyfriends, grandmothers, professors, pregnant woman, woman with their babies and finally those who I am most afraid of: woman that are more man than I will ever be. They remember me of ancient vikings who could squash me with only one hand while lifting 200kg with the other and navigating their long ships through an ice-storm :)

sometimes I hate computers...

2007-01-29T14:42:00.000+01:00

... today was a good example. I used open-office to write a short assignment. The text was in English the spell checker always suggested my German words. So no problem just switch the language! Well, it might seem this way but it actually was not. I messed around like 1h trying to solve the problem in the menu-jungle of open-office. I turned around 25 different options language options to English and still no result. AHHH! The one option I found that would solve my problem just switched back to German every time I changed the language. Even uninstalling my current version and reinstalling a new English version did not solve the problem. Sometimes computers are a miracle, even to a computer science students...

winter is here

2007-01-26T14:29:00.000+01:00

Since a few days we do have winter weather in Lund. It started with the first snow in this year a few days ago. Since that it was melting a bit but there was also some new snow that arrived, so we have around 5cm of snow. Although we have no mountains is it still very beautiful. Especially the weather is amazing throughout the last few days. We had almost one week of sunny, almost cloud free weather. Even the nights are clear and so the temperatures dropped down quite a bit. Two days ago we had the coldest day since we are here: -8°C. Feels almost like winter. The air is so clear and fresh it's really amazing.
Although the snow on the bicycle ways is quite dangerous because everything is covered with ice. So I have to drive very, very carefully. But in any case does my new headlamp do a good job, it makes cycling a lot easier and I suddenly see where I am driving and how the road-conditions are :).

impotent hamburgers

2007-01-22T20:36:00.001+01:00

Having a great Hamburger is a pleasant thing per definition. Well you only need some meat, vegetables a good sauce and well bread. Well so I was a bit worried when I bought a 4-pack of hamburger-bread that it would get foul before I could it eat. So thats why I checked the expiration date after the first two burgers today. Well, what should I say?

THE FUCKING BREAD IS GOOD UNTIL THE 14.7.2007

When I read this I first had to laugh, especially since they say it is without preservatives. What the hell are they doing with their bread. I stopped laughing at the point where I remembered the headline of a Swedish newspaper I had seen exactly at the day when I bought the hamburger-bread: "Food that makes you impotent". What else except "ois nur a tropfen aufn heißen Stoa" should I say? :D

Love you :P

another post about climate changes

2007-01-20T16:47:00.000+01:00

A very interesting article about the costs of climate change: Read here

open your eyes

2007-01-13T18:00:00.000+01:00

This post is one I had in mind for quite a while.

What could be a better day to talk about climatic changes than a day in the middle of January where it has 16° in Austria? What the hell is wrong with the weather? I hope a lot of people are asking those questions since I can't remember a single time in my life where the climatic changes have been more obvious than this winter.

I don't wanna write too much on my own here. I am not an expert and I should leave this field to those who spend their life exploring the coherences. The only advice I can give every reader from here is to watch the following movie: "An inconvenient truth" by Al Gore. It is the best documentation about climatic changes I have ever seen. It is scientific but still simple kept understandable. And it covers a variety of topics that I haven't seen in one film so far. If not now, when else should you watch it?

Do it!

NOW!

a visit to system bolaget

2007-01-10T20:16:00.000+01:00

What happened after my first visit at the local "System bolaget", the only shop in Sweden where you can buy alcohol above 3.5% can be seen below :)

nice isn't it?

btw: I like the ice-bear logo :)

back in Sweden with a stay in Copenhagen

2007-01-09T18:17:00.000+01:00

After two marvelous weeks in Austria where we meet a lot of friends and relatives we are finally back in Lund/Sweden. The stay at home was a very nice and "necessary" refreshment of friendship and relations. It left me with a happy smile to see that everything is as it should be even if we are not here. Of course some things changed while we were in Sweden but those are more or less details.
We left Graz at 5h in the morning with direction Bratislava/Slovakia where our flight left to Copenhagen. Thanks to Annina's parents who drove us to Bratislava we had a very nice journey and could spend our last evening in Austria in "the kongelige WG". After our arrival in Copenhagen we very surprised how cheap the ticket to the city was and how close our hotel was to the station. Considering all the luggage we had was it maybe the best choice we could make. It was the first time for me and Annina ever that we were sleeping in a Hotel that we paid ourself, normally we tend to chose camping places or youth hostels for our stay. But since there is only one youth hostel in Copenhagen which was more expensive than the hotel we booked it was an easy choice. We can really recommend the Hotel Saga, especially the breakfast buffet was super awesome.
A second stay at a place is always a lot different than the first one. We already had a good orientation inside the city and we did not "have to see" the main attractions again. So we mainly enjoyed the atmosphere in Copenhagen. The city center is quite small and almost 100% pedestrian area which makes it very nice for shopping. And that's what we did :). Since there was a huge sale in almost every shop we had the opportunity to get really nice affordable clothes. Annina bought new shirts, black SEXY boots(yehaa Alex!), lingerie, a belt, ear rings and I got at least 2 shirts. The shopping zone in Copenhagen is really amazing you can buy Levis, G-Star, Diesel, Wrangler jeans from only 12 Euro upwards if you have a bit unusually proportions. Aside from shopping we visited the Guinness Museum of records (unfortunately no beer this time) which was odd.
The museum covers a lot of world records ranging from cows that weight 2.3 tons and produce 120 liter of milk a day to humans with 4.2m long hairs, jumping up to 8.9m, eating airplanes and bicycles(!), and a baby weighting 10kg when it was born. In other news: Russians drink an average of 18l Vodka per year, Czechs a average of 157l(not pints!) beer/year but the Luxembourger beat every country by drinking an average of 12.6l 100% alcohol per year. Argentinians eat an average of 56kg of beef (steak for breakfast, yeha!!) per year, Greeks eat 27kg of cheese and the Swedes drink 6.3kg of coffee every year.
One of the most sickest records I have ever seen:

Except from this museum we visited two other museums: the museum Erotica and the Danish design museum. The first one was an exhibition of the history of sex and erotic pictures from the antic ages until now. Very interesting but not as spectacular as 40 years ago, when it opened. The design museum was very interesting with a car exhibition that would have caused some friends I have to forget their girl-friends ;).

In other news are we back in Lund since Saturday night. Currently our corridor is silent as never before because almost all the room are empty but this will change dramatically tomorrow when the "new ones" arrive. We are really looking forward to this! I already started to work a bit for university. Apart from that we do enjoy our life here, cook great meals every day and start running again. Tomorrow we will buy a 6 months membership in the local gym to reactivate our vanishing climbing-muscles.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-24T11:00:00.000+01:00

We wish all our blog-readers from near and far a Merry Christmas! I hope you enjoy the gathering with your families, friends or whoever else you celebrate with.

yes, yes yes and YES!

2006-12-16T15:21:00.000+01:00

Jojojo!

Finally after a billion busy hours in the last 1 1/2 week I have holidays! YES ! I just had a great meal drank my first beer for today (for sure not the last) and listen "Sleeping with ghosts" from Placebo while writing this entry! Could it be better? Possibly not!

Right now I would really like to turn on "ultra slow motion". It is just way too much happening right now. Last week we moved, I had a presentation, a few papers to write, this week I mainly learned for my exams. Yesterday 8.00 h was my funny Swedish exam located in a cosy 23432434 m2 huge gym hall ;). But I think I scored pretty well. Today I had my graphics-exam. As far as I can assume from now did I past both test for sure. Which means my first term is already over and I have holidays until in about the 7th of January which is super-dupa awesome. I can't believe it but we are leaving for Oslo tomorrow, coming back on Tuesday, then one afternoon of crying because Alex and a lot of other people are leaving on this day, then one day left in Lund and then we are back in Österrike, Austria, Österreich, Autrice or however this beautiful country is called. And I am really happy to see all of you so soon again!

short update

2006-12-08T21:42:00.000+01:00

Hej!

We finally moved into our new room in St. Lars. After a very quick packing/putting all stuff into our car/bringing it up to our new room and unpacking it action we finally arrived. Our new room is very nice and we already have a cosy atmosphere. After 5 months of having only single-beds we finally have a very nice "double bed" again. We just moved our two beds together but since they have no ceiling it's no problem. The room is a bit more than 20sqm, each of us has our own small desk and a nice rack. The internet is working better than expected and there is a lot of social life going on. The only drawback is that most of the guys are going home after this term and only few are staying but this also means that a lot of new people will come here which is good as well.

The others are out right now at a nation but I am to tired and stayed at home. The whole week was full with a lot of work for all my courses, moving and some travel planning. But my courses are coming to an end very soon, the only thing left are two exams on Friday and Saturday next week, one homework and two reports I have to write. So far I am very satisfied with all the things I have learned and optimistic to pass both of my exams. One is my Swedish exam and the other one is for my graphics course. I can't believe how fast the time is going over. And it seems to be almost unreal to be back in Austria in 2 weeks. 2 weeks, crazy! This means that we have been here for 16 weeks so far. I really hope for snow during Christmas to go snowboarding on the amazing, beautiful mountains I miss so much here in the flat granary (Kornkammer) of Sweden. So see you soon :)

going sambo...

2006-12-06T13:20:00.000+01:00

Hej!

Time has come for another change in our lifes. Annina and I are moving to another dormitory today. It will be the crazy mind-breaking dormitory of St Lars. Those with a good memory will notice that this was the place of the crazy Halloween party that was stopped by the police, the pirates party and some other smaller party's as well. In contrast to our current corridors will is it an international corridor with two floors of 20 students each.

We will share a double room over there which means we are sambo :). That's the Swedish word for a couple that lives together but is not married. The room is bigger than a normal room although it is not huge, but it's enough for us two. The biggest advantage is maybe that each of us has a normal bed and we don't have to sleep on the floor any more ;). That kind of sucked! Another advantage is that it is a lot cheaper since no one wants to share a double room with a stranger. But of course it also has some disadvantages: it's a lot longer to university for me (15-20 minutes instead of 5), the internet SUCKS ASS (going from 100MBit/sec to less than 50KByte/sec???) and I lose my friend Brice as a corridor neighbor.

But it was our decision to move there, so I won't complain and I am really looking forward to this, I am sure it will be a great time and we will get to know a lot of new people and that's maybe the most important thing.

Another random note is that we have too much stuff. Our car is more or less full, so we have to get as much stuff back home as possible or we will have to throw away a lot of things next year. I don't want to do this! If have a car as big as ours you just get allured to take as much stuff with you as possible. Of course it is good because you don't have to buy so much at the beginning but on the other side does it prevent you from reducing your life to what is really essential.

photos will follow as soon as I have found my camera in all my stuff :)

Jul i Lund

2006-12-03T16:34:00.000+01:00

Today is the first Sunday of advent. This is a big event here in Lund. All shops are open, everybody is out on the street and there is a big Christmasmarket in the Kulturen, which is a open-air museum and shows old Swedish houses and how Swedish people lived in the past.
Allthough it had +8°C, it felt like Christmas. There were people singing and playing old instruments, the whole Kulturen smelled like cinnamon and Glögg and I was able to look at really beautiful handcrafts. I tried some differnt jams and non-alcoholic Glöggs. I also tried Sill which is herring in a really delicious sauce and is a traditional Christmas meal here in Skåne. I just want to show some of my impressions:

time is an illusion

2006-11-30T12:25:00.000+01:00

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.

I've got a B+!

2006-11-27T11:45:00.000+01:00

As I had my written exame on Wednesday and my oral exame on Thirsday for that reason I did party the whole weekend. I had no time and no motivation to blog something about it, but now I wanna report about my exame and my first farewell party I had here in Lund.
The exame:
All our teachers told us during the course that the exame wouldn't be that hard. They said that we just should be in the lectures, maybe learn a bit during the week but enjoy the weekends. So nobody was afraid of this exame and we all started to learn just in the last week of our course, which is late for medical students. When we all went to the written exame we found out that it was not that easy. We had four hours time for 14 cases. In every case a patient was discribed and we had to say what we wanna examine next, what are the possible diagnosis, how to treat the patient and we also had to answer some theoretical questions about pathophysiology. I didn't know if I wrote the things they wanted to hear!
I learned no more after the written exame, I was really relaxed because I thought the oral exame would just be a nice chat. So I went to the hospital of Malmö next day at 5 p.m. without being nervous. Now I know that I should have been nervous. Two teachers asked two students at the same time stupid questions in a small room. Me and Violetta were the last ones to examine and our exame started at 8 p.m. I really hate to wate, I was tired, hungry and very unconcentrated and they asked really stupid questions were you had a fifthy-fifthy chance to guess right.
I was not good at guessing! But my written exame was really good, for that reason I a B+ on the total course which is the second best mark. By the way I've forgotten to mention that I got 18ECTS points for the couse, that is enough for me to get my money from Erasmus for the whole semester.
Afterwards we had dinner with a three dishes meny in a really good restaurant. I had elk (moose) and it was really good and tasty. The hospital payed for the whole dinner! Amazing!
We also got Lund University T-shirts as presents, we didn't expect such a thing. After this hard exame this was really nice!
On Friday we just went to a Nation and teached our French friends the Austrian bad word Oa(r)schloch. It was great fun!
As on Sunday the first people from my course went back home we had a farewell party on Saturday. We had a great evening: First we backed pizza together and celebratet Violetta's and Francesco's birthday in the meantime. Afterwards we started to write in address and memory books and we had also white Lund University T-shirt to print on with textile-pens. I really love my T-shirt, it looks great and I've got lots nice messages written on it. We wrote and chatted till late in the night because we didn't want to say good bye and go home!
Yesterday I had again a nice evening with my friends. Me and Felix went to St:Lars' dormitory for meeting people and chatting.
I didn't go to bed the last four days before 1 o'clock in the night! I am really tired now.
But that's the crazy student life here in Lund!

Dublin reloaded

2006-11-26T16:21:00.000+01:00

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

2006-11-23T00:37:00.000+01:00

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!

Without Felix

2006-11-19T20:56:00.000+01:00

As nothing really exciting happens in my life right now, just a short note:

What a girl should do when her boyfriend is in another country:
1. Going out every day
2. Have a drink with some friends
3. Flirt with guys from all over the world
4. Tell them that you allready have a boyfriend
5. Look at their stupid faces afterwards
6. Have another drink with your friends and laugh about what just happend
7. Start again with point 3
But I have to learn for my big exame on Wednesday and I have to stay at home to learn a lot and I have to try to be in bed early to continue learning on the next day. Poor me!

p.s.: I was out on Friday with three other girls from my medical course and it was quite fun.

Dublin, first update :)

2006-11-18T15:11:00.000+01:00

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....

2006-11-15T19:43:00.000+01:00

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

2006-11-14T09:32:00.000+01:00

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!

International Medical Stundents' Trip

2006-11-09T16:32:00.000+01:00

On Sunday I made a very special trip which was organised from my course leader Prof. Bengt Jeppsson. He invited all students from my surgery course to do some sightseeing on the east kost. We went first to Ales Stenar where Felix and me also were in the very beginning of our stay here in Sweden. Afterwards we all were invited in a fine fish restaurang. We travelled further on to see some archiological places. There we found rockpaintings from the Bronze age. But the nicest stop on our trip was at Bengt's holiday house which as an oldfisher house located in a little village by the sea.

Helloween

2006-11-09T15:30:00.000+01:00

I want to report about the Helloween party in St. Lars which is a dormitory for international students. The party took place last friday. Yes, I know I am allways a little bit too late.

Facts about the party:
private party
everybody brought his or her drinks self
DJ organized from people living in the dormitory
about 300 people, nearly everybody dressed up as zombie, witch etc.

Felix and me know lots people that live in St. Lars, for that reason we could enter also some private rooms not only the common rooms of the dormitory. It was a really amazing party but there were too many people.

Felix and Alex

The girls

Anna (medical student from Finnland) and the death

?

???

Felix, Bernhard and his girlfriend at the little Austrian party in the laundry room

Somebody was so stupid to put the party in an internet platform from the university, there were too many people and it was too loud altough the dormitory is far away from other houses. Guess what happend?
Sure, the police came! Two people were even arrested. (Für alle deutschsprachigen: Sie verbrachten eine Nacht hinter schwedischen Gardinen ;) ) The police arrested one guy from Ireland who use the fire drencher and distroyed things and one Italien guy who was dressed up like a transvestite and dried to "flirt" with the nice looking, blond and of course female police officer.
This was definitifly not the nicest end of a party, but that's student life live in Lund.

one of the greatest achievments of humanity...

2006-11-08T10:42:00.000+01:00

....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

2006-11-07T15:24:00.000+01:00

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 ;)

Göteborg, Part 2

2006-11-03T15:24:00.000+01:00

We're both too lazy to write a real report about our Göteborg trip. We went their with four friends by our car.
The first day 28/10 was really rainy. You couldn't tell if a street was a really a street or if it was a river. Just to give you a little impression. So we decided to go in a museum called Universeum were you can see a model of a tropical rain forrest, underwater animals and so on. The special discipline of this museums are dangerous animals which was very cool. I was fascinated of snake, sharksand spider since a was a little child.
In the evening we went to a beer pub with 2000 different beers.
On sunday we had beautiful but cold weather. First we visited the history museum and afterwards we just walked around in the city center. Göteborg must be a nice city to live at and if you have enough money to spend it is also a excellent city for shopping.
But anyways I want to let the pictures tell their own stories:

wahahah - SNOW :)

2006-11-01T10:33:00.000+01:00

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.

passed my first exam :)

2006-10-31T16:45:00.000+01:00

Yeha!

I just got my mark from my first exam (the mobile graphics course). I have 3.4 out of 6 possible points which means I am positive. Mainly, I am happy that I passed because the exam was quite hard and 2/3 of the students did not pass. But I am not sure if this number is of any value since I don't know if they count the students that did not finish the assignments (they were a precondition to be able to take the exam) or just those who actually did the test. If you look just at the positive students I am still in about in the average.

As usual I am not 100% satisfied, since there are still 2.6 points more to get but I gave my best and learned a lot and that's what really matters :)

Göteborg

2006-10-30T17:54:00.000+01:00

Since I am lazy bastard, too foul to write an own report from our awesome weekend in Göteborg I just forward the interested reader to a blog-entry from my Canadian friend Alex and post a few more details in the upcoming days.

Alex's blog can be found here

everyday's extremes

2006-10-25T11:05:00.000+02:00

Since both of us have bought a new, warmer sleeping bag last week we decided that we have to test them better sooner than later. So how to do that when both of us have university on the next and we have to get up at 6.30(Annina) and 7.00(me)? So time for sleeping in our tent.
The obivious(but maybe crazy) solution is inspired by a film we have seen at the "Banff mountain film festival" 3 weeks ago: Everyday's extremes. This means grap your sleeping pad, put it on the floor in your room, put your sleeping pad on it, open all windows as wide as possible, feel the cold air coming in and creep into your sleeping bag. Voila, as the French in me says (i am sure there are more misspellings in it than letters - but who cares ;)). The first thing we realized: It was to warm to keep the sleeping bags closed, mine has a comfort temperature up too -10 degree. We had decent mild weather the last days so temperature reached about 15 degrees during the day and no less than 10 degrees during the night. But in a room, even if you open all windows it never get's that cold.
So we opened our zippers at the foot-side and then it was quite comfortable. The only drawback were the karaoke singing, partying neighbours that let me think about big side cutters able to cut even the main electric power cable.

*UPDATE*
For those who haven't registered so far, I updated the link-list and added some awesome flags that indicate the language the blogs are written. I added all the blogs I know so far but if someone is missing, send me a message or post a comment, then I will add him/her.

the joy of hiking again

2006-10-21T17:08:00.000+02:00

Since I was quite busy for the whole week I will summarize the last one and a half week briefly.
Last weekend we did another hiking trip - again to Söderasens national park - to enjoy the nice(sunny!) weather and get our rusty body moving. This time Brice(France) and Hermann(Soizbuag) joined us. We had a marvelous time sitting around the fire, drinking some wine and having a nice conversations with a Swedish family while improving our understanding of the Swedish society. The night was again very clear and therefore also very cold, so we where happy to have the fire(and the fire-wood being supported by the local authority - god bless the welfare state ;)). It was also the first time we could test our tent in action and I am still getting more and more enthusiastic about it - every detail is at the right place!
The thing I knew after the first night outside with such temperatures (around 5°C) was that I need a better sleeping bag since I was freezing a bit although I wore my thick fleece-pullover and my hood. The once I have right now is from my father and quite good as long as it's warm enough. The temperature range is comfort 20°C, transitional -5°C and extreme -10°C but no way to use it at such temperatures. Maybe it's because it's already a few years old and the down has lost some of it's warming capabilities, maybe it's because it has been compressed all the time, which is not good for sleeping bags, maybe it's just because it's old.
Anyway, today I bought a new sleeping bag in Malmö which has it's comfort temperature at -9°C and should therefore have some reserves left for real cold nights :). It is a "Marmot Wave 4" and was only 75 euro (special price - seasonal sale). Annina bought also a warm sleeping bag, but a special short one - 1,6m ;).

Since I am not only having party up here but studying at the university I also have exams and the first one was yesterday. It was a quite hard one, but more on that tomorrow.

As usual some photos from our trip last weekend:

hermann to the left

and finally Brice. Most photos are stolen from Brice. If you speak french than you can also check out his side (with a report written in French) here

autumn is definitely here

2006-10-16T07:25:00.000+02:00

After talking about the coming autumn for a long time it has finally arrived. There is no way around stating this. The air got colder, the sun is rapidly loosing it's power, (if she is shining) and is not much more than a lukewarm spot on the sky. The heat radiated by the sun can be immediately blown away by a puff(ger: leichter Windstoss), and the cold catches you again. The average temperature during the day is about 10 to 12 degree and during the night temperatures drop down between 5 and 8 degree. Today it is the first day that I woke up as early as Annina (which means 6.30, ahhh!) and I suddenly realised that it is completely dark outside. Now its 7.30 and the sun starts raising slowly, although it is foggy and you can't see that much. Hoarfrost(ger: Raureif) is on the roof of the houses and I am happy that I can stay at home in my room and don't have to go outside. I hope they will turn on the heaters soon since it is getting quite cold in my room. I have an exam on Friday so I will continue learning and sum up the weekend later on. So enjoy the weather at home!

Är det ockso höst i österrike?

update to/for life

2006-10-12T00:26:00.000+02:00

hejhej!

Almost 10 days have past by since my last blog entry and it is definitely time for a update! I was kicking-ass in the last week to finish my mobile-game together with Alex (-> Check his site out here). Deadline was this Tuesday at lunch and since we spent quite a while during the last week to work on the project we were able to finish it in time thought - like always - there was a lot of stuff we wanted to implement but had no time for it. I will post a separate blog-entry about our game with some screenshots and the jar-file that you can actually play it. The graphics were not that good compared to the others but still it is quite addicting to play. But no I am coming to other things (which might be more interesting for you...)

As most of you won't know so far I have booked a flight to Dublin in November. My friend(and crazy asskicking lecture-mate too) Brice is coming with me. The booking was a really funny thing. Sometimes if I have time in the evening I read some Swedish online newspaper for the sake of improving my Swedish. One evening I checked out a Swedish newspaper at about 23.45 and instantly my attention was raised by a big Ryanair-special-offer article. I skimmed trough the article and found out that at this day Ryanair had a special offer running till 24h. So 15 minutes left. After that I immediately checked out the the ryanair-webpage to check for the real prices and found out that they fly from Malmö to Dublin or to London for only 20 Euro both ways including taxes. So no opportunity to miss! I just jumped off my chair and ran to the next door were Brice is living, knocked and fortunetly he was still awake.

F: "Wanna come to Dublin with me? Ryanair has a special offer"
B: "äääääh, when???"
F: "what about in the middle of November? "
B: "Hmm, sounds good, how much is the flight"
F: "only 20 Euro"
B: "wow, so let's do this ;)"

So after that about 7 minutes left until 0.00h
booking a flight in 7 minutes is not that easy, especially if you have to enter in all the payment details (for example credit card number - quite long and you have to double check them), addresses and whatever else. But we finally made it until 23.59. YESSS! The flight is at 16. Nov(Th.) until 21. Nov(Tue), so quite a long time for sightseeing and enjoying Guiness, Kilkenny and lot's of other good beer :D. Unfortunately Annina has no time to come with us because she has a big exam the day after we come back. I hope I won't have any important assignments to miss, but since we booked quite early in advance we should be able to prepare things in advance or do them after we are back. At this point I am just hoping for the thoughtfulness of our lecturers.

Before we booked I thought about going to London to visit Marlene and to some other sightseeing but considering the fact that I already was there a few years ago and already planned to go there in the spring or early summer maybe with "le kongelige Wg" and Annina i finally decided that it's just to early and I won't get to Dublin that fast again. Anyway I am looking forward to this, it will just be awesome!

Another good thing is that finally my personal birthday-present has arrived. It is slim and light but still has the curves at it's right place. It is very cosy inside it since it is not to tight but also not too wide. And in contrast to most other things in life it is very stable and also can withstand some storms as they might happen in life. What is it?

Look here to find out!

As I guess, most of you were already expecting, it is an awesome, cute, shiny(!!!) tent by the famous Swedish tent-maker Hilleberg. They produce nothing less but the most outstanding combination of durability, extreme light weight, quality, quality, quality and not to forget to mention: a lot of clever details. AND: only 2.4 kg including tent pegs and the rods.

Check out their webpage, surf to products/tents/nallo to find out more about those cute thing. The more experienced campers may know Hilleberg and it's outstanding reputation and may ask how I can afford such a tent. Normally it costs about 600 Euro (for a fucking tent!!!), but I got this via ebay from a german outdoor-shop who sold the last year-model for only 386 Euro. Lucky me, that Hilleberg has changed some details. You may ask -> 386 Euro for a fucking tent? omg! haha, you are right :D. But anyway, I talked to Aaron and Annina before buying it and we agreed that we will make a lot of cool outdoor stuff during the next years and we definitely need a tent that can withstand even harsh weather conditions (like in Sweden, for example...) and that is 100% reliable and light enough to carry it with us wherever we go. So we ended up buying it together which makes it affordable for each of us. And its so awesome! Thanks so much to Aaron and Annina, love you ;)

I will stop now, otherwise I have no cool other things to tell in the next days (even if there would be many other cool things to tell!) *evil laugh*

Weekend trip: Kristianstad, Åhus, Karlskrona, Glasriket

2006-10-08T13:51:00.000+02:00

This week I had university just on Wednesday and Friday. So we made a trip including Saturday, Sonday and Monday last weekend.
Our first stop was Kristianstad [Chrischansta]. It is lokated in the west of Skåne. Kristianstad is a renaissance city. But I don't think that the architecture is the nicest thing about this city. They have a nice park and a lake were you can rent kanus. And Kristianstad is very nice for shoping. Although it has just abou 40 000 inhabitants it has a big precinct (Fußgängerzone) with very nice shops. It was a Lång Lördag. The last Saturday in the month the shops have open longer. So it was very crowed. I bought myself a nice pair of shoes.
In the evening we went to Åhus. That's the town where the absolut vodka come from. But you cannot visit the factory. That's a pity. Anyways the town is very nice and rich. People have two expensive cars in front of their villas minimum. The harbour is beautiful too. At the harbour there one expensive restaurang and one club.

This is the Absolut Vodka factory. People call it the Vodka Kyrka (vodka church). The real church of the city has the same stile of architecture.
South of Åhus is a nature reservation. You can watch birds there or just enjoy to beach like we did. We had a camping dinner with fine Austrian vine directly on the beach. We stayed there also for the night. We had a real nice evening!

On Sunday we went to Karlshamn. On our way we made a stop at a very famous lax river. It is the wrong season to fish lax now. But the river and the fishingstation were beautiful. I think Felix will try to catch some lax there in April. I hope he'll find somebody who'll show him how to do.
Karlkrona is lokated direktly by the sea. It has a real ly nice Skärgården. That are little islands formed by the ice age. We were at the Marine Museet to. It has free entry and you can learn a lot about seafaring in former times.
In the evening we went to a beautiful lake near the Glasriket. We met some guys from Gemany. They were fishing there and left about 9 p.m. In the next morning me and Felix took a bath in this lake. It was very cold, but we feld fresh and awake afterwards.
In the Glasriket you can have a close look at the glas production. You just go into the manufractures and look how people work there. It is very interresting. Glas is a realy grazy material. If it is very hot it is soft like honey, a little bt colder it is just glowing and cold it is really hard. You can pay the products in factory shops. The Scandinavian Design is great! But the things are too expensive for students.
It was a great weekend. I hope we'll make a trip like this again.
Byebye Annina

Lisl, es war sehr schön

2006-10-06T10:41:00.000+02:00

Weil ichs grad im Standard gelesen hab: "Gehrer zieht sich aus Politik zurück". Kommt mir grad vor wie Weihnachten und Ostern zammen, deswegen auch auf Deutsch.

Swedish Ambulance

2006-10-06T10:20:00.000+02:00

On Wednesday I stayed a whole day at the ambulance headquarters in Malmö. There are no volunteers at the swedish ambulance. I drove in a car with two male emergency nurses. It was really great to see the differences between Austria and Sweden.
In Malmö they have Mercedes Sprinters as ambulance cars. They have much more space inside than our ambulance cars. Have you seen an Ivan before? It is a machine that does the cardiac massage for you.
But what was my day like?
I started at 7 a.m. The morning was very calm, we just brought old people to the hospital. We had time to eat breakfast together. I didn't know that Malmö is a poor city compering to the rest of Sweden. There are areas where just foreigners live and many old and rotten looking houses. We went to times with blue lights to an emergency. But these were wrong alarms.
In the early afternoon we had time to drink a coffee at the Turning Torso. That's Malmö's only skycraper. People from Malmö are very proud of this building. It's quite new and lokated directly on the seaside, you can look at the Öresund bridge.
But at 5.25 p.m. happened something crazy. All people in the ambulance just waited for goiing home. Our car got a call. We got a real emergency. An old man with a septic schock. It was really hard to do my work correctly. Everybody was busy. I had to take care of the bleeding that was caused by our intravenous tube. I had to hold things and put things out of our emergency bag. They all talked Swedish with me and sometimes I didn't know what to do. But I think it worked quite good. We came to the headquarters again at 6.30 p.m. It was a real long day for me.
In the evening I had an international dinner with my 10 colleques from my international surgery course. I ate dried hard fish from Iceland, pink soup from Lithonia, Pasta from Italia, some kind of noodles with cheese from Slovakia and a cake from Finnland. It was so great. I loved it. Afterwards we went to Smalands Nation. It's the left wing nation here in Lund. I like it! All people are open minded there and the music is nice. Not that usual main stream stuff.
I hope I'll find time soon to make a report over our last weekend trip.

Austrian pubs in Sweden

2006-10-02T23:56:00.000+02:00

I had a very cosy and interresting pub-evening with Hermann in an so called "Austrian-Pub". They call it this way because... hmmm... , ähhhh...., hmmm.....I really don't know why it is an Austrian Pub! They have the austrian flag, but you can't order a beer in "österreichisch" and they don't even have austrian beer. No way, they only sell german beers. So I guess it is just a marketing gag, allthough the pub itself is very nice (but the beer is too expensive, as in the rest of Sweden). Tonight I found out, that after 2 months of only lättöl (ligth beer, maximum 3.5%) I am a little bit drunk after 2 "normal" beer :). This sucks, but is a little bit of fun too and of course better for your purse. So anyway, good night and nice dreams too all of you, I have to go to bed now to be fit for classes tomorrow :)

Skanes Djurpark

2006-10-02T21:42:00.000+02:00

Better late than never!
We made a trip to Skanes Djurpark saturday the 23th of September. This park is a zoo with northern animals only! It's just about 40 kilometers away from lund, near the town Höör. We started our round trip about 12. It was a really nice walk and the animals were amazing! You have nice picknick places there too. The Swedish people made BBQ for their whole family at the fireplaces. You could rent a trolley at the entrance. And most families did so, they needed to do for carriing all their stuff. It looked crazy. Allthroug it was a sunny and very nice day you could find some silent places too in the zoo area. It is lokated direktly on a lake. Very beautiflul surrounding.
Now, have a look at the amazing animals yourself:In the evening we went to the Bosjökloster! Which is lokated at a big lake.
The normal entry is 75 sek. We just wanted to see the park with its thousand years old oak. We asked if that was possible. We payed 25 sek eachand we had a nice walk through the park. Afterwards we cooked at the parking space in front of the Kloster.
In the night went into the park again. It wasn't locked! We saw thousands and thousands of stars and three falling stars. It was so wonderful! We also stayed there for the night. Our camping car is so great. It was very nice to have a big bed together. The beds in our rooms are not very comfortable. I hope that you will be soon able to read about our current weekend trip.
Best regards Annina

24

2006-09-26T22:08:00.000+02:00

woo.

...as my friend alex used to say. 24 is exceptionally not the name of the famous tv-series but my new age. Yesterday we had a very nice and cosy birthday lunch with about 15 people from Austria, Spain, France, Sweden, Canada and Germany here. Annina was a great housewife (she will kill me, hehe) and girlfriend and prepared an excellent applecake and a fantastic blueberry-tart.

Thank you all for the calls, packages, postcards, greeting cards, GruXkarte(danke Uschi!), icq-messages or whatever. It's very nice to have the feeling someone thinks of you, even if you are 1500km away!

The last week we had awesome weather. It was sunny and warm every day and it seems to last for this week too. Unfortunately I did not have too much time for enjoying the sun, since I am pretty busy during the week by doing my work for university. Since I haven't written too much about univesity so far I will shortly summarize, what's going on here. In Sweden the semester is divided into two "studyperiods", each lasting for about 8 weeks. Since the courses are more work than those at home (and you get more credits, of course) I only have 2 courses each studyperiod - wich means 4 courses each term. The coures I take this term are: "Mobile Computer Graphics" and "Language Processing and Computational Linguistics". The first one is really awesome, the lecturer damn motivated (and motivating!), the structure very good, as well as the teaching materials and the lectures. The course is dealing with 3D-graphics in general with a strong focus on mobile devices, like mobiles or the playstation portable. Mobile devices means very, very limited ressources and so very strong care has to be taken to make the implementation efficient and fast enough to run on a mobile. We had two assignments so far, the first one dealing with some nice 3D-scenes on a mobile, ending in writing a small screensaver very similar to the starfield screensaver existing on many windows-pc's. Some screenshots of what we have done:

To finish the course we need to set work on a project, and we have choosen to make a cute 3D-game for a mobile. The plan(!) is to make a little, cosy bomberman game in pseudo 3D (view from above, but 3-dimensional objects). The only problem the time pressure, we have only 2 weeks left to finish the project which is way to short to make a really cool game, but we hope to get the basic bomberman features into it with some nice graphics. We will see how the result will look like in two weeks.

Über den anderen Kurs schreib ich lieber in Deutsch, dann kann ich bissi schimpfen (von Antschgi abgeschaut ;)). Der Kurs ist wirklich nicht gut, der Vortrag einschläfernd und mehr verwirrend als nützlich über die Assignments kann man sich mithilfe des Lehrers, der durchaus bemüht ist, aber leider halt keinen guten Vortrag/gute Struktur zusammenbringt, ohne größere Probleme drüberretten. Die gute Seite: Es gibt keine Endprüfung. Die schlechte Seite: Wir müssen stattdessen ein Projekt im Umfang von ca. 2 Wochen durchführen. Is aber erst in der zweiten Study-period, also wir haben noch Zeit.

So das wars wieder mal aus Schweden. Annina wird in den nächsten Tagen noch eine Zusammefassung unseres wirklich geilen Wochenendes schreiben. Stay tuned...

swedish bureaucracy

2006-09-22T23:14:00.000+02:00

Coming from a country like Austria usually means hating bureaucracy because it is as it is. But living in Sweden demonstrates that we should be VERY(and I mean VERY-VERY-VERY-VERY) happy to have our bureaucracy as it is. In my opinion it sucks 10 times more than the Austrian. It seems that the Swedes follow every law, no mather how stupid it is. Of course I am a little bit angry right now and not that kind of objectiv, as I should be, but I don't care about this right now :). I just tried getting into a nation-club and they don't let me in, because I only had my LTH(university)-card and not my nation-card with me.
The nation card is something you(should) get, when you join a nation and it is the key to all nation-activities(which are way-cheaper than the normal pubs/clubs/whatever) and the only(!) valid identity card to proof you are a student. I already have joined one nation, but I guess my card has been lost by the post, because I haven't received it during the last 3 weeks. If you don't have this card you need your letter of acceptance with you every time you wanna get into a nation. In my opinion, wearing the letter of acceptance with you all the time is the stupiest thing you could do because it is the only official document that you are allowed to study in Lund. If you lose it you have a problem. So this is as if you would wear your passport with you all the time. Anyway, the security didn't let me in, with my LTH-card and even my Austrian student card has not convinced them that I am a student.
But of course that's not the only example. When I tried to get a swedish banking account I had to visit 5 different banks to get one. First I was told I need a swedish personal number to open a bank account. After I found out what to do, to get one I went to the tax-office and applied for it. I had to lie and tell them I will stay for one full year (allthough it is almost 1 year - 11 month) to get it. After this, happy like a little boy, I went back to the same bank to open a swedish bank account. I told them my personal number and guess what?! She asked me about my swedish identity card. What the hell is this, I asked her. She told me that if you have a swedish personal number you need a swedish identity card too, otherwise they can't accept you. I showed her my passport, the most international and most secure document in the whole world, to prove one's identity. But no way, you need those identity card too. After carefully asking her how to get her, she told me I have to apply at the post-office. After saying the word "post", the rest of the sentence was cut of by my inner filter. Considering the fact how the post works in Austria I don't want to make the experience of a Swedish-post-officer in action. I am sure this would drain even my last vital force. At this point I was short before exploision. I can't see why they don't accept a passport as a valid legitimation to open a bank account. I could understand if they would not allow me to overdraw my account, this would reduce the risk of loosing money to 0.
But having a no bank account and no personal number is a vicious circle, without personal-number you can't order an internet access or anything else. And if you have your personal number as I have right now you can order it but then you need to have a swedish bank account otherwise you pay(for example):
50SEK(5.5 euro) for the internet
25SEK(3 euro) if you have no bank-account for sending the bill
75SEK(8 euro) for paying the bill in the bank! ->unbelievable

So as you can see, if you don't have one you are fucked :). Well, finally I found a bank that accepts me as I am, with my passport as legitimation but charges me for every service like there is no tomorrow(for example, I paid about 25 euro to get my money to my swedish bank-account).

Well as you see Sweden is a very rule/law-based country :). Next time there will be some more positive posts, the overall experience is very good right now, even still there are some drawbacks which I don't wanna hide from you.

eating habits

2006-09-22T14:55:00.000+02:00

At the beginning of my stay, I was a bit helpless by the fact I have to cook for my own and only for my own. I am used to cook together with Aaron, Morschi or Annina for let's say at least 2 persons but rather 3 or 4 persons. So at the very beginning I didn't even know how much food I should buy for myself. Cooking for only 1 person is less fun and more work. Back at home I tended toward making a froozen pizza, toast or just eating bread. But doing this all the time does not work.

But during the last few weeks I became a professional 1-person cook and tend to buy the right amount of food so that the food doesn't rot in my refrigerator. I mainly cook pasta with different kind of sauces or meat/fish with potatoes. Potatoes are a very, very traditional swedish food since it is one of the very few vegetables that grow in a cold enviroment like here in Sweden. The fact that the can be preserved during the whole year makes them even more important for the swedish history. Due all those facts, potatoes are one of the cheapest things you can eat in Sweden. One kilogram costs only about 0.5 euro. Although I didn't like potatoes that much at home and hardly ever cooked one by myself, I really enjoy eating them here. They fit very good to salmon, which I eat a lot up here :). And preparing a creme-fraiche sauce with a lot of spices as a side dish to the potatoes makes them even better.

Yesterday I had maybe the best food since I was here. At my local supermarket I have seen some pepper-steaks for a few times right now but I always was a bit frightened by the price. But yesterday i just bought them and hmmmmm ->peppersteaks with potatoes and some vegetables. Do I need to add anything here???

The only drawback is that I haven't managed to cook the right servings so far. We have no balance and therefore I tend to cook too much for me. The good thing is that I cook about 2 times a week together with my corridor-mate Brice and hopefully will cook more often together with Annina in the future.

one-legged climbers and the climbing club Crux

2006-09-17T12:18:00.000+02:00

On the last Saturday, the day after the Pirate-party I went climbing to a region called Kullaberg which is about 80km away from Lund. The trip was organised by a the climbing club called Crux. Since this trip I am a member of this climbing club. Kullaberg is the biggest climbing-area in southern Sweden and located in a national-park - but since there is a golf course too, I don't take this too serious :).
The climbing place itself was very beautiful, almost on the water-front, many different routes, but unfortunately no bolts. For the non-climbers among you: Bolts are the devices used for your own safety. If there are bolts in the wall and you fall into the rope nothing can happen, because they are firmely detached with the wall. If there are no bolts you have to use your own security devices namely friends, nuts and some other things. This is less secure and you need to know exactly how to use them. You can find more infos about bolts here or here. But anyway, since Crux is a climbing club it was no problem because they had the required knowledge and equipment to make climbing secure.
The most fascinating thing for me was seeing the first one-legged climber in my life. He lost one leg during a motorbike accident and is wearing a prosthesis. And the point is: He started climbing AFTER he had his accident. This is a good example what modern medicin makes possible. The fact that he was climbing at least as good as I do impressed me even more.
As usual I will add some photos :)

Pirates!

2006-09-17T10:22:00.000+02:00

Hej once more!

As you might have noticed, I had no time/motivation during the whole last week to write a summary into my blog. But now motivation is back and so you can enjoy some new experiences. I will start with the last weekend which opened with a great party!

Pirates-Party
I didn't expect the party to be so much pirates-like. If you try to make a costume-party in Austria this does not work that good because normally the people don't like it that much and spend no effort to design their costume. But this was different here! Everybody put a lot of creative energy to create the perfect costume and yield fruits (Früchte tragen-don't know if you can use it this way, but anyway...). In my mind this was the first real Erasmus-party since it was organised by exchange students with the help of no one. The party was located in a dormitory called St. Lars which is one of the most fancy ones in Lund. It earlier times it was a mental hospital and has been altered to a dormitory. But allthough it has been renovated it still has the air of a hospital. When I came in the first thing that came in my mind was one scene in Terminator 2. Sarah Conner in her white dress freaking out and running away from the Terminator who is trying to kill her. The white floor, the doors, allmost the same as in St. Lars. I can still see the heades of the madmen striking against the walls :)
But anyway the location is a good place to live, because they still have the huge social rooms and the kitchen from those times. They are designed to have space for about 60 people eating there, maybe more, and now only 20 live there. And the corridor and the toilets are big enough to have a football match :)
That is one of the reasons why the party was that great, I estimate about 200 students there, most of them were exchange students. Now a few photos:

Stay tuned, I will release a few more articles in the next days!

Blog-Design

2006-09-10T11:17:00.000+02:00

I just discussed the design of the blog with Annina. It seems that some people don't like the black background with the white font, because of the bad readability. I choose it because I liked the simple flourishless design. But of course you are the reader of our blog, so please don't hesitate to give me some positiv or negativ feedback about the readability of the blog. If there is a majority who thinks the readability is bad then I may change it.

Medical School Lund/ Malmö

2006-09-08T18:42:00.000+02:00

Hi everybody!
I have to report about my first week at the hospital. On Monday I had a meeting with the teachers to speak about some organization things. We are just 6 students in the International Surgery Course in Malmö and there are 4 more in Lund. We do the lecture together, but we are separated at our practical part. Afterwards our group had some suture training in a cosy little room near the operation theaters. In the evening we were all together the chef secratary and a teacher included in a restaurang in Lund. It was very nicy to talk to medical students from different countries like Italy, Turky, Slovakia, Iceland ect. As you can imagine that was a real nice start for my first week of study here in Sweden.
The only problem is that they didn't now our time tabel jet. So we met the next day at 10 a.m. in Malmö, the have a closer look at the hospital. Afterwards the secretary told us that we have no programm on Wednesday and that we should be at the hospital on Thursday to get our time tables.
On Thursday there was a big suprise for all of us. We all thought that we just meet to get more information and that we can go home after one hour or so. But, our teacher told us that we should stay on a ward till 15:30. Nobody was prepared to stay that long!!!
Today (Friday) we had some lectures. One about abdominal pain and another one about heart-and lung surgery. It was quite intensive, we were just 10 people in the course. I think I've learned a lot today. It is so nice to have that much regard.
My time tabel for the next weeks is: On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I am on a ward. That means that I've to be in Malmö at 7:30 and to stand up at 6:00. Urrgh. On Thursday I have sometimes special programmes, otherwise I've this day free. And on Friday are my lectures. I've to discribe 12 different patients that I've seen in my time at the hospital and work out some other cases. So I have quite a lot work to do!
As you all know it is always nice to study medicin.

Hiking and one more kräftskiva

2006-09-03T21:16:00.000+02:00

After a busy week (university started quite fast) with no special events at the evening finally the weekend entered. On Friday night Annina's mentor group was invited by one of their tutors for another kräftskiva (crayfish-party). Since I had no special plans for this day I decided to join them which was a great idea. Magnus (the tutor) prepared a delicious meal at his home with grayfish, bread and mayonnaise and of course some schnapps. This meal was in a much smaller(about 20 people) and cosier enviroment than the other party with alot of very nice people from all over the world (Chinese, Canadian, German, Poland...). I am sorry but this time were no stupid fotos taken from me ;). The most interesting thing for me at this eveneing was a conversation with two Chinese girls about their cultural shock when they came to Europe/Sweden. They went home very early because they are not used to stay out longer than eleven. For me it was very fascinating to talk about their views and tell them a bit about how things work in Europe. I am sure they will alter a lot during their stay in Sweden but hopefully they are not too scared of all the things happening here.

The party was also the place were we finally decided to go on a hiking trip this weekend. We were invited by Marie(France), Peter(Belgium) and Kristina(Germany) to join them at their trip to a national park. The national park is called Söderåsen and located 50km north of Lund. On our way their I had a dejavu - we passed a place where we were looking for a sleeping-place two years ago. As you see the world is really small :).

The hiking trip itself was gorgeous. There are no moutains in the southern part of Sweden but a lot of wood, lakes, grassland. For me the trip was like a "Best of Sweden" in a small scale. We walked for about 3 hours through the forest, passed two small lakes, a hut you can use for ree and finally arrived at another hut which was our sleeping place for this day. There we spend the evening together with two Danish guys and a Swedish family sitting on a campfire, drinking wine, eating cookies and roasting marshmallows. When it finally began to rain we backed out into a roofed spleeping place and spend the rest of the night talking and of course... sleeping. The second day we finished our turn back to the car. It's hard to describe the beauty of this place with words, so maybe I just post some pictures. Hope you'll enjoy them!

Actually, I would like to have those "Read more" button as in the lesspixel.com blog, but I haven't found out how this works at blogger.com. If somebody knows, please let me know!

The Nations

2006-09-01T15:24:00.000+02:00

I am a member of Krischan Nation now! I enroled myself yesterday .

That' s the reason why I want to give some general information about the Nations:
The Nations are student associations, but you cannot compare them with the Austrian's „Studentenverbindungen“. If you study in Sweden you have to go to such a association, all students have to.
But what are the Nations doing?
They organize different Pubs, Clubs and sittnings. A sittning is sitting together, having a fine meal (mostly 3 courses), drinking and talking. All offers are comperativly cheap. That's the reason why the Nations are the best places to go out and to enjoy oneself.
Every Nation has a main focus. One nation does political discusing, another one is specialized in music, some of them play theater and a lot of them do sports. So everybody should be able to find a nation that fits to him.

What is special about my Nation?!
Krischan or Kristianstad Nation is a small nation with a familiar atmosphere. People are heartly and you fell yourself welcome. They have a fine Pub. And of course it is not far away from my dormitory. Krischan has a lot of different activities. I want to do the baking course on Thursday! If I have any time left. I hope I'll meet many nice people in my new Nation and that I'll find new friends!

Best regards Annina

University starts with a "Bang"

2006-08-30T14:17:00.000+02:00

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

2006-08-27T16:05:00.000+02:00

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 :)

Räkskiva (engl.: crayfishparty, dt.: Flusskrebsfest)

2006-08-27T11:06:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we went to the International Crayfishparty of Helsingkrona Nation. Räkskiva is a traditinol Swedish party in August. We got a lot to eat, one beer, halv a bottle of wine and a shot for 200 SEK. So that's a nice price! We enjoyed our meal, talked, drank and did crazy things. Just look at the fotos.
First of all: Stupid hats
2. Eating Creyfish
3. Singing Karaoke4. DancingIsn't Felix crazy?!

a petty theft

2006-08-26T10:42:00.000+02:00

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

2006-08-23T15:07:00.000+02:00

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....

2006-08-18T23:06:00.000+02:00

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!

2006-08-18T22:50:00.000+02:00

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.