Surfin’ USA

Once more…

…I made the trip from Gothenburg to my parents’ place in Rheinberg. Friday morning at 2am I took the night train to Stockholm, from where I flew with Ryan Air to Weeze, which is not too far from here. It was quite a journey, a little more than 12 hours in total — but also quite cheap, summed up around 50 €.
As I had two hours in Stockholm before the bus to the airport left, I took a little walk around Gamla Stan, the old city center, just when dawn set in — a lovely experience with all the bridges and the water reflecting the lights. Towards the end I also came across a giant christmas tree, as you can see on the right.

Over the next days I will continue to work on my thesis a bit, since I have recently not really been progressing like I probably should have. Then, over christmas, we’ll have several family celebrations, but there’ll also be some parties or just get-togethers with old friends. I do, however, not really know yet what I will do for New Year’s eve, I guess I should look into that now that I’m back in Germany…

Visitor from Norway

Last weekend Nadja, a good friend back from from high school, visited me here in Göteborg. She is normally studying in Germany, but this term she is doing a traineeship in Oslo. And since this is actually quite close to Göteborg and a round-trip ticket by bus is fairly cheap, she came over to visit me and see the city, from Friday night to Sunday noon.
She arrived just at the right time to marvel at the renowned christmas lighting in downtown Göteborg. Saturday morning we went for a little cruise through the archipelago, which is always nice to visit — and where we were still lucky with the weather: on our way back downtown it started raining and it wouldn’t stop until late that night. Yet, after it had gotten dark, we set out to explore the beautifully illumnated Liseberg park, which was really quite a sight. In spite of our umbrellas, however, we got our feet quite wet so we took a little break at my place afterwards. Then Dain invited us over for dinner spontaneously (thanks again!) and eventually we hit one of the big clubs downtown, which was also good fun.
So all in all, apart from the fact that I didn’t get much sleep ;), it was a very nice weekend. A big thanks to Nadja for her visit — Dain and I will probably go up to Oslo at the end of January and visit her in turn.

Corridor dinner

I returned to Sweden just in time for our big corridor dinner, which took place this Tuesday. Apart from one neighbour everybody was able show up, and we invited our former neighbour Dain as well. Hence we were 14 people in the kitchen and, more critically, 14 people around our one table.

We prepared 6 chickens, around 2 kg of rice (’Bangladeshi style’), some quiche loraine and a big bowl of salad. For dessert we had fresh pears and icecream with chocoloate sauce.
What shall I say, it was absolutely delicious — wow! And it was a lot of food as well, all of us could hardly move after the dinner And we still had plenty of leftovers…

Comments moderated

For some days now my blog has been flooded with spam comments, partly containing inappropriate language. As of now, all of them have been filtered and held back by the blog software so they didn’t actually show up on the site. But eventually some will get through. And especially after some recent court decisions in Germany I don’t want to take this risk at the moment.
Thus I’ve decided to force all comments to require approval by me for the time being — this implies that it might take some time until your comments appear on the webpage. Sorry for the incovenience, I hope it will only be temporary.

Back home (again)

Yesterday night I arrived ‘at home’ again, this time back in Gothenburg. The trip was quite long (plane to Stockholm Skavsta, bus to central station, train to Gothenburg) but everything went well.

I spent most of my time at my parents’ place preparing my graduate school applications — especially writing a good statement of purpose (cover letter) took much longer than expected. But now I’m almost done with everything, I just need to collect two letters of reference here at Chalmers tomorrow, put them in my big envelope and send it off.

I also managed to meet some friends back home, although not all the ones I had planned to. But I won’t be gone for long, so that’s not too bad

Anyway, time to go shopping and refill my fridge…