Surfin’ USA

Movie festival

This afternoon I went to another screening as part of the Göteborg Film Festival, this time of a movie called “This divided state” (homepage). It was about the public controversy around an invitation for the film maker Michael Moore to give a speech at a college in Utah (one of the most conservative states in the USA) during the presidential election campaign in 2004. It was quite amusing — but at the same time sad — to see the two sides argue without really listening to each other. Instead of right and wrong, for instance with respect to someone else’s opinions, everyone tends to classify things into good and evil instead and extend this judgement to the related people.
The director of the movie was also present and shared some of his impressions and ideas on the issue, very interesting indeed.
I might go to another movie tomorrow night, I am still discussing with my neighbours, though.

Back from Norway

As planned Dain and I went on a little trip to Oslo this weekend, leaving Thursday night and returning Sunday night. And I think I can say that both of us had a blast over in Norway!
We stayed at my friend Nadja’s place (a big thank you to her and her lovely neighbour Lisbeth for putting up with us ). On Friday Dain and took a walk through downtown Oslo and visited some of the main tourist sights; that night we had “vorspiel” (Norwegian for preparty) at Nadja’s and met numerous of her friends — a bunch of wonderful people. Later all of us went to a club downtown where we had a good time dancing and chatting.
On Saturday some of those people also joined us for a barbeque in the snow, at a lake a little outside of Oslo. We enjoyed the beautiful winter scenery and the hot dogs and later marvelled at the sunset. Saturday night we met again at a bar in Oslo before heading to the clubs for dancing.
The next morning we went downtown again, among other things to the National Gallery, most famous for its painting by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (you have most probably seen his work “The Scream”). At 6pm, eventually, Dain and I got on the bus back home. All in all it was a fabulous weekend, check some of our pictures below (click for big version).
Again, I’d like to express our thanks to Nadja and her friends for their hospitality, let Dain and me know if you happen to be around Gothenburg in the near future.

Heading to Oslo

This weekend (tonight actually) I will go on a little trip to Oslo, where I will visit my friend Nadja, who in turn visited me here in December. It seems it’s even colder up there at the moment, so I am currently stuffing some warm clothes into my bag. Tonight at 19.30 me and Dain (who’s coming along) will catch the bus here in Gothenburg and about 4 hours later we are scheduled to arrive in Oslo. Tomorrow the two of us will explore the city on our own as Nadja has to work, but on Saturday she will join us and play the official tourist guide.
Eventually, on Sunday afternoon, Dain and I will take the bus back home; so all in all we’ll get to spend 2 1/2 days up north in Norway, which sounds very promising.

A blizzard

…That’s almost how you could describe the weather situation outside. After it had not snowed since Saturday it just started again as we were on our way home from the movies. So we got ourselves a little wet…
Speaking of the movie, the 29th Göteborg Film Festival is just about to start this weekend, with several hundred movies until Feb. 6th. But as they are showing the first movies already this week two of my neighbours and I went to see the movie “The Last Waltz”, a documentary about the last concert of the influential rock group “The Band” in 1976. It contained numerous wonderful live performances of several good songs with very prominent guest musicians on stage — definitely a recommendation to anyone interested in (rock) music.
On another, thesis-related note, I eventually tracked down the cause of a problem that had been bugging me for days, so although I’m far from solving everything I’m quite happy at the moment.

Snow…

For the last few days it has more or less constantly been snowing, pretty much everything outside is covered in white. Even the public tram system had to be temporarily shut down yesterday, but today the situation has eased up a little. Still it is freezing cold and I try to avoid leaving the house as much as possible.
Today, however, I went down to campus (fortunately not too far away) to see this year’s CBJO, the Chalmers Big Jump Open, a snowboard and ski jumping contest. Just like last year the audience witnessed some really cool jumps but also some contestants eating snow — don’t worry, though, only professionals were competing, so noone got hurt.

Winter is back

Just 15 minutes ago it started snowing again, after it had been quite cold (around -5°C) all day already. The weather forecast says we will soon have ’snow chaos’, as one of my Swedish neighbours put it — so it promises to be an interesting day.
Now that all the courses here have started again everyone on our corridor is back in town, and as usual we have some new faces around. And it seems that I am now the senior of the corridor, i.e. the one living here for the longest time — I’m not the oldest one, though.

Trip to Stockholm

For my PhD applications in the US and Canada I had to take one more test, the “Test of Spoken English”. It’s only offered a few times a year and only in some cities, so I ended up going to Stockholm on Saturday. I took a train at 7am and got to Stockholm around noon. The test was at 1pm and took only 20 minutes. It consisted of nine questions about different things, e.g. a picture story, a statistical figure and several role play situations, each of which with 60 seconds answer time. It’s hard to say if it went well, no idea really what the people grading it are looking for. Anyway, after the test I went to eat something and walked around a little bit, before taking my train back at 4pm.
So, all in all, I spent almost 10 hours in the train for 20 minutes of talking into a cassette recorder. I hope this was really the last test needed for the PhD applications — and of course I hope that all the efforts will eventually pay off.

Back for the final round

Around midnight I eventually set foot into my room here in Gothenburg again, after approx. 12 hours of travelling: My parents drove me to the Niederrhein Airport Weeze from where I flew to Skavsta Airport (south of Stockholm). I then took a bus to Norrköping followed by a train to Gothenburg (changing trains in Katrineholm) — so it was quite a trip and I’m quite exhausted.
It’s pretty cold outside (-6° C when we landed at Skavsta) and all along the way there was still lots of snow everywhere, it must have snowed recently. Maybe some sledding is in order this week?

I have so far unpacked my things and cleaned the room a little, now I am now about to go to bed. Tomorrow I should then continue with my thesis; I’ve finished the first small part of my implementation over Christmas and New Year, that gives me something to build on and raises my motivation a little.

Happy New Year !

Just a brief update to wish everyone a happy new year! I hope you managed to get into the year 2006 just fine; I for one attended a very nice new year’s ball in Heidelberg, together with some friends from school. Everyone was dressed up and there were a number of interesting and likeable people. I think everybody at the party had a good time. Unfortunately, however, I lost my digital camera on the way home from the ball — and all of the night’s pictures as well.

Christmas was also very nice, I enjoyed spending some time with my family and friends. But now it’s high time to get back to working on my thesis after I had started making some progress on the actual progamming work the week before christmas. It’s still a very tedious process so my motivation is not exactly the highest — but I guess that’s part of the game…
Anyway, I will definitely get working this week (actually I have already done some things today) before flying back to Gothenburg next Monday, on Jan. 9th.