Tag Archives: english

traveling

Preparing for the trip

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E-Ticket for the flight: check.
Confirmation of payment: check.
Visa confirmation: check.

Together with my driver’s license translation and my passport, earplugs and an inflatable pillow, this stuff is now hidden in plain sight in my room, so I won’t forget where I put it.

Next step: Check the wardrobe for everything that absolutely has to come along, so I won’t freeze to death (Montreal is having temperatures mostly below 0° Celsius at the moment). I’ll never say “I don’t have anything to wear” ever again. I have lots of stuff to wear, I just always wear the same stuff …

Then I’ll have to get the beer I want to bring to my hosts, and the chocolate Nicky “ordered”.

And I should not forget that just before taking off to New York, I’ll also spend some days in Tirol, so packing for going there should also be thought of.

12 days to go!

Outdoors

Winter: 1 – everyone else: 0

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This usually is one of the busiest north-south connections in Tirol, Fernpassbundesstrasse, leading from Füssen in Germany to Nassereith and on to Innsbruck.

It was closed yesterday morning due to high avalanche risk, and was reopened this morning.

The only other way to get to the south because of this was to drive north to Füssen, then southeast to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and south via Mittenwald and Seefeld to Innsbruck, though parts of this route were restricted to vehicles using snow chains.

Hell yeah, that’s winter.

Family, Other

It’s cookie time!

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In December, there were two cookie baking sessions happening at my place.

This is – approximately – what we used:

2.5 kilograms of flour
0.75 kilograms of sugar (and vanilla sugar)
0.8 kilograms of chocolate
0.5 kilograms of almonds

Doesn’t sound like much? Well, we made enough cookies for a party with 15 people, a dinner of 5 people, getting me, Georg and my room mates through Advent, and we still had enough so Georg and I could take about 0.75 kilograms home to pamper our families 🙂

And here are some pictures:

By the way: last-minute deciding on which cookies you want to make can make baking slightly difficult. For example, as we did not have star shaped coookie cutters, we had to make cinnamon moons and boots instead of cinnamon stars. And Georg, lucky him, managed to get the last 2 packages of crushed almonds at the store, as well as one of the last packages of flour …

I will see that I get more pictures from our friends, because the really good ones are not on my phone. Georg also made a cinnamon man … and there’s a picture of him eating it.

GeoCaching

Winter: 1 – Me: 0

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There is a GeoCache not too far from my parents’ place back in Tyrol (cache on GC.com). It is located at Frauensee, a lake some way up a mountain. Hiking there takes about 1 hour in Summer. I hiked up there with my parents at least three times in 2011, but never brought a GPS with me (once, because I was being childish and stupidly sulking).

Finally, when I was back home during Christmas Holidays, I managed to take the GPS with me up to the lake, and even had the coordinates saved onto it.

Still, I did not manage to find the cache. Look at the pictures to see why…

If I had looked at the spoiler picture at the end of the cache description, it would have been clear which tree is the right one. But still, I was standing in snow, half frozen on top and powedery below, up to my hip. I guess I’m just a whiny little good-weather city geocacher, then …

Outdoors

Recap: Skiing at Stuhleck

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So last Sunday, January 8th, Georg and me went skiing. Kira, a CS friend of ours, had posted on the Vienna Group that she wanted to go, and we immediately decided to join her. At the weekly meeting on Thursday before, one of the tenants of Flying Pig said he’d also come with us.

On Sunday morning though, I received a text from Kira that she wasn’t feeling well and would stay at home. Paul did not show up at the meeting point either, and also did not call, so this left Georg and me alone.

But this gave us the possibilty to last-minute change our plans upon arriving at Semmering train station. First we had planned to go to Zauberberg, which is actually at Semmering itself, but as a free shuttle bus to Stuhleck skiing area was waiting at the train station, and the bus driver and the skiers already aboard the bus were so nice and convincing, we decided to go to Stuhleck.

The weather wasn’t too nice in the beginning: it was snowing und heavily clouded until noon. As snow kept falling, heaps and heaps of it made a mogul pistes out of every slope. It was quiet fun, but very exhausting, especially as there were lot of people on the pistes.

After our lunch break, the clouds parted, and especially the lower parts of the area became more and more sunny. We did our last descent around 3.20 pm, having skied for about 4 hours. Unfortunately, it was way too cold to stop and take pictures from the slopes, so here are two pictures I took while being indoors:

Work / University

Estimated semester result

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In order to have more time to study, I will take the first attempt on the big Maths exam only in March, and because I did not pass the first attempt, I will have to try again on the exam in Formale Modellierung. Also, I still did not complete all tests in Programmierpraxis.

But: I will for sure have finished the other half of my courses within less than 3 weeks’ time! Also, repeating the tests in Maths and FMod at the beginning of 2nd semester means I’m still pretty much “on schedule”.

So, until now there is not one single subject I really have to repeat … sounds great, doesn’t it?

Outdoors

Finally: Skiing!

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Thanks to Kira, I will finally make it to my first day on skis this season. She suggested to go to Semmering on Sunday, and so we will do. It will be Kira (a snowboarding beginner), me (pretty good skier), Georg (trained ski instructor) and maybe even Paul (intermediate skier as far as I know).

I’ll see how my phone copes with the weather conditions and try to take some pictures for you 🙂

Enjoying Vienna

A walk in the park …

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Georg and I did not really know what to do during the last days, so after finishing the LotR-Making of (again), we got a bit bored. And then it occured to us that we did not go to the Zoo in the last 3 months!

Well, our last visit was in the end of October, with Armi and Andre, and as we’re both proud holders of an annual ticket, we decided to go there today.

In comparison to the last week, we got up pretty early (shortly before 8) and arrived at the Zoo only some minutes past 9, so just after the gates opened. It was a bit spooky with nearly no one else there, but we did get to see some work of the caretakers we usually don’t see: cleaning-up at the Katta’s, breakfast for the Somalia Blackheaded Sheep, and so on.

Also, as always, we attended the commented feedings of the Orang Utan, the sea lions, and watched the big clean-up at the Humboldt penguins. Unfortunately, we missed the (pretty rare) commented feeding of the Arctic Wolves, though 🙁

Want some pictures? Go ahead. The quality won’t be stunning, as I took them with my phone, but should be okay 😉

CouchSurfing

It’s planned!

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Yes, I know, I’ve been lazy again in December. So let’s try to catch up a bit, right?

In August I booked a flight from Vienna to New York and back again for less than 400 Euros, and got two guys, Josef and Christian, to join me.

Unfortunately, Christian won’t be able to join us any more, as there’s been some changes in the company he’s working with, and he should definitely stay in Vienna during February.

So yesterday, Josef and I got together and started planning the trip. He came up with the idea of going to Montreal (“There’s someone who’d LOVE to host us!”), and I said “Well, when we’re already in Canada, why not continue to Toronto and go see the Niagara Falls, too?”, and he said “But what should we do in between there and Washington? … Oh, wait, Cleveland’s just around the corner.” and I said “Oh, and Pittsburgh, right there, it’s on the way too!” … so this is our current schedule:

According to google maps, it should be about 34 hours of driving. The longest part would be from Montreal to Toronto, taking about 6.5 hrs. Our day-to-day schedule is not 100 % fixed yet and we’re not sure about some stops yet (e.g. if we’ll stay overnight in Cleveland and/or Pittsburg at all), but that’s about it.

I’ll be on my couch now, checking my brand new rough guide to the USA 🙂

Work / University

Stereotypical, and not.

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The friends I found at University are just the typical IT guys you can find everywhere. We like the typical things (music, movies, books), talk about the typical things (movies, comics, computers) and usually do the typical things (not too much sports, playing strange games online).

But then again, only a week ago, I asked a girl from this group and a friend from Couchsurfing if they would like to join me at another friends’ birthday party. It was going to take place at a Karaoke Bar and I would need some assistance and people I could talk to aside from the few I’d know there. The party was scheduled to start some about 2 hours after a written exam at University, so we met at one of Vienna’s christmas markets after the exam, as we were divided into several groups taking the exam in different buildings of the UT. And all of a sudden, when I wanted to get on my way to the party with my two friends, another 4 asked if they could join because they’d just LOVE to do some Karaoke.

So we crashed a party. 5 IT students and a nursery-school teacher. We had a blast, annoyed some of the other people attending the party, and sang some songs with the birthday girl.

So, we’re totally typical IT students. But we’re not 🙂