Oslo 2010

Finally I’m continuing my blog. In the last weeks happened a lot. I will have a quick recap and then continue with the current news.
I stopped writing the blog because I got distracted on and after the hiking trip by an unbelievably beautiful girl. Her name is Lilla and she might be the best thing ever happened to me.She’s Hungarian and does a semester abroad here in Oslo just like me. (Pictures of her can be found in my Stavanger folder). From the 30th September until the 1st October Lilla and I went to Stavanger to go to Preikestolen and visit Stavanger. Also we did “couchsurfing” for the first time and stayed with an german emigrant in Stavanger for one night which was very nice and a experience of its own.
On the 4th October Bernd arrived at Oslo. To visit me but also to do interviews for his PhD research. He stayed with me for 2 weeks. But as he was busy most days and I sat at university anyways it was no problem to share the room for 2 weeks. The only exception was of course that Lilla and I had no room for ourselves in that time. Lilla has to share a room for the whole 5month because they were not able to offer a single room for everyone this year.
On the 6th Oct we had a small birthday celebration for Bernd. Some of his old friends from Oslo were there.
While Bernd’s presence we were also able to go jogging two times which I had not done for a couple of weeks. I try to maintain that and am also trying to get Lilla enlighted to join me.
On Sunday the 10th Oct Lilla and I did a little hiking trip, starting from Sognsvann taking some randomly chosen paths through Nordmarka. Allthough we tried hard to choose the smallest paths we were not able to walk for more than 15min without passing or being passed by others. Norwegians really seem to like their nature and everybody is out there on Sundays. After some hours we took the mobile phone to get our position and to know where we had to search for our way back.
Sadly Bernd did not join for that tour, it was really nice. He decided that he wanted to use that day to relax or “daddeln” as he would say.
In the evening we went to Blå. As Bernd left earlier because he was to tired I decided to sleep over at Lilla.
On the 7th Oct Christian and I had to hand in our first home exam. A optimized mjpeg_encoder where we had to use SSE to speed up the encoding. We were quiet content with our result. The total speedup was ca factor 20.
On the 15th Oct we got the second task. This time we got a more sophisticated mjpeg_encoder which we have to speed up by using the computation power of Nvidia graphic adapters. The SDK is called CUDA and allows to run normal programs on the GPU. The card we use has 240 processing cores comparing to 2-4 cores on a “normal” computer.
In the evening Steffi and Swantje arrived for a short visit. They would come on Friday evening and leaving already on Sunday afternoon. But still we used the whole Friday evening to cook and chat.
As Bernd was still there as well, all four of us slept in my room which turned out pretty good. I did not expect it to fit that well. Bernd left for Germany on Saturday morning but after 40 minutes while Swantje, Steffi and I were preparing to go to the city Bernd sent an SMS in which he said that his flight is not as he thought on Saturday but on Sunday. He was really embarrassed about that.  We waited for him to come back to the apartment and then started our trip through Oslo together. We did a lot on Saturday, we went to Vigelandsparken, Holmenkollen, city hall, Akershus slott, Bygdøy, the Opera, over Karl Johans gate up to the palace. When we arrived at the palace it got dark already and so we decided that it has to be enough for the first day. We bought ingredients to bake pizza and made two baking plates of pizza. Mmhhhmmm…We spent the rest of the evening chatting and having a look at my photos that I made of Norway so far.
On Sunday Bernd left (again) to try to fly back and this time he did not come back. A few days after I also got to know that he arrived at home.
Swantje, Steffi and I went to a few places we had no time for on Saturday. First to Aker Brygge, then for a short visit to the National Gallery and on our way back to Sognsvann the lake “next” to my apartment. After that I brought the two girls to the bus terminal where they left for Torp airport.
Thanks girls for that nice weekend and thanks to Bernd for being my roommate for two weeks.
Of course it was nice to finally have the room for myself (and for Lilla) again.

The rest of the week I had not much to do because my informatics courses start next week. Unfortunately I found out that my Norwegian classes started on Monday while I was 100% sure they would start Wednesday because I wanted to have free Mondays.
Wednesday I had a „Welcome Party“ of our faculty. Where the Dean welcomed us. Also there was lots of good sandwiches. With shrimps and salmon … really nice and absolutely delicious. The student organization of our faculty that is responsible for the Pub, organizing the faculty parties,… introduced themselves and invited us to join. Also I met a lot of new people but only few informaticians but among these people I finally met Johannes, the other guy from Paderborn.
In the evening I was on a meeting with some of the people I’ve met here to plan our cabin trip. We’re now going for a two day trip from Saturday to Monday.
Thursday and Friday I was hit bad by my cold and decided to stay at home. I only went out for Norwegian classes on Thursday.
On Saturday I was almost fit again. Just in time since I met with my parents again to go to Geilo, 300km north of Oslo. As the speed limit is 80 km/h on most streets it was a long long journey. As you can see on the pictures we saw beatiful nature as well as some art.

At Geilo I bought some hiking boots for my trip for the next weekend. In Geilo the weather was pretty bad so we decided to go 100 km more to a impressive waterfall. Sadly there was no way to get a picture of the waterfall in a better angle.

On our way back we got hit by some heavy rain which forced us to slow down a bit. As we would be back really late I accepted my parents invitation to stay at their house for the night. As the house has some more beds it was no problem. We cooked dinner at around 10pm, some very good talbud and salmon. Soon after that I fell asleep exhausted of the long trip.
Sunday morning we decided to do a little walk on the Kystveien that starts in the village my parents live in. It’s a really little way but leads to some very beatiful places which you can only reach by foot or boat. At some of these places we found little seastars. I did not know that they exist in the Eastern Sea.
At 3.30pm I took the train back to Oslo. And here I’m sitting at the moment in Blommenholm. Today evening we’re going out with the buddy group again. Mary told me that I have to be at 7pm in Sogn. If not I’ll be punished as I declined to come the last three days. I really wonder where we’re going as it is called „Blå“.

On Sunday Lilla, Lena, Theres, Natascha and me went to a concert in front of the opera at 10 am. The weather was great, the perfect day for a morning concert. I did not understand a word what they were saying before each music piece but the music was nice. They played a whole hour and guess why we went there … it was for free.

After arriving home I began to write this blog. At that time I still believed I could summarize the whole week in 3 hours. As you can see I was not able to but I’m catching up.
In the afternoon we went to the lake for a swim but as we arrived at the lake the sun disappeared behind some huge clouds and the wind came back up. So it was really fresh and it was no fun to jump into the water.

On Friday we had a Bus tour through Norway which was for free (<- you don’t hear that very often in Norway ). We visited Vigeland Parken, a world-known sculpture park. It’s really nice but the sculptures are a bit scary. I mean who builds a monolith out of people? And who puts Gargoyles which eat people at the edges of a bridge? After that we went to the City Hall then a higher point from which we were able to have a good look over Oslo. The tour ended at the Opera. I don’t like the outside but it’s really nice made in the inside. And they have the coolest toilets I’ve ever been on. They look more like a lounge than like Toilet.



On Friday we had a Bus tour through Norway which was for free (<- you don’t hear that very often in Norway ). We visited Vigeland Parken, a world-known sculpture park. It’s really nice but the sculptures are a bit scary. I mean who builds a monolith out of people? And who puts Gargoyles which eat people at the edges of a bridge? After that we went to the City Hall then a higher point from which we were able to have a good look over Oslo. The tour ended at the Opera. I don’t like the outside but it’s really nice made in the inside. And they have the coolest toilets I’ve ever been on. They look more like a lounge than like Toilet. 
We then went to Majorstuen where they have an international coffee hour every week. Coffee and cookies for free.
After that I went back to the campus to meet with the AIESECers. For their recruitment they organized a barbecue on a lawn between the buildings. It was nice, free hotdogs and a lot of interested people. I also met there an AIESECer from Hongkong and one from Lithuania. Actually I met them before not knowing that they were AIESECers as well.
When I discovered that I was already after 7pm. I rushed home because I had to meet Lena, Susi, Theres and some others at 8pm at the train station at Kringsja to go to the MatNat Semester start party.
The party was awesome, we met with my buddy group and went inside at 8.30pm !! Norwegian parties are really strange. Now that I’m getting used to party that early it’s quite nice because you can get up early in the morning although you partied hard. MatNat was the first party where they played good house music so we really had fun. Sadly we had to take the last train at 12.30pm.
It wasn’t that bad for me because I had to get up early and meet my parents at the docks.

On Wednesday I had the information meeting for the Norwegian language course. We did not get much new information. Although it was good that they explained us how to sign up because this page is available in Norwegian only. Guess that’s the test to get in. 
After this I went for lunch with my buddy group in the cafeteria. It’s pretty cheap for Norway (around 45 NOK for a main dish) and tasted fine. Mary told us that the picnic organized by the ESN won’t take place because of the bad weather. But we would meet with the buddy group at 9 pm at Stortinget to go to an karaoke bar. After that I had to leave my buddy group for another Information meeting. The Erasmus information meeting started quiet unusual. A guy in the front announced that all Informatic people will be going to an other building. But he spoke Norwegian, I was kind of surprised but followed that huge lot of people that went out. It got even more strange there becuase now everybody was talking Norwegian and I wondered where all the people learned that. We were led to an computer pool where a Introduction course started, in Norwegian. I felt a bit misplaced there so I asked one of the teachers what’s going on. She told me that this was a course just held for Norwegians, so I assumed to be wrong and got out of there and went back to the Erasmus meeting. I figured out that the people that were before us in the Auditorium had not got out when we were coming in and that’s the reason why I thought I had to go there too.
While sitting in the right information meeting Mary texted that the picnic would take place because the weather got better (that’s Norway, always have sunglasses and an umbrella with you  ).
At the picnic we played Ultimate Frisbee against some medicine students. It was huge fun although we all played in our normal clothes and the sun was burning heavy. The game ended when Mary got hit by the Frisbee in the face by her on team mate. She survived and we decided to split up and get ready for the karaoke bar.
Mary, Rhys and me went to the metro. Mary had to took the 5 while Rhys and I normally had to take the 3 up to Kringsja. Mary told us that we could go with the 5 to Ulleval Stadion and either walk from there or wait for the 3 there. Rhys and I decided to walk. Rhys lives at Sogn which is just a 10min walk from there. While I had to walk to Kringsja. Rhys claimed that it would be just another 10min from Sogn so I decided to walk too. After 40min straight uphill I arrived at Kringsja. 10min my a...
At 9pm we met in the City center for karaoke. It was huge fun and Mary even convinced me that I have to sing too, so I sang Summer Nights with her. First time I sang at a Karaoke bar, it was fun but I don’t think I will do that more often. I just can’t sing.