Birthday party and first grade in LUT

First of all, happy birthday Esther !!
Thanks for the birthday party, it was a nice and comfortable evening. The topics we discussed were thrilling and funny like always. I don't really know why we always end talking about dirty stuff, weird *gg*
I hope you enjoy my self-made deep frozen cake ;)
We also tried some "glögi", which is the Finnish kind of "Glühwein/Punsch". It's very sweet and has not much alcohol, that's why you have to put some vodka in it.

HA, i got my first grade here in LUT. We got our grades in Finnish for Foreigners today. I have a 4 !! In Austria i would be a bit disappointed about that, but here in Finland it is the second best grade, so in an Austrian context it is 2. Actually I'm not very happy with it, because i wanted a 5, but it is ok, i made some stupid mistakes so i have to be punished. ;(

Weekend report and upcoming Trip

Another weekend is over and for those who don't know, we are in Finland now since 3 months and we will stay 2 months more. We didn't really celebrate the half-time so far, but i tried to combine the birthday party form Michael (Poland) last Friday with my half-time anniversary. I know that it is already more then half, but hei, there is always a reason to celebrate.

As i already mentioned there was a birthday party on Friday. Fortunately it was in our home area Karankokatu in a common room. This rooms are for rent. They include a kitchen and couches, tables and so on... It was the first time that someone rented the common room here, as far as i know, because Karankokatu is the only student home where you have to pay to rent the common room. (10€)

There where about 40 people, so you can imagine that the party was really good, i enjoyed it a lot. A lot of those 40 people went also to the nightclub or city center, but other ones, including me stood in the common room and partied on. So in the end we were about 15 people left and the party ended for me at 330. Normally the common rooms have to close at midnight, but who cares ;), one reason why the house elder was invited *gg*

On Saturday i stood up at noon, and the first thing i had to do, was getting rid of Jehovas Witnesses. I didn't know that the have them here, but as you see, they have, and they are the same annoying as they are in Austria.
The rest of the day i spent with doing nothing. Ok, not the whole day. At the evening i read a bit out of BS25999 for my pre-master project.

On Sunday i spent some time with reading about BOINC, which is our topic in Parallel Computing. I didn't really start writing so far, but i have to get some input first. Roman already started to write, but he is a bit party lazy the last days/weeks, so he has nothing else to do *gg*.
I also thought he got maybe a bit depressed, but he looks ok, but i will watch you Roman ;)
I will do more this week, because we have to finish the Seminar-work until 9.11.

What else is new? Easy, new lectures started today. I now attend "Presenting in English", "Finnish for Foreigners 2" and the ongoing lecture "Parallel Computing". As you can see, i do more then I had originally planned, I don't really now why, but hei! it's just for fun!!!

This Thursday I will go to St. Petersburg. This trip is organized by the Student-Union and a Travel agency. I'm really looking forward to this trip, i waited a long time to do this !!! And another great thing is, that my friends, or let's say some of my friends, from Joensuu are on this trip as well. GREAT!!!
So you will hear nothing from me beginning with Thursday to Sunday. I will make a report as soon as I'm back from St. Petersburg.

It's decided

Today we made the final decision. Roman and I will stay in Finland until 2.1.2008. As you can see, we will spend Christmas here and the new year in Helsinki. The main reason is of course, that some of our friends will come to stay with us in the new years night. My friends will arrive at 27.12 and Roman's will arrive at 31.12.

Everyone who wants to join us during the Christmas holidays, contact me, would be nice.

Sorry to my parents and relatives for not being at home for Christmas. There will hopefully a lot of other upcoming Christmas evenings which we can spend together, i think it will be a boring Christmas evening here, but we will handle it.

Exam week

This week is exam week. As I already mentioned in the entry before, the week were i have to study. I'm not really amused about this, but as you see, even in study abroad sometimes it is necessary to learn and work. (unfortunately)

However, today we had our first exam in Mobility Management. It was the first time that i had an exam together with a lot of students from different lectures. There wasn't only the Mobility Management exam, also six or seven others. So all together there were about 286 students.

You have to look at the table which color your exam has, and sit afterwards to a correct desk/exam. You are not allowed to bring anything except something to write. If there are other exceptions like dictionary, they are announced separately. In our case there was no exception. After the exam you have to show your student card or ID and subscribe.

One nice thing here in this university is, that you have the possibility to check all the exams from the years before online. So you get on one side a clue how the teacher used to ask, and for the lazy guys you also can guess which questions are coming. I don't trust teachers when it comes to exams, so i learned like i always do. But two days ago, we decided to check the old exams, to try one or two to check our knowledge so far. The bad thing was, the lecture is the first time in English, so we didn't find the exam on the first try. But after some translation we found it. Of course exams were in Finnish, thanks to one of my Tandem partners (Niko) this was not really a problem.

And guess what, the exam today was not really a big difference to those which are already published. ;)
So i started to write, and write and write.... After 45 minutes, i was at question 3 of 5, three people left with their MM exam. I just thought, what the fuck, i write like hell and they are already finished? But after some discussion with Flo it seems that they just don't know something and therefore left. (of course we discussed after the exam *gg*)

Normally there would be three hours time (!!!) for this exam. In a Hagenberger way we were finished after ~1,5h and left simultaneously. So in my opinion it should be ok, hope the lecturer also decides this way.

The next exam is on Friday, it is Finnish for Foreigners 1. I started studying yesterday and will continue tomorrow, maybe a bit today evening, i will see.

Short sign of life

Moi ja anteeksi!

Sorry for posting this entry so late, but there are some good reasons which i will explain later.
Before that let's have a look what I did on my weekend.
At Friday evening i was invited at Esther and Iris place, because there should be a party. So I went there with the bus and entered the flat.... ööhm, party!? *gg* there were 4 persons sitting, I thought about 10 people *gg*.
Nevertheless it was getting better and better. There were Esther, Iris, Doris (friend of Esther, from Austria but actually in Rovaniemi), two Finnish guys (sry, forgot the names already) and I.
We had a lot of fun, i just say "voi" (butter),.... it's an insider joke, so don't try to understand it.

After that party we went to the Diva (nightclub). Actually i do not like the Diva very much, but on that evening it was very funny. Of course it depended on the people in that case. On one dance floor in the Diva there was a Live Rap-Concert with a lot of different Finnish rappers. I don't like Rap music, but with the Finnish language it sound not that bad, quite funny.
But mostly we spent our time in the chilling area, where Esther and Iris practicing their kind of integrating in Finland, no it's not speaking or learning Finnish, and no it's not traveling around, there motivation is, .. get a Finnish boy and do some practical work, ok!? *gg* I would like this kind of practice with a Finnish girl, but the girls are not so easy like the Finnish boys *g*. However, it was a good night and we left the Diva about 315 with the taxi. (I will put a photo here, as soon as Iris or Esther are willing to send me one or more)

On Saturday the girls decided to eat at a Greek restaurant in the center, I was invited so joined them. The first surprise for me was in the bus. Five girls ... and me?! (Inga, Andrea, Iris, Esther and Doris) Ok, normally i have no problem with that *gg*, but i wished there was some male support when one of the girls started to talk about "Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten" (german soap opera on TV). *gg*

So we arrived at the center and walked to the Greek Restaurant which is located next to the Canibalis (Metal bar). But we didn't enter, because the prices were to high for some girls. (average 16€, in my opinion, not that expensive for Finland). So we went to a Pizza/Kepab restaurant on the opposite side of the road. There they had Kepab lunch for 5€ and pizza for 7€, and wow it was a lot to eat. A really huge pizza, and the "Rula Kepab" (Dürüm) where minimum 2times bigger then in Austria. It was really good, even when the waiter wasn't that happy about working.
After that we went to the coffee house and drink some coffee. We went back by foot, it really was necessary after eating so much. We talked a lot about everything including Finland. More about my opinion on Finland later on. When we reached my home place, Esther asked me where I have my rucksack ..... OK !!! So, getting my keys for my car, driving back and fetch my rucksack from the coffee house. In Finland it is not really a problem forgetting or loosing some stuff. Finnish people are very honest. Chris for example lost his wallet with all the cards and money in it and it was no problem to get it back on the same day, even with all the money in it.

Ok, so why did it take me so long to post some new news. That's easy to explain. Because this week is exam week. In my case that means that i have two exams. Tomorrow i have my exam in Mobility Management, what is quite a lot stuff to learn, and on Friday i will have my exam in Finnish for Foreigners 1. Believe it or not, I have also to learn for FFF1, even after the EILC course. Some things are not that easy to remember after two month and there is also some new stuff which i didn't have in the EILC course, but there is also some stuff we had in EILC but we didn't have it in FFF1. That was one reason why i took FFF1 even after the EILC, because you can never know which kind of teaching the teacher in Lappeenranta is using.

So, as you can see, i have to learn, or probably i should learn, but not this evening *g*, i have to catch up with Prison Break S03E05 ;) Those who know, will understand me.

Kiitos, nuku hyvin! moi moi ja nähdään !

Tandem Afternoon - Topic: German/Austrian Cooking

Hyvää päivä!

Yesterday we had our second meeting with our "Finnish-German Tandem". Paul and I decided to cook some German and Austrian specialties. Paul made some "Reibekuchen" and I made "Apfelmus" and "Salzburger Nockerl".

Recipe for Reibekuchen

5 lbs white potatoes
4 medium yellow onions
4 eggs
1 Tbsp salt, or to taste
sunflower oil or other neutral oil for frying

Coarsely grate potatoes and onions (a food processor saves a great deal of time).
Salt the potato mixture to taste.
Drain salted grated potatoes and onions in a sieve or colander, trying to reserve as much potato starch as possible. Discard liquid.
Mix in eggs.
Pour in just enough oil to cover the bottom of a nonstick frying pan.
Place the pan over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, drop heaping tablespoonfuls of the potato mixture into the pan and flatten.
Cook until golden-brown, approximately 3 minutes, depending on the stove. Flip and cook until the other side is also browned and crisp.
Drain on a paper towel covered plate and keep warm in the oven.
Replenish oil and repeat until all the batter is gone. Avoid using any liquid that accumulates in the bottom of the bowl.
Serve with applesauce, sour cream, or smoked salmon.

Applesauce recipe:

Apples (how much you want or need)
Cinnamon and sugar

1. peel the apples and cut them into four pieces, remove the core.
2. put some water and the apple pieces into a pan and cook them 'till they are soft.
3. crunch them
4. put cinnamon and sugar to the crunched apples and mix it.
Decide yourself how much you wanna put in, start with less and put more if needed.

Salzburger Nockerln:

There are a lot of different recipes for those, i put you one for example.

serves 4 as dessert
• 5 eggs
• ½ cup milk
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 tablespoon Butter
• Vanilla aroma
• grated skin of ½ lemon
• less than a pinch of salt
• icing sugar

Preheat oven to 245°C or 470°F.

Divide the eggs into yolks and whites and beat the egg whites with salt and little sugar for one minute. Add rest of sugar and beat egg whites until stiff.

Put the egg yolks into a mixing bowl and add ¼ of the stiffly beaten egg whites. With a whisk mix this quite well. Add rest of egg whites, sieved flour, Vanilla and lemon skin and carefully mix this, fold it in more than mixing it.

You need a heat proofed dish in which you put in the butter and milk and let this come to a boil. Spoon 3 or 4 big dumplings onto the hot milk-butter and put it into the oven.

Bake until golden brown, this takes not more than five minutes. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve immediately.

Ok, some of you maybe already have experienced the difficulty of Salzburger Nockerl ;)
I never did it before, so i was not expecting anything *gg*. At the end it didn't look like Salzburger Nockerl, but it was ok to eat ;)
I will give it another try soon.

The Reibekuchen and the Apfelmus was very good and only Niko and Paul had some accident with the muller (?), they needed some plaster to stop the bleeding *gg*. I think they just did it, so that i have to do all the washing afterwards, grrr.

At the end all of us were leaving with a full stomack. We are looking forward to our Finnish cooking evening, hopefully i will stay alive :)

The days before there was nothing special to report, just trying to do some useful stuff for the university, more or less with success.
I've also learned the Finnish expression for "2 left handed", but i don't remember, i will post it later.

Update: I have now the Finnish phrase, it is "peukalo keskellä kämmentä". In English it means something like "thumb in the middle of the hand" and in German as whole sentence it is "Jemand hat einen Daumen in der Mitte der Handfläche". *gg*

Nähdään !

Tandem Afternoon

Today we (Paul, Niko, Nikita and I) had our first arrangement for our "Finnish/German- Tandem". For today we decided to play some bowling

Ok, I'm actually not that good in bowling, that's why I will not place the photo of the result here ;) I think Paul will post the second result in his blog, because he have won :)

After that, we went for coffee and doughnuts, where I ate a Vaahtilasiirupi (mapple syrup) doughnut. It was very delicious. Paul ate some lakritsi (liquorice) doughnut, würg !!!

The Finnish/German - Tandem is on one side for the Finnish students who want to improve their German and for German speaking students who want to improve their Finnish.
So we did of course some German talking, because Niko and Nikita speak already perfectly German.
Paul's and my Finnish is not good, so there is no thinking about a communication, but we have the opportunity to ask for some vocabulary and such stuff, that's what we did. For example the first word i needed today, because of my bad bowling was "perkele". This means devil/satan, but also damn/damned. I will need more of those ;)

Next week we will cook something typical German and Austrian and the Finnish guys will cook something typical Finnish, I'm looking forward to it.

At the evening is the semi-final game of the rugby world-championship, i wish my French friends good luck!! But I will do nothing today, just a lazy evening watching some tv-series.

And again happy birthday to Marie, who celebrated her birthday yesterday. It was a nice party, thanks for that.

The first snow !!

After sunshine, rain, sunshine, rain (no not different days, all today)... i didn't believe my eyes, the first snow is falling *ggggg*. Of course you don't believe me, that's why i made this:

I was chatting with Martin and simultaneously we both wrote snow!! snow!! :) 1 minute later Chris wrote Snow!! *gg*
However, it was just for a couple of minutes, so no reason to panic ;)

Update: 20 minutes later, sunshine again *g*, quite weird!

Lapland - Urho Kekkonen National Park

There was a good reason why there was no sign of life from me the last few days. The reason was Lapland. But here is the whole story.

1. Departure Day
After a lot of discussion and planning we finally decided to go by car to Lapland. We were seven people, so we needed two cars. First of all my car and as second car we rented one. On 4.10 after the lectures and lunch, we started our journey to Lapland. It took us about 9 hours to drive ~800km to Rovaniemi, were we spent our first night. Normally the cheapest Hostel in Rovaniemi cost about 25€ per person, fortunately I found a camping place near Rovaniemi with nice cabins. We got one 4 person and one 2 person cabin and paid for all together 70€. (Normal price 60-68€ for the 4 person cabin) 10€ per person is not much, that's why we decided to sleep the last night also in this place, but more about this later.

2. Day 1 at Urho Kekkonen National Park
The original plan was to stay in a cottage outside of the National Park and make daytrips to the inside. Like some other plans before, this plan also was wrapped around. BUT, like all the other wraparounds, the new plan was much better, even when i was very skeptic about it.
We or let's say the bigger part of the group wanted to go directly into the park to the first reachable free cottage. (There are several free cottages inside the park)

It was already 2 o'clock pm when this decision was made. So we drove to one of the National Park entrances, the one at Kilopää. We parked our cars there and only put the most important stuff in our rucksacks. 15 km was the distance from this entrance to the first free cottage. I'm not a "professional" hiker, that's why I thought we will never make it 'till it's getting dark, because it was already nearly 4 when we left. But, fortunately we really made it in time. I think it took us about 3,5 h to get there.
I was forced to use the nature toilette, because in our hurry I can't visit a real toilette before we left the entrance *ggg*

200m after entering the National Park we took the wrong way, that was not a good start, but fortunately this happened only once :)

This was the first impression we got there:


First of all, before you expect too much colors, the "ruska" time in Lapland (ruska == autumn colors) was already over, 2-3 weeks earlier would be the best time.

On the way to the cottage i tried to get some impressions of the nature, but we were "running" so fast, that it was nearly impossible *g*. But the landscape was very nice, even without the autumn colors. For example we have crossed some "rivers":

And finally reached our cottage (this photo was from another day):

We were quite tired. So we eat and marked our territory and went to bed early.


3. Day 2 at Urho Kekkonen National Park

On day number two we decided to make a roundtrip to a hill to get an overview. Everybody knows that the hills in Finland are not very high, but the climate make those hills and the area look like at 2000m in Austria.

The trail was very nice and the whole distance was about 16km for this round. Here is a photo of me at the top of the hill, with a very nice surround view.


As you can see, the weather god was very nice to us. The temperatures weren't that cold. I think the coldest night was about -1° and the highest day temperature was about 6°. (Btw. the weatherforecast for 10.10 says snow for Lapland in this area ;) )

This part of the park is in the wilderness area, this means no marked trails there. Hannes was very good equipped with a map and a gps, so we were never really worried about that ;)
After lunch at the mountain we walked through the bog on the back of the mountain down hill through a very nice landscape, where we found our first reindeer corpse.
We walked a long a very beautiful river valley 'till we got to a fireplace at a very nice lake. We all enjoyed this trail very much. Some of the group decided then to walk some more kilometers, Roman and I decided to walk home and prepare the ovens and the fireplace for the barbecue in the evening.

The river valley:

As I already mentioned, on this evening we made a barbecue with sausages at the fireplace. Mhhhmmm!!!!

4. Day 3 at Urho Kekkonen National Park

On the last day we had to go back to the entrance at Kilopää. The main plan was to go another route back to get some more impressions of the National Park. The route would be about 20km. So we left the cottage to walk this route. Unfortunately decided Roman after 20 meters to slip and fall into the river during the crossing. So he was totally wet and pissed off. (understandable)
However, he decided to walk back the way we came on the first day and not this route, because the other is shorter (15km).
I got no good feeling to let someone walk alone this path, so I decided to go with him, while the others stuck to the original plan. In the end I think It was a good decision, because 20km could be quite hard to walk. We reached the car about 1,5h before the others, so we went to Saarenkylä for shopping and were reunited with the others after that.

About 6 o'clock pm we went back to Rovaniemi to our cabins.

5. Rovaniemi - Arctic Circle

On the very last day we wanted to see some sights in Rovaniemi and wanted to visit the Arctic Circle with the Santa Claus Village. We started the cars about 9 and wanted to leave the camping area, when this strange noise came from the front of my car. I stopped to check what is was. It was my V-belt, some parts of it were already ripped off ;(

I phoned ARBÖ in Austria, because i have this special insurance for holidays. The arranged a tow-car, which took 2 hours. The woman at the camping place was very nice and she invited us meanwhile for a coffee in the main house. The others were meanwhile in the center to see some sights. The tow-car brought me to a repair station. I waited 10 minutes, because they had lunch time, then they started immediately to repair my car. The repair took about 12 minutes and cost 58€ for the v-belt and 11€ for the working time. It was really very fast and I was really happy about that. So there was time to go to the arctic circle, where i got me my certificate for passing the arctic circle and of course a obligatory "kissing the arctic circle" picture:



I also visited the Santa Claus main post office. There you can buy postcards and put them in a special mailbox. They deliver this postcards exactly to christmas time with a special stamp on it. It would also be possible that Santa Claus sends some greetings, but this fat, white bearded, red clothed old man want 7,80€ for that, .... no thank you ;)
A lot of souvenirs there, so if you wanna loose a lot of money, this would be a good place for it.

Finally we started our way home to Lappeenranta. It took us about 9 hours again and we arrived about 1130 pm. Unfortunately I overlooked a 80 km/h limit, so I will get a fee for that ;(

It is impossible to tell all things that happened on that trip, so please forgive me that I will not mention everything here, this would need a lot of time to read and write and hell lot of space ;)

However, the trip was very very very nice. Thanks to all participants, you all were great and it was really fun and a wonderful, unforgettable trip.

Of course there are a lot, lot, lot of photos in my gallery (And still more to come, so look out for them). I also got a lot of videos, but I will not publish them in the internet at the moment, because it would took to much space (~1,5 GB).

Studies or Parties

Some people always ask me if I'm here in Finland only for parties. Come on, do you really think so? No, it is not true. Of course I also have more or less to study.

For example this week on Monday we had 6h Parallel Computing, with ring-, mesh,- hypercube calculations, yesterday Tuesday we had 6h Parallel Computing (again) including a 15 minutes quiz and algorithms for Parallel Computing, afterwards 2h of Parallel Computing exercises (!!).

As you see, sometimes it can be quite challenging.

Parallel Computing is the most intensive course this semester. But I also have Mobility Management, mostly 2h on Tuesday and 2h on Thursday. The good thing is, I already know Mobile IPv4 because of a seminar work in Austria. So I understand the meaning and problems of Mobile IP. The IPv6 part is new for me including the security part, but the attacks are quite common, so nothing exciting for us. Bad luck that we miss two or even three lectures because of Parallel Computing.

I also have of course some Finnish lessons. Normally about 3h a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I will not mention the rest I have, because it's just for Fun and not really for study.

My pre-master thesis project should also be managed, but I didn't start so far. It could be that I will start it in November.

Don't say that I'm only here for parties anymore !!!!!