Heaven 23 and Peter back to Moscow

Yesterday Peter sent me the Photos of our last night out together. We were to the heaven23 cocktail bar in the Gothia Hotel. Its located in the 23rd floor and you got an amazing view over the whole city. Definitely worth going there.
Unfortunately Peter had to go back to Moscow last Friday. But I am sure we will meet again during his Euro trip next summer.

First snow

Today we had the first real snow. Atleast 0,5 cm ;)

Snowcovered Birkagatan

Weekend number 7 and some football

Don’t be afraid, this blog is not dead. There was just not much going on. Atleast nothing extraordinary. During the week we are bored at work and the weekend is spent in downtown Gothenburg.
On Saturday we been to Sticky Fingers again and at least for me that place was much more fun the first time I was in there. I probably wont go there again. There are better ways to spent the 80 crowns entrance fee. Fortunately around 1:00 am Jonathan, Stefan and Jonas rescued us from this place and we had a really cool night in one of Gothenburgs oldest nightclubs: Nefertiti. A jazzclub style nightclub that is open till 5 in the morning (which is very long here in Sweden)

From left to right: Georg, Jonny, Hanni, Jonathan, Stefan (the picture was taken when the club was closing and the light was already turned on)

Yesterday we decided to watch the football match at the O’learys sportsbar in the avenyn. As support we took Georg and Peter with us. As it turned out Georg wanted the

England team to win (stupid Austrian guy ;) ) and Peter realised at the bar that his t-shirt had the colours of the english national jerseys… We need to do some practice here.

Except of the result everything was pretty nice.But

who cares? Losing a friendly match with 1:2 is one thing, but not qualifying for the eurocup is a whole different story ;)

Work work

Another boring day at work. I am almost all alone in the office and once again my own boss :D
Here are two pictures of my desk and a part of the office.

Hanni's and Sebbo's big candy test

Sunday evening was the right time for our candy test. In sweden they dont have all the pre-packed candy. In every supermarket you can choose from a big wall whatever you like to. These are the first out of ~70 different sweets.

Marcus' Birthday

Marcus (Jonnys roommate in Munich), Jessy (Jonnys girlfriend) and Maria (Marcus girlfriend) visited us this weekend to see Gothenburg and celebrate Marcus’ birthday. We had an almost spontaneous party this Saturday evening. With our visitors, Peter from Moscow, Georg from Linz (he is another IAESTE student I met on the pub crawl), Anne and Thorsten we were even running out of chairs.
Mentioning the name Thorsten brings me to a whole different story which I missed to write down here till now. Through StudiVZ (the german Facebook) we met some other interns in Gothenburg. We already visited some clubs, the Volvo museum and a few after work parties with them. To give you a better impression I will just post a picture of all of us in Valand.

Von Currently going on in Sweden...

From left to right : Sonja, Alex, Fabian, Thorsten, Me (Hanni), Sebbo, Jonny
Back to Saturday. Our plan was to go to a nightclub called Excet. After 40 minutes waiting in the cold the bouncer decided that we aren’t allowed to enter because Peter is not 23 yet… what an idiot. I wont go there again during my time in Gothenburg. Anyways we still had a cool evening. Peter and me ended up in Rockbaren which was even wilder then the bar in Stockholm ;) I will post a Video of the club as soon as I receive the file.
Marcus, Jonny, Jessy and Maria will go to town now for some sightseeing . But I think I will prefer lazy Sunday.

Valand, pub crawl and some boxing

Basicly not that much happend since my last post. The student party was ok, but just ok. Maybe it would have been better if we stayed longer. But unfortunately we got to work on Thursdays.

On Thursday there was a “pub crawl” going on at the Chalmers campus. Every faculty got its own pub and in the week after the exams all are open and a big party is going. Lots of the students are wearing "party suits" which look like the ones garbagemen are wearing. Might be because of the orangen color or the fact that you arent allowed to wash the suits till your studies are finished. Hopefully I will receive some pictures of this evening soon. I met a guy from Russia there. Peter. He is a pretty funny guy and his drinking attitude is just like you expect it from a Russian.

Today me and Richard were at a boxing tournament where Gussy had a fight and won it 3:0. Kaj was supposed to fight too but due to his injured hand he wasn’t able to.

Von Currently going on in Sweden...

Valand, here we go again

Last weekend we tested some more of Gothenburgs nightlife. I can really say: I like it :)
On Friday we been to a club called Nivå. Great place! Great party! A fairly big place with 2 dance floors, lounge area and a big balcony to catch some fresh air.



The only down side was that I was more or less forced to leave the club since my two friends decided arguing with the bouncer is a smart move… no its not. Nevertheless we will definitely go there again.
Saturday we went to Valand. Not as cool as Nivå but still worth a second try. And today its time for that second try. Currently there are school holidays in Sweden and all students finished their exams last week. So hopefully the Valand student party lives up to its promise. I will keep you updated.
Hanni out.

Nothing in your way Hanni!

Today we can proudly annouce that Hanni graduated to the academical degree of a cand.-ing. (candidatus ingenieur). Everyone knows that he has really earned this success...I'm quite eased now that all the big efforts he's made the last months finally got to a very good end for him and us all. Would have been very sad especially for me to lost such a good friend and comrade in my everyday life at Munich..

Well done Hanni!
Pedal to the metal!

Running

First time running after almost 2 months break. Horrible.
But atleast there is a nice running track in the "Skatas" park near our house. You only have to cross one street and you are in the nature.

Stockholm

Home of the Swedish king. A really impressive city. The mediterranean style houses at the promenades near the sea almost give you the feeling being in Italy. But the cold wind and all people wearing caps and scarfs quickly bring back to your mind that you are about 2000km further in the north.
Our Stockholm trip should begin at 14:00 last Friday and surprisingly for all of us we actually managed to be on the highway around 14:30. The fact that Basti is an exchange student in Stockholm at the moment made it a lot easier for us to find a cheap accommodation. We stayed at his place in Tyresö for free ;) But of course we weren’t cheap and spent the saved money in our new favorite shop. The system bolaget. Driving from Göteborg to Stockholm took us about 5,5 hours and gave us the opportunity to enjoy Swedens beautiful landscape. The mix of coniferous and deciduous trees all colored in autumn colors is something you hardly find in Germany. This combined with the sunny weather made the time worth spending in the car.
The first night in Stockholm we spent at Bastis dorm talking with a lot other Erasmus students and finishing the box of beer we brought from system bolaget and the boxes they brought from their ferry trip to Estonia. As usual Sebbo went to bed first. Fault again…


Saturday we started our tour to downtown Stockholm around 10. We had a walk around in the city and watched all the mandatory sights like the royal palace, Gamla stan (the first old town I have seen so far worth comparing to the one in Regensburg. Different but as nice as the one in Regensburg. Well nearly as nice ;) ), the nobel museum, T-centralen and many more. Since pictures say more than 1000 words you can get a better impression at Sebbos flicker page.
After dinner at Bastis place we all went to the city again to enjoy Stockholms nightlife and visited some special places during night. Seeing the whole city from Katarinahissen and Södermalmwas really great. We also been to some bars. But none of them was a place which going to again is a must. They all been ok, but nothing special except the last one. A freaky mix of heavy metal and punk style people populated that place. I wonder how we ended up there and I am sure Jonny, Sebbo and me fit in this place like Will smith at the anual KKK meeting.

On Sunday we had another walk in the city and been to the Vasa museum. A really cool place.


The ship is called Vasa and sunk in the 1620s on its first trip. When it was 600 meters away from the harbor the wind became too strong, the ship started to roll too much, water entered through the canon holes and we all know the rest of the story… Swedish engineering for the win ;). If you ever go to Stockholm make sure to go there. Its definitely worth it!

First week of work and weekend 10th - 12th of October

For finally being up to date again I will make a short post about our first week of work and the last weekend. Event though it is already some time ago it is still worth reporting on.
I cant tell you much about work because not much happened yet. We are all sure that noone of us has to suffer heavy work load here and it might turn out just as it was predicted by our German human resources contact: “you cant compare Swedish students to German students. You have to tell the guys at SKF what you are able to do”. I’ll be damned if I will… ;)

Lets go back to the more pleasant things of life. 2^nd Weekend in Gothenburg. Friday wasn’t that spectacular at all. We did some preparty out our place with Richard and went out to a bar at the Avenue afterwards.

Compared to that our Saturday was way more interesting. IAESTE organized a cryfish-party, the Swedish would call it: Kräftskiva, for all the interns and some exchange students from Germany, Holland, Switzerland and Italy.

Of course you will ask now. What the hell is cryfish? And why is there a cryfish party. Here you go:

The first time you try to eat the cryfish it isn’t easy at all.

1. Rip of both pincers, collect like 2 gram of meat and suck out the “delicious” slime (I skipped the sucking part after the first one
2. Rip of the tail. Crack the tail carapace and collect an additonl 10 gram of meat
3. throw away all the rest of the cryfish caus it is full of guts and other disgusting stuff. Yes Sebbo, you aren’t supposed to eat it ;)

But now you still don’t know why there is a cryfish-party. Neither do I. No one of the Swedish guests knew why this is one of the 4 special days of the year where heavy drinking is a must...

So much about our time in Gothenburg. Tonight we will go out to the weekly pub organized by IAESTE to meet some other interns and maybe the exchange students again. Tomorrow we will start our first weekend trip to Stockholm. Hopefully reporting about our Stockholm adventures wont take as long as it took us this time ;)

Saturday 4th of October

This was our first night out in Gothenburg. We first met up with Kaj and Gyssy at Kaj's place and started playing the famous game "fill it up again". There are a few rules for this game, but basicly it is just about stuffing as much alcohol in you in the shortest time possible. So far so good.
After about an hour we were finished and all ready to hit the town. We went to a bowling club near downtown Gothenburg and it was the first time for me playing bowling. Actually it was a lot more fun than i ever imagined. But due to our great preparation at Kaj's place we really sucked. I think we all only scored like 50 - 70 points ;)
Here is a pic of the bowlingcenter:


After that we moved on to a club called Sticky Fingers. A pretty cool place with 3 different areas and a liveband.
It really remembered me of the Sudhaus club which used to be in Regensburg.
Not much more to tell about it if you cant remember ;)

Day two in Gothenburg

Our second day in Gothenburg should start at 9 in the morning. At least that was the plan when we went to bed last night. At 10:30 we were finally up for breakfast. After ham and eggs and the research where all the needed places for today are located we finally started.
Todays agenda was
- getting a personummer at the local tax office
- transfering our rent to the landlords bankaccount
- buying some stuff at IKEA
- paying a visit at Baushaus
- and maybe check out a bit more of Gothenburg

But as it turned out we should be done faster then expected. Our gps navigated us very precisely to the tax office. But the tax officed moved to a different location in town. Noone updated the webpage.Good job guys! Fortunately it was only a 10 minute walk and a lot of swedish people helped us to find it. When we finally arrived a very friendly guy at the entrance of the tax office who looked more like the trainer in a local gym helped us to find the correct persons at the tax office. A really good invention which makes stuff a lot easier. We should get one of those in Germany... . So far so good. Getting the personummer was very unbureaucratic compared to a german agency. The only downside was that we cant get a real personummer because we arent staying long enough in sweden but a temporary personummer will be send to us in the next 2 or 3 weeks.
The second stop for today was at swedbank to transfer the rent to our landlords bankaccount. Thats where the trouble started. Each of us wanted to withdraw 5000 KR (about 500 euro) to deposit it on the landlords account (direct transfer is not possible yet because we need a personumemr for that). But my ec-card didnt work and the bancomat refused to give me any money. Fortuntaelly we had enough money left to pay the rent. Since only Jonnay and Sebbo were able to withdraw money we are a bit low on money now we had to cancel the rest of our plans. All we can do for the moment is waiting for the next day until Jonny can withdraw antoher 5000KR from his bankaccount. But there is still some Carlsberg beer left...

Destination Anywhere

(use http://www.flickr.com/photos/30970874@N02/show for better quality)
Hi again!

We've now sucessfully arrived at Birkagatan 43a in Gothenburg. Our trip ends here for the moment and we're taking the time to settle down here at Sweden. Our journey was really nice and we had a lot of fun all together. Special thanks to Ruben and his mother for the excellent accommodation between monday and thuesday :-) The further ride to Kiel was very rainy and we had a typical north german lunch at "Nordsee" (fish). The ferry was nice but a bit too boring for my taste - the night club called "c-view" at the bow of the ship was even closed the whole night. The ferry crossing lasts from 7 o'clock p.m. yesterday til 9 o'clock a.m. of today. I think i didn't get a wink of sleep between 3 and 6 o'clock a.m. but the sea condition was not very strong. This morning we stayed on deck while we got into the harbour of Gothenburg, where we had a really fabulous view. I've uploaded the fotos to my flickr account - I hope you all can view them within this post. We've now a visit by a friend of Hanni - so i've to stop now...

more from gothenburg next time :-)
Sebastian

one thousand thoughts...

Hi there...

It's pretty enough time now that i've posted here. Now it's the even the last evening we stay here at home. I've driven lots of km this weekend from munich to schweinfurt and schweinfurt to regensburg and back. Hanni is sleeping at my home and we've a packed Seat Ibiza with our new and fully loaded jetbag on the roof. Nearly all things are packed in the car - it's really tight in the interior ... especially on the backseat. I try to post some pictures of it tomorrow.

To shorten up this post (it's really late already...) the plan for the following days looks like that:

- load in jonny tomorrow at hirschfeld
- drive to lüneburg and have a stay at rubens home
- drink a lot of alcohol
- take our ferry on thuesday... shipping at 5'o clock p.m.
- drinking...
- email our IAESTE contact to get the bank account data for our flat... (using wlan on the upper deck of the stena line ferry ;)
- drinking...
- arrive at gothenburg... get the fabolous look of the city, under-crossing a bridge with a few meters to the upper deck
- meet the landlord or the weird IAESTE guy to check out our flat at Birkagatan in a district called Torp in Gothenburg
- get in our stuff
- drinking ;)

(sorry for my weird english, its really late now...)

Think i go to sleep
i'll try to write soon and continous now...

Sebastian

Hopes & Fears

Now it's been nearly a month ago, that i've posted the last entry in our blog. Much too long for a blog that should be a bit interesting for someone (at least friends&family). So come one you two, just write some lines...

So for all to get a minor status update - First of all we've now booked our ferry and a flight from Gothenburg to Munich and back, so we can meet our familys over the christmas days (23-28th of December).
Now the last thing we're still worring is our apartment. We're nearly running out of time if we don't get a concrete habitation possibility for our short stay in the next 2-3 weeks. So let's hope our "reliable" HR contact gets the ball rolling in the next few days (whats wrong about HR? they sometimes even don't answer on emails or just don't read them).

The last weeks there were a bit confusing for me.. many things happend and i've had to get through many stress situations. But often in these moment I got lots of thoughts about our upcoming internship in Sweden in my head, flipping around. I feel them as some kind of light at the end of the tunnel for me.
I really hope that the high expactations, we've made ourselves, will not be too unrealistic.

The most important thing for me, i think, is that this internship would become some kind of self-discovery for me. I realy wish that I will grow with this experience and got advantages for my personality. Its a lot about courage and self-confidence for me. I feel that its the right moment for a time out for me and my good old friend: the university.
What would be greater to join this journey away and back from everyday life here at the TU Munich with two of my best friends?

Hope next time there will be some further progress for our planning :)

To get a better understanding which route we'll travel, i've shown our waypoints on a map24.de route. Map24 indicates about 1500 km from Munich to Gothenburg, via Regensburg, Hirschfeld, Lüneburg, Kiel, and our ferry.. long trip => much fun :)

Investigations & planning

So now that Hanni has done his phone call with his contact from SKF purchase yesterday, everyone of us has been confirmed that the internships will take place between 1st October 2008 until 31st of January 2009.
We're now starting several investigations for our trip to Sweden. The main point for the moment is, how we will get there?
We three had the opinion that it's better to drive by car on our trip to Gothenburg, to be sure to stay mobile for any circumstances or the case we like to do a flexible trip within Sweden. Beside that everyone of us likes the idea to do a real funny roadtrip up to the north. We'll be driving up the endless A7 Autobahn til Kiel and then taking the overnight ferry to Gothenburg.
Therefore our list of open points shows the following issues:

- check how much cargo everyone would take up to sweden
- validate that the capacity of my Seat Ibiza will take it wether we use a jet-bag for additional 50 kg / 320 litres or not
- book a ferry trip for us three and the car from Kiel to Gothenburg for the 30th of September, 7 o'clock p.m.
- visit Ruben on 29th of September, and stay alive resiting the party time in Lüneburg
- take enough beer and grog with us :)

Another thing we're still worring is the fact, that our human resource contact at SKF hasn't already organized a flat for us. We're looking forward to get a flat share possibility for us three near city centre of Gothenburg. So we just started requests on our own to check prices for a short-time-stay flat there.

Stay tuned to get newest informations about our planning and our current thoughts for our abroad internship...

The party never ends

Nearly one week too late i feel like posting a short summary of last weekend. Like usual we started prepartying at Felix and ended up dancing on the stage at the Suite15 Club. Only exception was that we got swedish company this time. Kaj and Gussy visited us on their trip to Croatia. We had an awesome time and a foretaste what will be going on in Gothenburg this winter.

On Monday we went to the cathedral in Regensburg's old town. On our special private VIP tour we had the chance to go where no common chinese tourist will be able to go. But nevertheless there were atleast as many fotos taken as a chinese could have.

Amazing view and a really unforgetable experience.


Here we go. The two explorer Teams on the bridge between the towers:

Let the Games begin

All of us got their SKF contacts now and we started to fix the dates for our internships.
Stay tuned!

Ab nach Schweden ;)