Blog-Os, the tasty, topical, DIGITAL cereal!

...Filled with just the right balance of nutrients and copyright indignation, for all you budding Doctorows out there! mmm. Tasty.

Now, to business!

One consequence of my more settled routine, and perhaps also a huge deluge of cultural delights in the past few weeks, is that I have once again not been very active in the tourism area. I have done many things, but none of them are really write home worthy.

The party on saturday night was fun, it had a high proportion of danish people. This didn't influence my enjoyment of the party positively or negatively really, but I did meet this great danish guy who cultivated a proper posh british accent and a love for all things british. He is the first non-UK person I have met to know Fawlty Towers. We resolved to create a more highbrow version of Borat where he unleashed his powers of absurdity and witticism on the unsuspecting (and naturally highly dane-prejudiced) public of our fair island. He also works for Carlsberg, thus his professional life is spent surrounded by free beer. A good man to know. After we had consumed a lot of beer, we went out. We ended up at some underground place which I would definitely not have paid for while sober, and we danced enthusiastically to lots of music I would not have ejoyed while sober. However, I was not sober, and the whole thing was very very fun.

On sunday, my major achievements were a) making a delicious sausage casserole/stew thing and b) being introduced to the fantastic (and surprisingly as old as me) Studio Ghibli film 'My Neighbour Totoro'. It is completely delightful, the kids are cute but not annoying, the parents are cool and sensible, the totoro are funny and strange and adorable. And I'm sorry Ms Kitefish, but I think the cat bus is pretty cool too. There, I said it.

Monday was also uneventful, though I did go for a long rambling walk around central Vienna, basically because I could. Damned cold. The perfect setting to get to know music in though. A friend has gifted me pretty much every note of music that Andrew Bird has ever played, and I am slowly working thorough it. At the moment, it is all good, but each album has one song that blows everything else out of the water. I am especially enjoying the little known first album from 1996, which is basically a folk record, rough violin reels with just the right level of wail to be sad and uncomfortable and lovely, without sounding twee or annoying or discordant.

Tuesday: lectures. Wednesday: less lectures, and I finally scanned in and started working on my mapping project. Luckily, Uni Wien has really wide screen, super fast, Adobe Illustrator 4 equipped PCs. The only downside is that unintelligible computer babble menu items are no more intelligible and considerably less easy to guess the function of when in German. Good news from today: Ed is coming to visit very soon! Finally I have a real life person to shamelesly show this place off to. I am looking forward to it. He'd better like art :-) and opera...

Thursday's lectures/practicals were BRILLIANT. I think maybe I have finally reached a level of geology where every single thing is new and exciting and complicated. The German thing helps too. I feel like I am learning more things as I am re learning old words in a new language. Isotope chemistry is getting very complicated, more fool past me... My favourite lectures are still Petrology though. I have a tiny hope that I might thus be able to pick one strand of rock-studies over another, but I'll probably be just as interested in the stuff I study next term. In the evening found (actually, I was taken to) a great 'oriental' (as in the orient express, not China) restaurant. Huge plate of the tastiest foods that area has to offer, tres lecker. My finnish language skills continue to improve at breakneck speed (ha) I can now say one, two and three, and occasionally pronounce written things slightly right.

Todays plan: nonexistent! Except, MUST WORK ON MAP.