How are you? I am well. Vienna has become extremely (and unseasonably) cold recently but I've managed to survive the freeze. I have done various things which there are no photos of, therefore they didn't really happen, however despite this they were enjoyable. At the weekend I bought blinds, this is amazing because it means I don't have to stare at my friend the streetlight while trying to fall asleep. Last weekend I also ate schnitzel, drank punch (christmas markets on your doorstep are a good thing), and hung out with about 15 english people and a finnish Aikido student (although not at the same time). 50% of these activities would have been more difficult were I in London, so I guess in all that's a win!
To end this pointless ramble, here's a link to a picture of the view from the window of our PhD office. I'm not 100% sure all PhD offices even HAVE windows, so I think we are doing okay here.
I keep meaning to write a post explaining what it is I'm supposed to be studying, this will be helpful for you, but much more so for me, as I'm the one who is supposed to study it! It will appear sometime soon, before I am required to explain to everyone at our inaugral doctoral school meeting what it is exactly I am doing.
Der Tom
Monday, 28 November 2011
Sunday, 6 November 2011
Herbst
There isn't really much of an autumn for the average londoner*. For one thing, that cosy urban heat island which keeps you warm means that the London trees take a long while to realise it even is autumn, and then by the time they decide to get all pretty and drop their leaves it's starting to get dark early, it's raining or you're working hard on some report, and you don't have time to make that trip to Hampstead Heath or Clapham Common or whatever. And then all of a sudden it's December and you're cold and the only reminder of those lovely autumn colours is a vague brown pavement gunge...
Not so in Vienna. As befits a city which can boast that 50% of its area is green space, there are several places in and around the city which really encourage some joyful autumnal wandering. This weekend I attempted to explore the largest of these, the huge park/reserve/forest that is the Lainzer Tiergarten. This sea of trees on the western edge of Vienna is approximately 7.5 times the area of Hampstead Heath (I googled it) and therefore approaches the area of the entirety of central Vienna (say, districts 1-9). It has various wild inhabitants, deer, horned sheep, wild boar, and all the other commoner inhabitants of european woodland.
In comparison to the rest of Vienna's green spaces, the Tiergarten is a little trickier to reach. It can only be entered through a series of gates studded round its vast perimeter. One of these, the Nikolaitor, is a short walk from the end of the U4 line, and it was here (after a brief but successful reconnaissance a few weeks ago with Ash) that I attempted to visit on Saturday. Alas, my google skills had failed me, and I had not noticed that between November and February a large part of the Tiergarten is closed to visitors for winter. This meant a locked Nikolaitor and a disappointed me. However, I turned my trip around by hopping back on the U4 to Schoenbrunn, to enjoy nature of a more regimented kind. Although I have as yet remained untempted by its palatial interior, the park at Schoenbrunn is a wonderful place, filled with majestic avenues of trees and over the top architecture, as well as tourists and squirrels. On a late, slightly misty autumn day as the sun goes down, it's a pretty nice place to be! Here are a few electronic images wot I put on the internet for you.
Today I set out earlier to get to the Lainzer Tor, the only gate that remains open at this time of year. This required taking two buses, an underground train and a tram, a pretty massive trek by viennese standards. Unfortunately it turns out that most of the Tiergarten is also sealed off during winter closure, leaving only an area probably just less than one Hampstead Heath to wander around in. So, a full exploration will have to wait for spring. But! What amazing colours! And some lovely big meadows with mist hovering over them. Here's the odd picture.
Hope you enjoy the photos, if it is still autumning where you live, get out and look at some trees!
Der Tom
* I freely acknowledge that several of my friends are definitely not included in this category. Take, for example, ex-housemate and current friend Ed Taylor, who loves decaying leaf matter so much his website is named for it (Okay actually his favourite thing is the fungi that may feed on said leaf matter, BUT WHATEVER).
Not so in Vienna. As befits a city which can boast that 50% of its area is green space, there are several places in and around the city which really encourage some joyful autumnal wandering. This weekend I attempted to explore the largest of these, the huge park/reserve/forest that is the Lainzer Tiergarten. This sea of trees on the western edge of Vienna is approximately 7.5 times the area of Hampstead Heath (I googled it) and therefore approaches the area of the entirety of central Vienna (say, districts 1-9). It has various wild inhabitants, deer, horned sheep, wild boar, and all the other commoner inhabitants of european woodland.
In comparison to the rest of Vienna's green spaces, the Tiergarten is a little trickier to reach. It can only be entered through a series of gates studded round its vast perimeter. One of these, the Nikolaitor, is a short walk from the end of the U4 line, and it was here (after a brief but successful reconnaissance a few weeks ago with Ash) that I attempted to visit on Saturday. Alas, my google skills had failed me, and I had not noticed that between November and February a large part of the Tiergarten is closed to visitors for winter. This meant a locked Nikolaitor and a disappointed me. However, I turned my trip around by hopping back on the U4 to Schoenbrunn, to enjoy nature of a more regimented kind. Although I have as yet remained untempted by its palatial interior, the park at Schoenbrunn is a wonderful place, filled with majestic avenues of trees and over the top architecture, as well as tourists and squirrels. On a late, slightly misty autumn day as the sun goes down, it's a pretty nice place to be! Here are a few electronic images wot I put on the internet for you.
Today I set out earlier to get to the Lainzer Tor, the only gate that remains open at this time of year. This required taking two buses, an underground train and a tram, a pretty massive trek by viennese standards. Unfortunately it turns out that most of the Tiergarten is also sealed off during winter closure, leaving only an area probably just less than one Hampstead Heath to wander around in. So, a full exploration will have to wait for spring. But! What amazing colours! And some lovely big meadows with mist hovering over them. Here's the odd picture.
Hope you enjoy the photos, if it is still autumning where you live, get out and look at some trees!
Der Tom
* I freely acknowledge that several of my friends are definitely not included in this category. Take, for example, ex-housemate and current friend Ed Taylor, who loves decaying leaf matter so much his website is named for it (Okay actually his favourite thing is the fungi that may feed on said leaf matter, BUT WHATEVER).
Saturday, 22 October 2011
On the racial segregation of windows
I have admired Hundertwasser for a while, ever since seeing the incredible incinerator at Spittelau in Vienna, but until last week I had not visited his other two architectural masterpieces here. The museum of his life and work and the series of flats called the Hundertwasserhaus are a stunning example of this artist's style and ideas, utterly different from their surroundings, but designed not to visually impress (although they certainly do) but to serve the needs of their inhabitants (both human and tree).
The above quote is a good indication of Vienna-born Hundertwasser's incredible talent for manifestos and declarations. Although these incorporate a good deal of the revolutionary and belligerent language one often finds in published and signed artistic outbursts, Friedrich Hundertwasser manages, by virtue of his obvious desire to make the modern world habitable for humans again, to come across as relevant and compassionate, rather than as awkward for the sake of it. Although he is deadly serious, there is a good natured and poetic hint in his writing, which I think is conveyed well by this short excerpt from an piece he wrote about stamps and stamp collecting (himself having designed a large number for various countries and organisations):
''A stamp must experience its destiny. A true stamp must feel the tongue of its sender when its glue is licked. It must experience the dark inside of the letterbox. The stamp must bear the postmark, it must feel the Postman's hand - a stamp that has not been sent on a letter is not a stamp as it has never lived. It is a precious piece of art that reaches everybody as a present from afar. The stamp must bear witness to culture, beauty and human creativity. The most viable mark of national identity becomes the most effective way to convey the message of harmony"
The artworks inside the Hundertwasser museum are brightly coloured and often naive seeming, with no sense of perspective or particular attention to accurate details, but the sheer energy of the compositions is really something else. However in many ways, I don't love Hundertwasser because he made really cool pictures (although he did). I love him because he dedicated himself to pointing out the unnatural eccentricities of modern life and the necessity of living closer to nature in the future for our physical and mental wellbeing, and because he made practical suggestions as to how we might go about it.
Consider: Hundertwasser promoted the idea of Baummieter, 'tree tenants', who would inhabit their own flats, outfitted for the needs of the tenant with waterproofing, open windows and deep soil. Every street would have trees projecting out into it at every level, and every building would have a roof of soil and vegetation. In summer these trees provide shade, shelter from rain showers, and a trap for the unhealthy ultrafine particles which continually plague the lungs of every city dweller. In the dark of winter, the leaves fall away and so we are left with a view of the sky. Throughout the year water can be channeled into the dwellings of the trees to be filtered before reaching the drains of the city. If any of this seems familiar it is because in today's densely populated and climate change threatened world, where over 50% of the world population lives in a city, the idea of a vertical garden and city agriculture is at the forefront of many forward thinking planners' minds.
Hundertwasser also believed that the straight line was a thing of the devil, and that flat floors were made to accommodate machines, not humans. For this reason the museum of his work famously boasts a serious of undulating floors to ensure that you have to use your full complement senses to get around. 'It is good to walk on uneven floors and regain our human balance'. This too might seem familiar, following studies examining the effect of hard, flat flooring on the development of our joints and muscles*.
Hundertwasser travelled often, including several long voyages in his boat 'Regentag' or 'rainy day', so called because of his love for the rich colours of a wet day. This boat took him as far as New Zealand, where he fell in love with the abundance of greenery and nature on show in the country, even designing a possible alternative flag for it. In his later years he spent 6 months of the year in a small house there, and is now buried there according to his wishes, straight in the ground, under a tree. I think it is this fact which gets at why I think Hundertwasser was so interesting. Yes he was a fabulously wealthy artist given to rather naive sounding proclamations, but what sets him apart is the amount of effort he went to to put his ideas into practice, from building blocks of flats with tree tenants to researching and implementing composting toilets.
Hundertwasser believed that the design and decoration of a house should begin AFTER the first tenants move in, because how can you design a house for somebody, they need to have free reign to change it as they wish. That is something that never struck me as strange about the way we treat design and buildings, and something I am grateful that Hundertwasser and his buildings brought to my attention!
You can all use the internet, I encourage you to check him out! Here are my own photos from my visit and some wandering I did afterwards (summary: Vienna continues to be very pretty).
Der Tom
*this is one of those things I'm sure I have read in a New Scientist somewhere, but it is listing dangerously into unjustified 'everybody knows' territory. I did some googling to look for literature or articles, but getting the right combination of words proved near-impossible. If anyone has any concrete evidence (for OR against) my wild claim, please let me know!
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Wienerwald
This post is basically only here to point you towards the pictures I took on my hike through the Wienerwald about 10 days or so back. Looking back at the photos now is odd, because in the intervening time the average temperature has dropped over 10 degrees and it is now grey and occasionally rainy for whole days at a time. The benefits of this are that when I went on a walk to mostly the same places as are in this album on Sunday, it was a completely different experience, with copious edible and non-edible fungi and the surprise discovery of FIRE SALAMANDERS on three separate occasions...
Other things wot I have done: carried on being officially a PhD student. It's still pretty great. More importantly, I have consumed a lot more beer than normal, because Ed's advent in town meant that we needed to rekindle his memories of Austrian breweries. I guess the reason I don't normally go to them so often is that I am safe in the knowledge that they will always be there when I want them. This is a pretty reassuring fact.
On Saturday I FINALLY had the opportunity to watch a performance by the Manuel Legris- headed Vienna Staatsoper Ballet, featuring everyone's favourite ballet dancer and friend, Ash! The performance was a series of 4 pieces, half originally choreographed by one George Ballanchine, the other by Jerome Robbins. Of course these names meant nothing to me at the beginning of the performance, but now I am very much impressed. I find super traditional, greek god and fairy based ballet to be a little hard to swallow, it is hard to be emotionally affected and drawn in to dancing when you are distracted by how the plot seems to be solely designed to entertain princes and princesses with lots of money and free time. Needless to say this had nothing to do with that type of ballet, even the more traditional style pieces gave you space to interpret the dance yourself and, frankly, just sit there open mouthed at how impressive it all was.
My favourite piece was the ballet 'Glass Pieces', set to music by Philip Glass (such as this piece of genius). Describing what actually happened in the ballet seems pretty pointless, but it made me think of computers and cities and communist utopias and martial arts and it also made me really addicted to listening to Philip Glass. All results which are not necessarily expected when one sets out to watch a ballet!
The best thing about the whole evening (apart from finally seeing a longstanding friend and fomer Mitbewohner do the thing he has trained to do since he was 11) was that whatever happened on stage, I was always just as excited to see what the heck would happen next! Surprises are great, especially when they are good.
Bis bald, der Tom.
Other things wot I have done: carried on being officially a PhD student. It's still pretty great. More importantly, I have consumed a lot more beer than normal, because Ed's advent in town meant that we needed to rekindle his memories of Austrian breweries. I guess the reason I don't normally go to them so often is that I am safe in the knowledge that they will always be there when I want them. This is a pretty reassuring fact.
On Saturday I FINALLY had the opportunity to watch a performance by the Manuel Legris- headed Vienna Staatsoper Ballet, featuring everyone's favourite ballet dancer and friend, Ash! The performance was a series of 4 pieces, half originally choreographed by one George Ballanchine, the other by Jerome Robbins. Of course these names meant nothing to me at the beginning of the performance, but now I am very much impressed. I find super traditional, greek god and fairy based ballet to be a little hard to swallow, it is hard to be emotionally affected and drawn in to dancing when you are distracted by how the plot seems to be solely designed to entertain princes and princesses with lots of money and free time. Needless to say this had nothing to do with that type of ballet, even the more traditional style pieces gave you space to interpret the dance yourself and, frankly, just sit there open mouthed at how impressive it all was.
My favourite piece was the ballet 'Glass Pieces', set to music by Philip Glass (such as this piece of genius). Describing what actually happened in the ballet seems pretty pointless, but it made me think of computers and cities and communist utopias and martial arts and it also made me really addicted to listening to Philip Glass. All results which are not necessarily expected when one sets out to watch a ballet!
The best thing about the whole evening (apart from finally seeing a longstanding friend and fomer Mitbewohner do the thing he has trained to do since he was 11) was that whatever happened on stage, I was always just as excited to see what the heck would happen next! Surprises are great, especially when they are good.
Bis bald, der Tom.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Lange Nacht der Museen
One thing I had been looking forward to ever since I knew for sure I was going to be in Vienna in October was getting another crack at the long night of the museums. For €13 you get entry to as many museums as you wish to enter between the hours of 6pm and 1am. You are unlikely to run out, over 100 museums take part in Vienna alone and 660+ in all of Austria.
There are many approaches to be taken with such an opportunity. Some hold that you should go to the most ludicrous museums possible, safe in the knowledge that if the snow globe museum isn't very good then you didn't lose out. Others use it as an excuse to try and rack up the most money saved, visiting the big Vienna museums for the price of entry to one. Whichever strategy one chooses, a prospective 7 hours of museum viewing does require a strategy. If you think about it, that's about as many hours on your feet as a pretty reasonable day hike, and you wouldn't just wander off into the hills without a plan, would you? Oh alright you probably would, but this is MUSEUMS we're talking about.
This year I went for a slightly more focussed approach than my first year, as I have already been to a number of the bigger museums several times, and I have had the luxury of time to work out what I have missed out on. I started by going to the museum literally 2 minues walk from my flat, because it felt rude not to. It is the Austrian Museum of 'Volkskunde' which literally translates as folklore but really it is a museum of austrian ethnology sort of thing. Ie they study what people were like in the past and how attitudes change, from what they wrote and what they made, ate off, read, played, etc. It was a cool spin on a normal museum, as I don't tend to think about what objects in museums are telling me about how popular attitudes and prejudices changed. One forgets that people from the past were just as susceptible to misinformation and misplaced countryside nostalgia as anyone is today...
THEN I went to the Austrian National Bank (10 minutes from my house) for a brief but entertaining visit where I saw a €100,000 coin and lifted a 12.5kg / €500,000 gold bar. Cool! I made an aborted attempt to check out a telescope which was too overcrowded, and then by way of a classic tram that was out for the night, made my way back towards the heart of Museum-Vienna. I have always wanted to go into the Secession building, a beautiful piece of Jugendstil architecture, but I've never felt that the size was worth the price, especially seeing how likely it was to contain incomprehensible conceptual art. Well, it did, but it also contains the greatest piece by Gustav Klimt I've ever seen. The beethoven frieze wasn't even ever supposed to be anything but a decoration for an exhibition, but the figures in it are beautiful, the (to me) normally strange gold-and-pattern colour scheme of Klimt works really well here, and all the mythological creatures/demons/temptations etc are brilliantly done. I'd probably pay full price just to go stare at it again!
Continuing the theme of hellish creatures, I met up with Ash and I directed him to the picture gallery of the academy of visual arts to see the epic Heironymus Bosch masterpiece, the Last Judgement Triptych. I do not use epic unadvisedly. It is three panels, one of eden, one of earth ending in fire, and one of hell. The backgrounds of fiery black mountains stretch infinitely into the distance, in the skies above heaven the angels are duelling, and everywhere genuinely horrific, twisted but faintly comic creatures or ex-humans are crawling out of, through or around things as people are trapped in spiked cages or simply swallowed up by the ground. Basically, if I were a 15th century peasant and I saw it, I would go to church every day for the rest of my life. AMAZING.
So many hours in museum mode can be tiring, so we dropped in to the Heldenplatz and bought huge Krapfen. Which have a silly name if you're english but actually they are Austria's version of filled doughnuts. And instead of those ones you get in Tesco which are over-sugary doughy rubbish, these were light, sweet, satisfying apricot jam filled pieces of genius. So good I sort of didn't regret not buying a langos...
Finally we headed over to the Leopoldsmuseum to take in their huge exhibition of Egon Schiele paintings (After I forced a 15 minute detour to see the ever wonderful meteorite room in the natural history museum..). Egon Schiele was a genius expressionist painter, but his paintings and drawings of humans distorted into gangly, ungainly caricatures of the traditional artist's nude are not what one would call relaxing. The amount of awkwardness he can portray in his truly unique style, with pose as much as colour and his jittery but somhow still purposeful lines is admirable from an art point of view, but you aren't ever going to put him on your wall. There was also a nice selection of other german expressionists too though, so it wasn't all tortured nude people.
And with that my feet nearly fell of and I limped home, having thoroughly though only temporarily sated my culture-lust.
Tune in sometime soon for a brief account of how the next day I decided to rest my feet by going for a hike in the Wienerwald!
Der Tom.
PS some photos in the usual place.
There are many approaches to be taken with such an opportunity. Some hold that you should go to the most ludicrous museums possible, safe in the knowledge that if the snow globe museum isn't very good then you didn't lose out. Others use it as an excuse to try and rack up the most money saved, visiting the big Vienna museums for the price of entry to one. Whichever strategy one chooses, a prospective 7 hours of museum viewing does require a strategy. If you think about it, that's about as many hours on your feet as a pretty reasonable day hike, and you wouldn't just wander off into the hills without a plan, would you? Oh alright you probably would, but this is MUSEUMS we're talking about.
This year I went for a slightly more focussed approach than my first year, as I have already been to a number of the bigger museums several times, and I have had the luxury of time to work out what I have missed out on. I started by going to the museum literally 2 minues walk from my flat, because it felt rude not to. It is the Austrian Museum of 'Volkskunde' which literally translates as folklore but really it is a museum of austrian ethnology sort of thing. Ie they study what people were like in the past and how attitudes change, from what they wrote and what they made, ate off, read, played, etc. It was a cool spin on a normal museum, as I don't tend to think about what objects in museums are telling me about how popular attitudes and prejudices changed. One forgets that people from the past were just as susceptible to misinformation and misplaced countryside nostalgia as anyone is today...
THEN I went to the Austrian National Bank (10 minutes from my house) for a brief but entertaining visit where I saw a €100,000 coin and lifted a 12.5kg / €500,000 gold bar. Cool! I made an aborted attempt to check out a telescope which was too overcrowded, and then by way of a classic tram that was out for the night, made my way back towards the heart of Museum-Vienna. I have always wanted to go into the Secession building, a beautiful piece of Jugendstil architecture, but I've never felt that the size was worth the price, especially seeing how likely it was to contain incomprehensible conceptual art. Well, it did, but it also contains the greatest piece by Gustav Klimt I've ever seen. The beethoven frieze wasn't even ever supposed to be anything but a decoration for an exhibition, but the figures in it are beautiful, the (to me) normally strange gold-and-pattern colour scheme of Klimt works really well here, and all the mythological creatures/demons/temptations etc are brilliantly done. I'd probably pay full price just to go stare at it again!
Continuing the theme of hellish creatures, I met up with Ash and I directed him to the picture gallery of the academy of visual arts to see the epic Heironymus Bosch masterpiece, the Last Judgement Triptych. I do not use epic unadvisedly. It is three panels, one of eden, one of earth ending in fire, and one of hell. The backgrounds of fiery black mountains stretch infinitely into the distance, in the skies above heaven the angels are duelling, and everywhere genuinely horrific, twisted but faintly comic creatures or ex-humans are crawling out of, through or around things as people are trapped in spiked cages or simply swallowed up by the ground. Basically, if I were a 15th century peasant and I saw it, I would go to church every day for the rest of my life. AMAZING.
So many hours in museum mode can be tiring, so we dropped in to the Heldenplatz and bought huge Krapfen. Which have a silly name if you're english but actually they are Austria's version of filled doughnuts. And instead of those ones you get in Tesco which are over-sugary doughy rubbish, these were light, sweet, satisfying apricot jam filled pieces of genius. So good I sort of didn't regret not buying a langos...
Finally we headed over to the Leopoldsmuseum to take in their huge exhibition of Egon Schiele paintings (After I forced a 15 minute detour to see the ever wonderful meteorite room in the natural history museum..). Egon Schiele was a genius expressionist painter, but his paintings and drawings of humans distorted into gangly, ungainly caricatures of the traditional artist's nude are not what one would call relaxing. The amount of awkwardness he can portray in his truly unique style, with pose as much as colour and his jittery but somhow still purposeful lines is admirable from an art point of view, but you aren't ever going to put him on your wall. There was also a nice selection of other german expressionists too though, so it wasn't all tortured nude people.
And with that my feet nearly fell of and I limped home, having thoroughly though only temporarily sated my culture-lust.
Tune in sometime soon for a brief account of how the next day I decided to rest my feet by going for a hike in the Wienerwald!
Der Tom.
PS some photos in the usual place.
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
It's a hard life
Hi there internet, how are you today?
Over the last week my room has slowly transitioned from floordrobe to fully furnished (ie it has a bed, a desk, some shelves and some drawers). This has been a somewhat arduous not to mention reasonably expensive task, and I hope I don't have to do it again any time soon! I hadn't realised how spoiled I had been up to now by furnished accommodation...
I'll be honest with you, I still haven't really gone out that much, although I have visited the odd restaurant/ beer dispensary with various Vienna friends who have had the decency not to move away (unlike most of my previous acquaintances here). The weather has been monotonously lovely, apart from when it dipped down to 14 or so degrees at the beginning of last week and everyone briefly thought it was the end of the world. We're comfortably above 20 now though.
I went in for lunch with my colleagues (weird to say, even if they do use the word a lot more often in german than in english) last Monday. They seem a very friendly bunch, much given to jokes and silliness, thank god. Not that I'd expect even a bunch of people who had partially left geology behind for the lofty peaks of thermodynamics and materials science to be anything else, really. But it was nice not to feel like I was sitting an exam by talking to them.
As luck would have it, they were planning a small research group seminar at the weekend, so I went along. One of the Professors owned a beautiful wooden house in a valley near Zell am See (Salzburg area) and so it was that a week before even starting I got to hang out with a bunch of geologists in an alpine house, with gorgeous views from every window. Also there was beer, schnapps, bread, cheese and meat. Oh, and progress reports from various students and postdocs on their research to date.
Although all the talks were pretty darn technical, I had at least heard of all the words before, so I didn't feel completely lost. It's really good just to switch my head back into excited about science mode, out of obsessed with furniture and application forms mode. It was also really good to spend such a big chunk of time extensively speaking german. Although it will take a while to get used to the sentence 'and of course Tom's project is looking at (such and such a thing)...' and having everyone look at me, whatever language it happens to be spoken in.
All in all I can't wait to go in tomorrow to start thinking about my own work and someday soon be able to talk about research successes and failures of my own!
Der Tom
Over the last week my room has slowly transitioned from floordrobe to fully furnished (ie it has a bed, a desk, some shelves and some drawers). This has been a somewhat arduous not to mention reasonably expensive task, and I hope I don't have to do it again any time soon! I hadn't realised how spoiled I had been up to now by furnished accommodation...
I'll be honest with you, I still haven't really gone out that much, although I have visited the odd restaurant/ beer dispensary with various Vienna friends who have had the decency not to move away (unlike most of my previous acquaintances here). The weather has been monotonously lovely, apart from when it dipped down to 14 or so degrees at the beginning of last week and everyone briefly thought it was the end of the world. We're comfortably above 20 now though.
I went in for lunch with my colleagues (weird to say, even if they do use the word a lot more often in german than in english) last Monday. They seem a very friendly bunch, much given to jokes and silliness, thank god. Not that I'd expect even a bunch of people who had partially left geology behind for the lofty peaks of thermodynamics and materials science to be anything else, really. But it was nice not to feel like I was sitting an exam by talking to them.
As luck would have it, they were planning a small research group seminar at the weekend, so I went along. One of the Professors owned a beautiful wooden house in a valley near Zell am See (Salzburg area) and so it was that a week before even starting I got to hang out with a bunch of geologists in an alpine house, with gorgeous views from every window. Also there was beer, schnapps, bread, cheese and meat. Oh, and progress reports from various students and postdocs on their research to date.
Although all the talks were pretty darn technical, I had at least heard of all the words before, so I didn't feel completely lost. It's really good just to switch my head back into excited about science mode, out of obsessed with furniture and application forms mode. It was also really good to spend such a big chunk of time extensively speaking german. Although it will take a while to get used to the sentence 'and of course Tom's project is looking at (such and such a thing)...' and having everyone look at me, whatever language it happens to be spoken in.
All in all I can't wait to go in tomorrow to start thinking about my own work and someday soon be able to talk about research successes and failures of my own!
Der Tom
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Repeat Offender
So I moved to Vienna again. Which means more posts on this blog! The fabric of reality likes it much better when what I am writing and where I am writing it agrees with the blog title.
Although literally nobody reading this could have failed to discover this fact, I have in fact moved to Vienna to start a PhD in Geology at the University of Vienna. But that doesn't start for a couple of weeks yet, so I have had plenty of time to get my doing stuff shoes on and, well, do stuff. Note that this isn't the kind of scintillating, picture filled cultural voyaging stuff, rather the travelling to offices to get things signed, opening bank accounts, getting SIM cards and buying furniture stuff.
Currently (well, until Tuesday if the delivery counter at Ikea are to be believed) my living quarters consist of a very spacious (14 square meters) room with nothing in it apart from variously strewn about belongings and a matress I'm borrowing of a flatmate. I like it because a) it is a roof over my head, which wasn't a certainty a month ago and b) because it is central enough to be near what feels like EVERYTHING. I haven't adjusted out of London mode yet, being able to reach pretty much anywhere in central Vienna within half an hour and some of the most impressive architecture and parks of the Ringstrasse in around 15 minutes leads me to occasionally giggle under my breath like a mad man while I am (briefly) on the way to places. I'm getting to use the tram a lot here as well, which is mostly just nice because it is fun to go in trams.
There is a kitchen, WITH an oven and WITHOUT any form of shower/ bath etc (unfortunately as I discovered while property hunting, that latter is not a given). My flatmates seem very nice, obviously one of their best features being the fact that they are fluent in german. Our conversations havent ranged too widely yet, partly because they are both very busy working and studying for their exams. Thus is revealed the downside of the Austrian 'choose when you want to do your exam from these three dates' policy, you may be able to postpone your exam, but then you have to do a bunch of revision in September just before the next year starts....
We have had the odd conversation about how great Europe is and how english people are lame stick in the muds for not hanging out in it as often, and I promise I didn't have that conversation JUST to piss off Peter... I will say that I learned you can choose to go abroad to study for half a year or a full year in another country, when you are only 17 or 18. Even if you don't know the language to start with. When I asked how many people do it, the answer was 'oh, only a few in each year'. Can you imagine if we were allowed to do that in the UK? Would anyone go? I wouldn't have gone.
Aaanyway, I am hoping that having to speak at least a little german every day will go a long way towards improving my casual comprehension. I already learnt the german for semolina! It is Gries / Weizengries, if you were curious.
I could go on about how nice it is here but heck, you already knew that, didn't you?
Der Tom
Although literally nobody reading this could have failed to discover this fact, I have in fact moved to Vienna to start a PhD in Geology at the University of Vienna. But that doesn't start for a couple of weeks yet, so I have had plenty of time to get my doing stuff shoes on and, well, do stuff. Note that this isn't the kind of scintillating, picture filled cultural voyaging stuff, rather the travelling to offices to get things signed, opening bank accounts, getting SIM cards and buying furniture stuff.
Currently (well, until Tuesday if the delivery counter at Ikea are to be believed) my living quarters consist of a very spacious (14 square meters) room with nothing in it apart from variously strewn about belongings and a matress I'm borrowing of a flatmate. I like it because a) it is a roof over my head, which wasn't a certainty a month ago and b) because it is central enough to be near what feels like EVERYTHING. I haven't adjusted out of London mode yet, being able to reach pretty much anywhere in central Vienna within half an hour and some of the most impressive architecture and parks of the Ringstrasse in around 15 minutes leads me to occasionally giggle under my breath like a mad man while I am (briefly) on the way to places. I'm getting to use the tram a lot here as well, which is mostly just nice because it is fun to go in trams.
There is a kitchen, WITH an oven and WITHOUT any form of shower/ bath etc (unfortunately as I discovered while property hunting, that latter is not a given). My flatmates seem very nice, obviously one of their best features being the fact that they are fluent in german. Our conversations havent ranged too widely yet, partly because they are both very busy working and studying for their exams. Thus is revealed the downside of the Austrian 'choose when you want to do your exam from these three dates' policy, you may be able to postpone your exam, but then you have to do a bunch of revision in September just before the next year starts....
We have had the odd conversation about how great Europe is and how english people are lame stick in the muds for not hanging out in it as often, and I promise I didn't have that conversation JUST to piss off Peter... I will say that I learned you can choose to go abroad to study for half a year or a full year in another country, when you are only 17 or 18. Even if you don't know the language to start with. When I asked how many people do it, the answer was 'oh, only a few in each year'. Can you imagine if we were allowed to do that in the UK? Would anyone go? I wouldn't have gone.
Aaanyway, I am hoping that having to speak at least a little german every day will go a long way towards improving my casual comprehension. I already learnt the german for semolina! It is Gries / Weizengries, if you were curious.
I could go on about how nice it is here but heck, you already knew that, didn't you?
Der Tom
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