As some of you may know (especially those that visited my room), room 210 at Avenue Pasteur, 102a was not really that big. It was a place to stay, and I did have a nice neighbor, but space-wise less then optimal. Hence, I asked for a bigger room.
I got one.
:) :)
Now I have some space for guests. So, who’s going to be the second non-luxembourgian resident to check out my new room?
PS: new address:
Hugo Jonker
Chambre 113
102a, Avenue Pasteur
L-2311 Luxembourg
Luxembourg
’nuff said.
The plan was to have some visitors over for the Ascencion Day holidays. Since I was in the Netherlands before that anyway, the plan was to all travel to .lu together. Well, there was a slight problem with getting the car we had rented, which through some convoluted but amazingly funny reasoning we managed to turn into a “let’s visit Walibi Flevo today”. So we did, and it was fun — as you can see on the picture :) (top to bottom: Marek (slightly relaxed), Ania (enjoying herself), me (pondering), Klaus (having a blast))
The reason for visiting Walibi was that they had a special discount and extended opening hours. Even though we left at 4 (pm), we managed to do all the roller coasters in the park and even check out the fireworks! Of course, by the time we got back to Eindhoven, it was a bit late to pack everything and continue to Luxembourg, so we went for a short sleep instead. (Incidentally, turns out that I was not the only one who didn’t sleep brilliantly that night. Can’t win ’em all :)
Next morning, redo from start. I.e. start with a nice meal — breakfast this time, not lunch — and then pack and go. Well, I was up early anyway, so I went to get some bread for breakfast. Got back, and then realised that we didn’t have all that much breakfasty stuff. So went back to the store again, and got some more supplies. Came back, we had a nice breakfast (the fresh bread was brilliant!) and then got round to packing. Realised I was missing batteries, which were sorely needed for use with the mp3-player.
Incidentally, if you have a TuneCast or iCast or whatever thingy that converts your mp3 player into a short distance radio station: from Eindhoven until a bit past Luik/Liege, FM 91.8 is available (with incidental hickups, but nothing substantial). After Liege you enter the range of some Luxembourgian station, I have yet to find out which channel works then, although I think somewhere near 107 FM there is something which lasts the rest of the way.
But to continue, I went back to the store for the third time that morning, got my batteries and we got going. Sjouke graciously lended us his apartment, which is very much appreciated since 4 people would be quite a squeeze in mine :)
We installed ourselves there, had a slight miscommunication then which led to us having pasta there (with fruit and boiled in milk, tastes quite different from your regular pasta, but nice), and then went for the dreaded registration and pasta party. Afterwards Ania felt like checking the route — an activity which had a profound distressing effect on my mood. Luckily, as Petr’s tile says,
There is no problem so big that chocolate cannot cure it.
So afterwards I o.d.’ed on chocolate, which lifted my spirits to a new height. So now I am looking forward to this thing again. Will let you know afterwards (eventually) how it went… For now, cross your fingers!
A lot of stuff has happened since my last update. In this post, a focus on the official side of things — the rest is pending pictures :)
As you may know, the Université du Luxembourg is a very young university. As happens with young and dynamic universities, stuff gets done, and then the results are celebrated. First up was the opening of my apartment building (which gives me a good reason to show off once again what a nice building it is!). The Minister of Education dropped by (to put it nicely, he and his secretary of statecame to my house just to shake my hand ;-). There were some talks in Luxembourgian. Turns out that I can follow Luxembourgian only if I sort of know what they are saying — so I understood all the pleasantries, but all the extrapolations for future projects went by. Then we had a tour of the building, and it had quite a bit of surprises for me! We even have an altar hidden in there, and a lecture hall. And of course a nice place for a drink, where they had the drinks.
The next uni.lu event was the first doctorate defense within the CSC research unit (roughly speaking: the CS subgroup of the department of technical sciences here). It was the second or third defense of the university, so there is no set way of how to arrange this. Of course, I am used to those defenses I have seen in the Netherlands, which are quite formal. So you can imagine that a much more informal approach was already quite strange to me. That coupled with the attempt to find a form for such an event really ment that my previous expectations of how a defense is conducted, and what happened here, are quite far apart :) Still, good to see how these things are evolving here.
Third uni.lu event was the opening of our office building, here on an old picture. There was some planning in advance, since a lot of journalists would be invited and this was the ideal chance for CSC to showcase itself to the Luxembourgian world. So, the various subparts of the CSC all prepared nice presentations and what-have-you-not. We participated, I patched up an old poster and took it from .nl with me to hang up. The event was kicked off by official talks by the dean of the department, who was followed by the rector. The rector had quite a long speech in French, talking about short-term work contracts and how it is better for academics to move on. He then wanted to recapture that in English, but somehow missed the mark at times. There were some funny remarks made, but the overall message was quite clear: fixed-term contracts will not be extended — if it is up to the rector. And it seems to be. This has of course been playing a bit longer, and there are varying views on the subject.
After the speeches, there was a round of drinks and a sighting of the building, after which we got back to work. The poster presentation was planned as the final part of the program, and of course the invitees were by then overflowing with information and looking to get home, so that part was skipped.
The final event was the first inaugural speech within CSC, by Leon van der Torre. He gave a nice overview of his planned research. The form was once again different from what I was used to, but by now I was slowly adjusting and expecting differences :)
Enough for now, more updates later!
Recent gaming: acquired a GBA Micro2Micro connection cable, trying it out with Sasa! Mario Kart Advance is the winner until now.
Recent cooking: couscous variants :)