Ghi ghi, I just beat Rogier at chess! :)
For the record, that means that IF he screws up severely in the beginning of the game (sacrificing his queen for a pawn), I manage to just beat him — otherwise he wins.
Still, chess is fun, and a lot more fun if you win :D
Recently: – played: Mario Kart: Double Dash; – watched: Shrek 1, Heroes season 1 end; – read: The Belgariad book 1&2 and The Fionavar Tapestry book 1
I just had a totally wonderful weekend — many thanks to Yohan, Cas & Yen-Ha and Sasa for that! I finally went on a long overdue visit to Zürich to visit Yohan and Cas & Yen-Ha. What I did not know in advance: Zürich is cool! The city feels alive, especially around the lake area and in the old center. Friday evening I had the personal tour of Zürich by Yohan, which cemented my impression (and convinced me to return here once). After a short sleep, Yohan departed and I walked around for myself a bit to find the recommended chocolate store Teuscher.
Now, you may now Lindt, you may have heard of Sprüngli, but if you’ve seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (the one with Gene Wilder in the role of Willy Wonka), you already know the feeling you’ll get upon entering the Teuscher Konditorei. “Who can take a rainbow” indeed!This store is cool! I seriously recommend it to you :) It’s tiny, and they do not have the widest selection in the world, but you do really feel like you would in the candy store in Willy Wonka.
After taking way too long and managing to curb my inital enthusiasm (i.e. I did not buy the whole store, and I did manage to walk out with less than a kilo of chocolate) it was time to visit Cas and a very pregnant Yen-Ha. They are doing wonderful, and it was very, very nice to see the two of them and catch up again. In the evening we explored Zürich-by-night and inevitably this led to some foosball. Cas’ skills haven’t diminished in the slightest, while I learned some new stuff there. We were good enough to provoke a local team into playing us in their real setup (instead of reversing their traditional roles of keeper and forward player). And then we got our asses handed to us, giftwrapped and all.
Well, again a short night later, I met Sasa’s dad downstairs to receive Sasa’s new bike. A decent mountainbike, and I sort of expect that now that the majority of the SaToSS group is bike-mobile, we will inevitably go on some bike tour. (It helps that taking your bike in the train is free in the Luxembourgian trains (CFL) — but remember, there are plenty of trains in Luxembourg by other companies.) I returned to my bed (humongous bed btw) for a bit more sleep, and then Cas & me went out for Zürich in broad daylight, and spending of final Swiss francs. We walked by the lake, saw the Alpes in the distance (cool view!) and walked back to the station. Luckily (considering my surplus of Swiss francs) the Sprüngli Konditorei at the station was open. Nowhere near as nice a store as the Teuscher (I doubt they have truffles that will be categorised by some as “life-altering experiences”, for instance ;-). Bought a magazine to have a bit to read in the train, stressed with getting on the train (they decoupled the first third of the train, where the obvious bike carriage was…). In the end, it all worked out, and then I had a nice, short (5hrs) train ride back home and happened to see the Ardennes on the way.
(yes, I enjoyed the view of the Alpes and the Ardennes on one and the same day. Sometimes I envy my life ;-)
Biking out of the station, towards home, I hit a Portuguese festival at Place Guillaume. Looked like fun, but I wanted to get the bike to Sasa and grab a bit to eat and then catch up on sleep. Getting the bike to Sasa was easy. Turned out he hadn’t eaten as well, so we took our bikes and went into town to find a nice place to eat. First we looked close to the station (did about 45 km/hr getting there :), but just about all places were closed. So we then looked in the center, again many places closed. In the end we ended up at a place called L’entracte. It looked a bit stylish on the outside, and turned out to be even more so on the inside. The food tasted wonderful, and the desserts were a treat to behold (and taste too). This place is going on my ‘OK’-list of restaurants (on the top position in fact). The perfect conclusion to a very, very enjoyable weekend.
Recently played: Mario Kart DS. Recently listened to “From Paris To Berlin” (of course)
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!
Been kind of busy lately. After the bike tour on Saturday, Sjouke, Baptiste and me went for a hiking tour in Little Swiss (photos, route description+map+elevation chart). Baptiste had found this site detailing nice walks. We walked for about 6 hours :) Well, it was quite a challenging road at times. But it was a very nice day for a walk, and we did have a very nice picnic after a third of the way. Still, perhaps wine is not the best option if you’re still going to be marching some distance…
Tuesday, Baptiste & me went to attend Die Dreigroschenoper — hadn’t heard of it before myself either. Following a musical in a foreign language (German) is hard. It’s even harder if they switch sometimes to another foreign language (French) — in mid-dialog. Yes they do. They will be talking with four people, and three of them are German speakers, but if they talk to the fourth, out comes the French. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem attached to a specific role or person on stage — characters who were addressed in French previously, were suddenly speaking German…
But anyway, nice to see once, but not brilliant.
That’s it for now, talk to you all later.
Running: today: ouch. Gaming: not at all. Cooking: y’day: tomato soup; today: hutspot(?). Music: Clannad – I will find you.
Imagine this: you wake up in the morning (slowly), rouse yourself (without coffee! Ha!), get your laundry going, change into your sportsgear and just before heading out, your best friend calls. “Hi, you doing anything this afternoon?”
– “Not really, no”
“Okay, then we’re dropping by!”
How’s that for a cool start to your day??
Of course, I start running into phone trouble the moment I am relying on the damned thing :( — i.e. when expecting visitors. Apparently the damn sim-placeholder isn’t tight enough, and thus the sims can shift around a bit. What is worse, is that they do (shift around that is) — something the phone does not appreciate. Right now I am testing patch 0.01-beta (in normal words: a piece of paper stuck behind the simcard in order to fill up the holes). Since I am not 100% convinced this is the origin of the problem, and definitely less than 100% convinced that the current patch is sufficient remedy should this suspected leeway indeed be the origins of the crashes, expect me to be hard to reach phone-wise for the coming time.
That rant sort of interfered with me explaining how cool it is to have visitors. Well, trust me on this, it is :)
Last game played: Wario Ware: MicroGame$
Trust me, sleep is overrated. Who needs more than 5 hours of sleep anyway? See, the thing is, the holiday sort of hit sleeping time a bit. Going to lux has done little to improve this — we have the SaToSS compositionality workshop here, with all sorts of cool people to meet. Hence: long days, longer evenings. Well, luckily I found one area where I could save time. You guessed it!
Well, to be honest, I don’t get a chance that often to see Cas nowadays, so sleeping is the lesser alternative then anyway. It was very nice to see him (he attended the comp. workshop) and hear about Zurich, Yen Ha and their impending happiness (i.e. how Yen’s pregnancy is going). Glad to hear that things are going more smoothly!
Anyway, as you can see from the timestamp on this post, it’s time to go to sleep and work some more tomorrow. I should actually make my fruity salady lunch, then again, there are more things I should actually do :)
Now: sleeping!
But first things first, let’s start to mention that Friday was “kei-goed”, did some nice shopping for .lu together with Ronald. Found myself a small spare bike, so all of you who are coming over once: you’ll have some transportation!
But anyway: after dinner (yes, I can mess up rice :) (nonetheless it still all tasted nice, and the dessert was cool) it turned out that Ronald did have some drinks with alcohol in them left… well, not anymore :) So the next day started out slow — woke up, gamed a bit on my newly acquired LotR: 3rd Age (cool gamecube game, I have been meaning to get that for ages, found it together with Ronald for an affordable price) and then went on to more active things.
In the evening, after a lovely dinner, me and Ania went to Verdi’s Requiem — impressive. Got back just after the start of Running Man, which is ok as far as Schwarzenegger movies go. And it ended just in time for us to catch The Departed in the cinema :) That was a cool movie. The night ended with chatting a bit and a taste of some russian drinks (after we managed to get the annoying bottle cap removed, it turned out that the drink wasn’t worthy of that effort… the company however, more than made up for that :)
Sunday I just checked out LotR: 3rd Age a bit (still cool!), Super Mario World (saving is broken in my copy :() and went to see Bro. We had a nice improvised dinner (greek yoghurt works very well as a sour cream replacement :), tried to check out a movie but were to tired. We got to 00:38 of resevoir dogs — further than any of us two had ever seen it before :)
And that definitely is enough for now.
Such a wonderful weekend deserves a blog entry, so here is one to commemmorate it! Yeah, I could write what happened – but that would never do justice to it. So no details :P
Okay, in a nutshell: dinner at the Thai, movies, talking, sleeping, breakfast, open market, new saddle, fitness, cardio, dinner, zouk/samba/salsa, “bloody diamond”, sleeping, breakfast, climbing, dinner, work, sleep.