Sunday, November 12, 2006

Time to get to work

This coming month is going to a bit more loaded when it comes to homework. I've two group assignments. In one of them, the three of us have 30-page scientific text about car manufacturing (more precisely about optimisation, the best order to produce cars with the different features, like colour or extra equipment, on the same production line) in French which we need to understand and present by a two-page text and presentation, with questions from the teachers in the end. It IS a bit scary. The other assignment is to go out and interview a company about their innovation process and make a 15-page essay about it. We're visiting Caterpillar, the company that builds construction vehicles. This course also includes a written 2-page synthesis on another text plus a presentation of said text, about 21 hours of mandatory lectures AND a test. All this will give 1,75 ECTS which corresponds to approximately one (1!!!) Swedish högskolepoäng. To give a bit of perspective I managed to get 3 ECTS by doing an all-to-easy online French course. You had to work online a bit and then the examination was 2 half-hour tests. Do I need to add that the French are quite new with the credit system?

Despite school having its ups and downs, I still love it here. Yesterday, I had an absolutely lovely evening. I made pizza and kladdkaka with a couple of friends (and DAD, if they show up on several photos it won't necessarily mean we're dating) and after that we joined with a couple of other persons and went out dancing. We manage to find this bar with the kind of music I love I love to dance to and we stayed till closing, which sadly is two o'clock at all bars in France. If you want to continue you need to go to a boite (disco) and the one we found cost €10 (or is it 10€?, comment please). It was free for the ladies though. Makes you think what you're actually paying for...

The ones of you who have visited my photo page lately have seen that I've done some stuff I haven't really written about, like climbing outdoors. My mother asked me when she was here (guess I haven't mentioned that either) what the fun with climbing was, with the sort of tone in her voice suggesting that she personally thinks it's dangerous and unnecessary. I guess it's just the challenge of it all. Managing to do something that first looks impossible. I've already got me a pair of climbing shoes and joined the climbing school attached to the university sport system (which I've described it a bit more in the bottom of this blog entry) so now I can go climbing almost every week-day if I want to. I guess the outdoor season will soon be finished but there's always the indoor wall.

I've also gone to Paris with a couple of friends from school. It was nice.

Then my mother came here last Thursday. It was also nice.

I hope to go Nice before the end of the year here.

Ha. Ha. Ha. (I am a little bit tired today.) Paris trip and my mother's visit was possible thanks to the vacation we had last week. Write something in the comments section if your curious and wanna know more. Actually, write something anyway. It would be nice to see who's reading this text. What you think of the links, etc. See, I ain't to proud to beg...

Anyway, before I go back to trying to start doing my homework I want to give you a little treat. The window below starts a clip from a concert with Jethro Tull, a group I know absolutely nothing about. However, the song is absolutely brilliant, weird, fluteylicious>, (you'll understand when you see him play...) and generally different from whatever you usually listen to. Listen at least until the flute solo. Later he plays air guitar with it as well...

Tills nästa gång, kram till er alla! (Hugs until next time!)