May 2005 in Review

Devon's Breakdown of May in 30 seconds or less:
May 1 - Arrived in Switzerland, met Simon and moved in to the Schadenmühle at Mellingerstrasse 55
May 2 - Start my exciting new job at Baden-Dättwil under Markus Abplanalp
May 13 -16 - Partied it up in Vienna, Austria and watched Canada lose the World Championship of Hockey
May 26 - 28 - Went to Copenhagen, Denmark and a bit of Sweden for my only holiday with Jay for the year

Quote for the month of May: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' - Brian Hamm
Song for the month of May: Bush - Glycerine
Picture for the month of May:

Beach in Helsingborg, Sweden

Copenhagen, Denmark with Jay

Back at work after my weekend in Copenhagen, Denmark with Jason, my roommate. The country turned out to be a lot more expensive than we thought, and we had to budget quite a bit. On the bright side, Swiss Air just joined with Lufthansa, so now the airline has the best of both worlds. Swiss efficiency and cleanliness and don't forget chocolate, and German hospitality (is that a German trait, I dunno.) Basically what it boils down to is they spoil you on the flight. You can have tons of food, like three servings of the meal and as much swiss chocolate as you can grab. I think the average flight costs about the same as Air Canada, but we get the last minute Wednesday flights which only cost Jay 220 CHF and me 290 CHF (he got the last cheap ticket, oh well) which is amazing for Denmark. Rome was up for 100 CHF round.

Thursday, May 26: We kindof informally walked around and caught the sites at our own pace. There is a long pedestrian walkway through the centre of town that has shops and squares and fountains, and tons of 7-11s. I'm not exaggerating when I say that there is at least one every block.

Rådhus

Canal

In the park

We walked along the canals and ended up in a place called 'Christiania', a kind of free state in the middle of Copenhagen. It's basically its own self contained society, where they say NO to hard drugs, and YES to hash. The main street was called Pusher Street, and you weren't allowed to take photos there. The police pretty much stay away from there. It seemed really safe there too, although we didn't go at night.

Christania

After having a quick beer, we headed back downtown and rested in the hostel for a couple hours (we only had a couple hours sleep because our plane was so early.) For dinner we have some herring, because the only phrase given in Danish in the Lonely Planet guidebook was "Danish herring is much better than Swedish herring." It was wayyy too expensive. Then we headed out downtown to check out the entertainment. We sat on the main canal for a bit and then headed to the Copenhagen Jazz House, where we bought tickets for the show. The show was really good, turned out to be some guys from Harlem, well at least the pianist was.

Copenhagen Jazz House

After the show we were tired out so we headed back to the hostel for the night.

Friday, May 27: We decided to get out of Copenhagen, and we had spent so much money just surviving on Thursday, we had to go to a grocery store and buy a loaf of bread, some buns, and four litres of juice (it was a deal if you got four litres.) We got train tickets and headed up to Helsingor, where Hamlet's Elsingore was set. We walked around the old town there, and then we hopped on a twenty minute ferry over to Sweden, which can be seen from Denmark.

Careful!

Inside Hamlet's 'Kronborg' Castle

Leaving Helsingor

We stayed in Sweden for about an hour and a half, went up to a tower, down to the beach, through the town, we really had no idea where to go.

Helsingborg

Beach in Helsingborg, Sweden

Back in Denmark we got lost on the confusing train system and eventually made it to the beach in Klampenborg around 4:00 PM. There were actually tons of people on the beach, and it was pretty hot, so we stayed until about 6:00 PM when the wind started to be too cold. Back in Copenhagen it was really hot because there was no wind, and we went back to the hostel to drop off our stuff. Since we didn't have nearly enough money to do anything special for dinner, we went to the grocery store and picked up a block of cheese, a bunch of 'Brutalis' beer, and some sausages which we cooked up on the grill at the hostel. It was great.

BBQ

After dinner we found a club where there was no cover, and it was in the sketchy part of town, but was still really cool. Denmark is supposed to be one of the partyingest places in Europe, so we had to check it out. The club was called Vega, and was multiple floors, with a lounge on top. On the main club floor, which was the second, they had live music, a Danish DJ and an African MC doing Reggae style music. It was really cool to go to a club that wasn't pumping top 40 hits like everything in Canada. The place was absolutely packed, even at 2:00 there was a huge line of people trying to get in. The capacity was 1500 according to the poster.

At the club

Saturday, May 28: We realized that we had over stressed about money and now had a bunch of Crowns to get rid of. We did the real Copenhagen tour, with the actual sights like Hans Christian Andersens 'Little Mermaid' and then just walked up and down the pedestrian street and watched the street performers.

Church behind fountain

The Little Mermaid

The highlight was there was a huge festival going on in one of the squares, commemerating some anniversary, but the cool thing was there was a massive free concert for a Danish band called BikStok, which we think means 'Big Stick' because they got excited that one fan brought a giant log to the concert. Heh. We really liked the band, it was a mix of rock, reggae and rap, and it was really original. I'm going to try to download it. The concert went till 6:00 and our plane was at 7 something, so we stayed as long as possible and then booked it to the airport.

BikStok

All in all, Denmark and Sweden were really cool places. I'll have to go see Sweden for more than an hour and a half later on.

Shades and Ribs - Combo of Champions

Tonight Jay, Simon and I decided to do 'Shades and Ribs' because there are cheap sunglasses at H&M and cheap all-you-can eat ribs at Pickwick's.

Grabbin' a brew and ribs at Pickwick's with the new shades on

Vienna, Austria

Back after my first real trip in Europe, to Vienna, Austria. We got on a night train to Austria on Friday, which got us there early Saturday morning. Next time I definitely want a couchette, as it was virtually impossible to sleep in a chair. Quickly dropped our stuff off at the hostel, and Tyler, Nate, Adrienn and I walked around to find some food. After speaking to some old Austrian lady, and remembering the key word 'Frühstück' (breakfast), we eventually found a little place and I got some bacon, excellent eggs and tons of bread. Satisfied, we made our way over to the Schloss Schönbrunn, a summer palace with massive grounds. It was so big, we almost spent three hours just walking around. We also did a little tour of the palace itself, which was pretty interesting. On the grounds, we ran into the rest of the guys that came with us.

Massive Greenhouse

Schloss Schönbrunn

On the palace grounds

Austria group

We got out of the palace grounds and headed down to the market area and I grabbed a beer with Travis. Everybody else wanted to look around the market, but I wanted to catch the World Championship semi-final, Canada vs. Russia. Travis and I asked around, and we found out how to get there. We made it there and looked for tickets, but the scalpers were charging way too much for us. Fortunately, there was a huge tent set up, and it looked like the party there was better anyway. We met up with some Canadians, and watched the game. It was intense, needless to say. The game was over at around 18:45, with the Canadians victorious. The final score was 4-3. After the game we headed back to the hostel to get ready to party. One of the Canadians from Toronto, Manu, at the game had told me about an Irish Pub called Charlie P’s, so we all headed down there. The place was really cool, and we ran into Manu there, and eventually the only people left of the group were Tommy, Travis, and me. We left the pub and grabbed a taxi over to a club called Chelsea, which was supposed to be a good University bar. We ended up partying and celebrating there until it closed, at around five in the morning, and then grabbed the train back to the hostel. Since none of us had keys to the place, we had to throw coins at the window of the room to wake up the other guys to let us in.

Chelsea

On Sunday morning, we headed downtown around noon, and found a place to eat crêpes, and they were amazing. We got one round of hot crêpes with meat and cheeses, and then a few of us got sweet ones for desert. Henri had separated from us to go to church in the morning, but when Richard went to the meeting spot to find him, he wasn’t there. Turned out later he was waiting at a different huge cathedral on the other side of the city. We decided to walk around and check out the centre of Vienna. There was some nice architecture in the city, including the huge gothic cathedral that Henri was supposed to be at.

Gothic Cathedral

After walking around downtown for awhile, we tried to find this museum someone heard about that apparently had no straight lines at all. The idea interested me, but it took us more than two hours just to find the place. It was alright, but most of my interest had passed, and the fact that there were tons of straight lines made it worse. Everyone had heard how awesome the party in the tent was the day before, so this time everyone was excited about making it to the game, the World Championship Final between Canada and the Czech Republic. The intensity at the game was…well I guess intense is a good word. The Czech fans came out in full force, because Vienna is only a few hours from Prague, but we were also surprised by how many Canadian fans there were too. The only thing was that, after talking to them, for every fan from Vancouver or Edmonton or Calgary, there was a fan from Germany or Austria that had just bought the jersey because we were in the finals. Still, though, it was impressive. Unfortunately, this time Canada didn’t do so hot. We lost 3-0. It was totally worth going to the game though. We hung out with the Czech fans celebrating and did some hard swigs of Czech liquor with them.

Go Canada Go!

In the tent

After that, we found a bar downtown called 1516, after the Bavarian purity laws for beer. We hung out there for awhile and talked, and met a guy that owns a Canadian pub in Paris, so I’ll have to check that out. Then we called it a night and headed home.

On Monday, which was a holiday in Switzerland, Travis and I headed out to do a bit of sightseeing. We went down to the parliament area, and there were huge crowds gathered. We weren’t sure what it was, but I think it had something to do with unveiling a ‘new’ Vienna. There were also people crowding the sides of some street, as if they were waiting for a parade or something, but we waited for awhile and nothing happened, so we left. A bit later I started noticing a lot of sporty cars like Ferraris and Porsches and Lotuses driving around covered in decals. We found some parked ones, and found out that the Gumball 3000 was in Vienna.

Gumball 3000

Throughout the day we ran into the cars everywhere. We basically just wandered around all day, seeing the Rathaus (town hall) and a few sights I don’t really remember and eventually ended up at the Museum of Modern Art, which by luck was free for the day for some reason. We walked around until that closed, and then sat on some funny green chairs/tables outside. We had about 3 hours until the train, so we just lay there and then ordered some beer, and then made our way to the train.

Rathaus

Relaxing on the green chairs/tables

On the train, I learned the wrong way to sleep. I tried sleeping spread across two chairs, but my head was hanging slightly in the aisle. A few hours later, I was rudely awakened by luggage smoking me in the head. I was dazed, so quite a few people hit me before I realised what was happening. My head still hurts a bit, but it’s feeling a bit better.

Welcome to Baden, Switzerland

Hello everyone! So far my time here is amazing and I doubt its going to get worse. Everyone I've met is so cool and nice. It's really nice to have a roommate that has been here for a while, because he is helping me out with all the special stuff. Work is pretty interesting, I'm actually not doing the job I applied for, as they need to wait for one of the Italian research centers to catch up on their part of the project. So they stuck me doing a thermodynamics related job, which is the course that everyone except Electrical engineers take. I am learning to map thermo systems by using circuits (using voltages as temperatures and currents as heats.) Enough nerdy stuff though. I got in Sunday night and realized my luggage was locked and the key was in Calgary. Didn't get that open until this morning. I'm pretty settled already, I have a phone at home, a swiss bank account, a year train pass, etc. Last night after work we went to the beer gardens, so nice out, I think it was about 25 degrees. But apparently it's going to snow this weekend, so maybe I'll go skiing or something. I'm heading over to Germany tomorrow to go grocery shopping, it's only 4.60 CHF to get there, so cheap. Anyways, I've already been at work for 12 hours now, so I think I need to go home.