Second week, Uni, Dancing, Bike and Transport.

Is was a nice week filled with new experience. Since you all have read about what happend on Sunday I'll start on Monday. (And skip the politics) Spoiler alert: one of the two sides has lost (that's the last I'll say about politics). Ahh yes and I can't find where I first named Jess but anyway this is a link to her blog http://dustydandelion.blogspot.co.uk/

Monday. The start of a brand new week and also the start of college. The first day starts early. 8 am who decided classes should start at 9. Anyway living close to UoE has its advantages as will become clear on Tuesday. First class was exciting. We have to build a robot. It will be a simple one that can race around picking and avoiding various things. After class we had to go to the lab to pickup or robotkit and given that I am a member of the Monday class could start right away on building it. Then again after a while I had to leave I wanted to pickup my first student-card of this year (actually my second still got a dutch one :)) and want to arrange for a student travel card as well. The latter will only be for a week because if everything goes to plan I'm getting a bike on Sunday so I could cycle to HW every time and save a lot of time. After getting my bus card I had to travel to HW anyway (hence getting a bus card). To say the least this trip made me realize the importance of a bike. Came to HW missing my mentor so I couldn't meet with him. Ah well had another meeting anyway so do that first then. Nope the second person I wanted to meet was in a meeting herself. Okay make the most of my time and get some explanation on a machine learning technique called deep neural networks (if I'm correct). I will post some more about this on a third blog when the time comes. After the explanation I was a bit late for my second meeting so I had to run around the building to try and find her. This meeting was for being a lab help. Or to put it differently to see if being a lab help fits into my schedule. From now on I'm a lab help for a course called Praxis. It's about creating documents and reviewing them. Great fun to do. After this I could return home for some cooking or to make an attempt to cook. The veggies weren't quite ready yet only my stomach didn't agree with the readiness of the veggies.

Tuesday. At some stage I'm thinking lectures might have thought we don't care where the students are coming from but we start when we want to. So this time it was getting out of bed earlier than before. At 7 am. Got into HW too early but well with the time schedule of yesterday I'm not complaining about the speed of the bus. Just my stupidity of getting it too early. This course is somewhat related to the stuff I had a couple of years ago only this time there is a lot more mathematics involved. Which for me is great because it explains a bit of the background of the stuff that is happening. This was the biggest annoyance I had with the courses in the Netherlands. After the course I had to run to a meeting and arriving there 15 min late. Ah well I got to see all of my colleagues from last year so that was great. By now it was nearing 12 so lunch time. Apart from dinner lunch might be one of the most important time of a day for me and luckily I was at HW so that meant a better lunch than at UoE. I can make a small comparison between the sandwiches but haven't tried all the food places at UoE. So after lunch getting a bus back to UoE to work on the robot again. We are making some great progress getting a base with wheels connected. But yeah that was actually it for Tuesday.

Wednesday same old story for getting up. Thankfully it was now one hour course one off one course. Actually that was the plan but at the start of the second course I found out that it wasn't held. Ah well lets go for lunch :). After lunch I travelled back to do some laundry. The days are going much quicker now.

Thursday. Finally got some more time to sleep since my first course is held at UoE and not at HW today. When I saw the first couple of slides I thought I could have had more sleep and skipped the lecture. Ah well. After the lecture it was straight to HW for another course (different than that of Wednesday).  I must say I like the thinking of this lecturer. He literally said I'm not a morning person so I'm not giving the lectures on Friday. Great that solves one problem. After this and lunch went back home to prepare my self for dancing. Yes I'm dancing and like it. Different that last year when I did some Cuban style dancing I'm now going for the Scottish style. Part of this is Highland style and that is hard to follow but great to watch. So I need to learn Highland style. And if anyone is wondering no I don't have a kilt (yet). Given that I was dancing from 7 to 10 it was a long day and my bed definitely looked nice when I entered my room.

Friday. Set my alarm for 9 am and woke up 7 minutes before. Great finally got some extra sleep. Today is lab help day. Actually it was great fun to do. Learnt somethings myself as well. Of course after the course it was already time for lunch and in most cases at HW I can drag some people with me to lunch which makes it always better. After lunch I had to travel back to UoE for working on the robot. We finally got the base together and now just need to programme to work. To make student life even harder I had to go out for drinks and dinner with some people of my group and some other random people. Which is a very hard life. Anyways that was basically Friday in a nutshell.

Saturday. Now you think after having some sleep deprivation I could sleep longer today. Only my mind didn't want to. So around 8 am I was wide awake. Ah well went with Jess to the Farmers' market in the morning to buy some veggies and fish for tonight. Have some veggies that I need to finish anyway. But same as last week now chocolate stall at the market there is something fishy about this. Had to buy some shoelaces because mine were deciding to split either in three laces or in four although to four would have taken a week longer. Saturday afternoon there was a beer tasting in the park from the home-brew society. Great way to meet new people and a good excuse to drink beer. (What would the whisky society be like :)). Tonight going out to BrewDogs again made a plan on Friday with two colleagues to go of which (if I'm correct) neither of them have ever been there and because Jess knows how to get there she will be my guide for the evening. And I was correct about neither of the two having been there. Only one had to cancel at the last moment which is truly a shame. Anyway after a couple of lovely beers we went home again for some shut eye.

Sunday. Sleeping in a bit finally. So I said to David lets go for a run today. Which ment that I would go later as I normally would but apparently it isn't a big problem here there are always people around no matter what time you go. After the run and a shower I had to go into town again to book a restaurant and to make some pictures. The last couple of days (as in Saturday afternoon and Sunday) we had lovely weather so a great time to take pictures. I'm still not satisfied about the pictures but there will be more good days. When I got back I thought lets sit down for a while and do nothing. Only I got a text to pickup my bike. Being Dutch and being a big kid in general I just had to do it right away. So instead of allowing my feet to rest for a bit I went out again to get the bike. Let them fit my own flat pedals which are to my opinion a lot better than the ones they fitted as a standard. Apart from the pedals I had to get a helmet and a lock. Now I finally got a private way of getting from A to B (or from UoE to HW) and it will even wait for me.  After getting the bike and putting it away safely we (as in Jess and me) went on the hunt for some chocolate and made a nice donation to a very good shop. Thankfully they gave us something in return as well. Now I can rest my feet for a bit and tonight I'll go out for dinner to some Italian place.