We aren't going home! At least not yet.

When writing this it is either Saturday or Sunday. Given that the message gets published on Sunday I would say: happy new week!!

Monday. I finally got some extra sleep. After the courses in the morning I had to edit my report for another course, which was due on Monday. The feedback I got on Friday was that my idea was to broad. So let me tell a bit about the idea I had. Last week the acoustic camera arrived and I thought it would be a good idea to put the thing to use and to try how it would work with some machine learning algorithms. As I said this was to broad and I have to concentrate on the machine learning instead of the use of the camera. Well I'm pretty stubborn so I'll figure out a way to use the camera for the same project not sure how but I'll figure it out.

Tuesday. A pretty standard day of cycling to uni having some courses and going back again. In the evening it was my time to cook so I made some chili with as special ingredients chocolate, cinnamon and peanut butter. The latter added some nice twist to the dish. I thought about going to sleep early but ended up going to sleep pretty late. One of my housemates locked herself out and texted me to notify me about that.

Wednesday. Now it gets more interesting. Normal classes in the morning but around lunch time we had a video conference with UoE. This because we didn't want to cycle back and forth between two unis. In my case it would mean that it cycled twice between home and uni. So this was pretty interesting to see and do. We could control the camera on their end and they could control ours. So time to play :). Later in the afternoon was my real reason why I didn't want to cycle back and forth. I was going to an inaugural lecture by a professor who does something with squirrels. Given that one of my friends is one of his PhDs it was a bit difficult to mis this if you know what I mean. I new a bit about the subject the friend explained it very well to me but the professor clarified some additional things and was able to show the results of some of my friend's models.

Thursday. One lab got cancelled so that meant going home earlier than normal. Which is nice when you have to cook and allow yourself more time to do this. That's why I heated up the chili from Tuesday :). After which I still had to run to dancing because I found myself in an animated conversation with Jess. For the first time in two weeks I was in time for the start of Ceilidh class.

Friday. Asked Jess if she wanted to go out in the evening. We ended up having dinner in some pizza place nice pizzas though but still not the real deal. After this we went to a pub called Brauhaus. Nice small pub with a lot of international beers. My own rule is when in doubt go for the Belgian beers. And they were pretty nice.

Saturday. Time for another hike. This time the Pentlands, a really nice hilly forest near HW. I first went by a close friend for some lovely soup. Made me think of a dutch dish called snert. Then we literally had to sprint to the busstop. Where we saw the bus just leave. Talking about annoying. Fortunately we were still in time for the hike. The next bus came literally 10 minutes later. The hike was really nice. Saw some great bits of the Pentlands and it made me want to go back. After the hike my friend asked me if I wanted some cake. The cake made me realize that I have a lot to learn when it comes to baking. Rushed home around six because we were supposed to meet some people at seven. Had a quick shower and shave and went out again for dinner and drinks.

Sunday. Need to do a lot of homework. So in the morning I did a large part of it. Given that at least half of it was already finish but just needed finalizing. I thought that it would be a good idea of me going to UoE to try my code. It was a really short visit; the building was still closed. So went back home to work some more and in the afternoon went to a close friend for lunch. Only I forgot that it was for lunch so I made some myself when I got fed up with coding. (I'll probably be better of with baking stuff :) ). Walking towards her place I thought I might only stay for an hour. Just have a quick chat carve some pumpkins and go back again. This single hour lasted for 5 hours and involved eating pumpkin soup, trying to help with making marmelade and of course carving the pumpkins. Ahh and now I'm forgetting the cake. To my close friend I can only say thanks for the great time, cake, pumpkin soup and I'll make it up to you at some point. Okay so now I need to make dinner, try and eat some and make soup myself otherwise my veggies will go off. Afterwards I'll probably get back to homework again.

Cake, cake, my kingdom for cake.

Okay a bit later than normal. Somehow time has caught up to me and it is pretty relentless. I simply had to less time to write this week. Another annoying part at this point also my mind doesn't help me. Thankfully there's always a dutch blog that helps a lot. Let's start...

Monday, free pizza. Yep I'm Dutch so this day was marked in my agenda. A couple of weeks ago we (as in all the flats) got an e-mail saying that there would be free pizza on a Monday. This is always a great excuse to go out of your flat and to meet new people. Thankfully I wasn't the only one who thought this. I found another Dutchie who was clearly lost here. After we talked for a bit I discovered that he was from a town very near mine. Talking about a small world.

Okay so a this point my dutch blog is acting a bit funny; so the next part comes from my mind.

Tuesday. Two weeks ago I got an offer to present myself to the rest of the lab I'm semi-working in. I'm still placed in two different uni's only I'm more in one of the two for some obvious reason. So today was the day that the presentation had to happen. Thankfully all went really well.
Wednesday. This week is also the week that a company comes to the lab to install an acoustic camera. This is basically a small camera with a lot of microphones around it. They wanted to explain to us how to setup the microphone and how to use the software. Great fun to do because I'll be one of the people using the thing so great fun.
Thursday. The second day of this training. More like half a day of training. The afternoon was of course filled with courses and the evening with dancing. When I got back I quickly prepared some things for the next day because I had to bake a cake for the Freshers' weekend.
Friday. Normally this would be a nice long sleep but like I said I had to make a cake. So got up pretty early made my cake, in my still sleepy mind I used the wrong baking tray. This meant that my cake was flatter than it supposed to be. Still it tasted really well. After my presentation in the afternoon I rushed back home. I had exactly an hour and 10 min to get home, shower, change, pack my bag, cut the cake and run out again. At least that would be in the perfect world. In the end it took me a little over half an hour to get home. Leaving me with 20 min to shower, etc. I was almost ready when the doorbell (Uhm my phone) rang. A friend offered  to pick me up and walked together to the bus. This meant rushing even more. First running to the door. You can't leave a person waiting outside. Grabbed my bag, the cake and ran out again. The start of Freshers' weekend. After a drive of 2 hours we arrived at the hostel. Unpacking and collecting all the cakes. I haven't seen this much cake in my life and to think that we ate most of it during the weekend. After a quick-ish dinner the fun started. Dancing till midnight and then go back to the hostel for some music and cake. Somewhere between 3 and 4 my mind found it time to go to sleep. Normally this won't be a problem but someone decided that it would be a good idea of getting up around 8 again. After breakfast another day filled with dances started. Two workshops before lunch, one of which was country (if I remember it correctly) the other was step. After lunch another workshop this time the highland sworddance. Looked amazing and was also pretty difficult. This was the last workshop for the day after this it was time for games. One of the assignments was to make 5 pictures of faces in places. Great fun to do. When this was finished it was time for dinner. Haggis! Yum!! And with some red fruit and apple crumble for dessert. Can it get even better. Of course it can have some cake :). A quick change of clothes for the ball.  Which meant again dance till midnight after this there was some weird game which involved chairs and people running around. Round 2 am I decided it was nice to walk back to the hostel and to have some cake. Some were already playing music after listening to this my mind told me that it was sleeping time again. The next morning was even worse. We had to get up much earlier. In the end there was still time for another workshop and some nice dances. Round 12 it was time to head home again and find a bed to sleep in. The latter didn't happen before 9 but it was definitely really good after a weekend of dances and sleep deprivation. Thankfully I'm forgetting the water that came from the sky :).

Slippery when wet

Given this title I've got some explaining to do. I like to run and especially off-road. Given that I'm living in Edinburgh which has a big hill called Arthur's seat (misspelled it I think) I can run up a hill :). My running shoes are apparently not suited for running up a rocky hill that's slippery when wet. Then again running (more like walking) up hill wasn't that bad. If I would fall I would fall up hill and not down. But running down hill is more challenging when your shoes lack grip meaning that is was slipping and sliding the whole way down. Then it's all of a sudden less fun to run around. This actually happend to my today (Sunday). Luckily for me it was already the end of my run and the second time I was up on Arthur's seat within one run :). Don't get me wrong it was still a great run and a bit more challenging this way. On the way back I was thinking about how quickly the week had gone by and about the interesting stuff I could write about. To be honest it was a pretty boring week. Okay so now for the interesting bit. On Tuesday I cooked Minestrone soup for Jess and me. It was a bit different from the normal or standard way in the sense that I found some Habanero sauce (really nice and spicy) and added that to the soup. So it was now a soup which had some nice spiciness to it. The advantage of cooking for two is that you can cook a bit more try some different stuff and put some more effort into it. On Wednesday I went out for dinner again. This time it was Portugese. I'm guessing the people of the restaurant though those students need to eat more because the portions we got were really big. And when I say really big I mean really big (also really good though). The starters looked more like mains and the mains looked more like dinner for two days. Again it was really good food and a really lovely place. The only thing was that my body found it a bit to salty and I had to go and get some water during the night. After a rubbish night there was a long day ahead of me on Thursday. It started around 9 and ended around 6 pm at two unis. The starting time is normal the ending time gets normal now. This is because of a lab that started this week and ends at the end of the semester. So now I need to skip one dancing class and can only dance for 3 hours instead of four. The most annoying thing is that I need to skip the most difficult and also the nicest class. Any way I'll just start doing that next semester then. So on Friday I had to got to the JobCentre for my national insurance number. On of the questions was if I ever lived in the UK. Nope not officially. How long was my previous visit. Euhmm 3 months. Okay so now we need to know your previous address. Yeah that was over a year ago. I could drive or walk there but definitely don't know the actual address anymore. Okay so I'll just write down that your dementia has started and your fit to work :). That was a new experience still they are nicer than back home and less bureaucratic. Anyway the rest of the day went as normal traveling between unis and relaxing a lot in the evening. Saturday consisted of doing more homework. Thankfully Jess dragged me away to a movie in the evening.  And I guess I told you about Sunday because apart from the running bit described above and writing this there was more homework involved. Onto a new week :).

Ceilidh and wet

Okay so the weeks are getting back to normal with classes and cycling between unis. This is the reason why I'm only updating this blog once a week and I won't be boring you with those things. Apart from this there are still some interesting things happing in the week. So on Monday my flatmate had invited me to go to her part of the UoE to meet some people and go for some drinks. It is always great fun meeting new people. On Tuesday she (the same flatmate) promised to make some Indian curry. She claims to be very good at this; I can now confirm this. It was a really good curry. This all takes us to Wednesday in no time :). So Wednesday the informatics Ceilidh. I myself never imagined that the people here were that crazy about Ceilidhs but they really are. This is the second time for me now and I'm getting better at it every time. I thought it would be fun to invite a friend. She (this friend) is a much better danser than I am this means that I could learn some things whilst dancing. (No Hannah that wasn't the only reason it was maybe a little side reason, very tiny). All in all a great evening which was really tiering. This I noticed the next day when I had to cycle to HW. I was glad that there was some random person cycling in front of me so that I could relax a bit and didn't caught too much wind. Then again the whole process of dancing started all over again in the evening. So when I cycled to HW on Friday my legs were definitely arguing with me and yet again I was glad that some random person was cycling in front of me. Although this time the person looked rather weird over his shoulder every now and then just like he wanted to say you can overtake me if you want to. But I really didn't want to because he kept the wind and some of the drizzle away from me. This drizzle shifted to proper rain when I wanted to go back. Given that up to now my cycling gear consisted of shirt, shorts and rain jacket. The last proved to be really handy when cycling back. My legs, socks, shoes, shorts and undies where soaking wet when I arrived at my apartment. So I need to by some more waterproofs and some waterproof cycling shoes.

Saturday morning the first thing I did was go to a cycle stuff shop and bought some waterproof longs even then it was still raining and my wet shoes didn't completely agree with me going from A to B through the rain again. Ahh well I had to do it anyway. On my way back quickly went over the farmers' market to buy some veggies and then relaxing could begin. In the case the relaxing was doing homework and trying to understand some equations. In the evening went to are bar filled with mathematicians. I had to go back a some reasonable time because there was a hike planned for Sunday and given that the bus would take an hour to get there then you might want to get up a bit earlier than normal.

Sunday the day of the hike. The plan was to get a bus to Gullane and walk back to Port Seton. This time we got a message from the organizer saying that he was an hour late. These buses go only once an hour which ment that he had missed the bus. Luckily for us we had a local with us. So first went to her parents place to wait for the organizer to arrive. When we were at her parents place her mum told me that it would be foul weather on Monday luckily I don't have to cycle to HW then :).  All in all it was a really nice walk especially the first bit which was amazing to see. The last bit was a bit closer to the road which ment that it was nosier but still with some great views. In the end we got a (cheaper) bus back to the city. Even after walk 8 miles I wasn't really that tired.