h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well you can have beer and I can have something else

But really seriously on my behalf, you are very welcome to see beautiful Lake Constance here...well or Stuttgart (almost as beautiful, but therefore better for going out ) depending where I will be...
And (seriously as well) I might really consider Norway as a possible stop on my studying abroad tour (that's the best thing about studying anyway )...sounds very nice to me, that country, though we'll have to see to that language thing, till now it sounds rather strange to me, I mean I can see some slight familiarities (does this word exist?) with German and English if you tell me what it means but otherwise...hopeless!

That was a lot of s in one post!

Having had some German in school, and a lot of English, I'd have to say there are actually more similarities towards German than English. It's quite easy for me too see them, but I can understand that it's difficult for others. For instance, I once spoke with a guy from the Netherlands (living in Denmark), who said that there were great similarities between those two languages... I could for the life of me not find any!

I know...I even had one more in there, but I deleted it again, wouldn't want to overdo it

Well, if German has any similarities with Danish then (as Dutch has a lot in common with German) Danish should be kind of similar to Dutch...guess that was what you call logic, right
I for my part would never ever have to learn German as a foreign language - poor you!!! As a matter of fact I am still working on my own proper German, but I guess I'll never really learn it as I grew up in the Swabian part of Germany ...but I did improve it while I was living in Belfast.

You improved your German in Belfast?????

And what's the "Swabian" part of Germany?

Sounds strange, but it's true, one of the other co-workers in my house was from Leipzig (that's in the Eastern part of Germany), so I just had to try and speak "normal" German otherwise she wouldn't understand me, although we hardly ever spoke German, but I had her parents on the phone quite a few times...In Germany you can find quite strong accents or rather dialects, there is only one part, where they speak the so called written German.

The Swabian part is in the south, you might know Bavaria (Munich)(?), well just go west and you get here (the area around Stuttgart).

Ok, I know ca. where that is. Didn't know it was called Swabian, though.
That friend you're talking about. Is that the one that couldn't get the spelling of your name right?

No . The one who couldn't get the spelling right (Alison) was from Dublin. She was a 17 year old girl I was looking after (I really like her, although she has that typical Down-Syndrom tendency to get terribly stuck ). She had those little first-reading books and copied them all the time. One of them was about a prince and a princess and the other one about Peter and Jane and their Dad's new car. And sometimes she just scribbled nonsense. On some days I got 4 or 5 of those letters . But she couldn't work out how to spell my name although I showed her a few times...

There is something wrong with that site (loading times etc.) at the moment...don't you think?

Anyway it just started snowing !!! (anything other than rain is great

How sweet!

I haven't experienced problems today...yet!

Here it's justs cold... (-10°C)

So how are you today? Anything exciting going on in your life?

Well, I am very busy today as I have to prepare a meeting for tommorow and still do some tests for that and this one guy just does everything to look important and through that things get more difficult for me ...

Anything exciting? not really...Could you see that moon eclipse in Norway yesterday. It was quite beautiful over here. A friend somehow posted a message in the internet to remind me via phone. Some machine phones you and reads the message to you, I almost broke down laughing when I heard the voice, it was almost impossible to understand anything.

So what exciting things are going on in your life then?

I saw some of it. It was all over the telly last night. It wasn't as beautifull as the last one I saw, a couple of years ago. The moon turned all red, it looked like someone had lit a campfire in the sky

Nothing much exciting going in my life... (I am, after all, Keeper of Dullness...) A lot of work on this end too. Been workin' overtime two days this week, and I guess I'll be working late tomorrow too.... But really, it isn't that bad. I like it what I do, and I don't have money to do anything on my sparetime anyway...(I'd probably just be playing Playstation...)

What was it, like some kind of Stephen Hawking-voice?

It was such a male computer voice and I guess it was an American service or something like that, so it read the German message with a very funny pronounciation...and it was very hard to understand it.

I think you're quite lucky that you can say you like a job . I don't know whether I want to be an engineer yet. Can't really imagine myself to be one...we'll see...

Btw. loads and loads of snow outside (well at least compared to the rest we had this winter)

I am glad I have a job I like, not all people can say that. It just gets to be a bit much sometimes...

Why not? (with the engineer-business)

*puts on Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication*

The weather again, eh? Well, here the temperature is now up to -8°C, and sun is shining! There really isn't much to touch the beauty of a winter-landscape bathed in sunlight!! The factory I work at is placed on a little height in the woods, so since the lab is on the 3rd floor, I've got an excellent view!

Lucky you, my lab is an underground one, well my office is on the 2nd floor, but still I just see a carpark and such a industrial butcher's place...

*thinks Chilly Pepers is very nice as she'd already thought of putting it on herself, but had forgotten to do so *

Why not engineer? Don't know, just can't imagine myself as an engineer (especially the office bit...clicking around excel all day long )...well I might still enjoy it if I get the right job, maybe something to do with special needs technology...who knows. Anyway already the decision what I should study was rather complicated (ask my family ).

Getting a bit much?

I mean your job!

Yeah, the workload's too heavy sometimes... (don't blame you if you didn't get that, think it was really bad English...)

Complicated how? You had no idea, or was there a difference in opinion with your family?

Had too many ideas, I came home with a new idea every week. I thought of social work or curative education, philosphy, psychology, ethnology...one my favourites would have been to get a magister degree in ethnology, comparing religious studies (don't know the right English term) and chemistry or something like that, but you somehow can't do it as they belong to different departments. Then I decided to study medicine and everything was fixed and suddenly I felt it wouldn't be right...I was really close to curative education, too but then I thought, well I've been doing that (as a volunteer) since I was 15, maybe I should also try something different...so somehow I ended up with mechanical engineering...

What about you, always wanted to become a lab tech?

Nah, I was actually going for advertisingdrawer (almost sure that isn't the right word), but then I saw this lab-thing in the catalogue and, well, I'd also been thinking of going all the way in quantumphysics, so I thought it'd be a good starting point for that. Allthough, now it looks like I'll end up studiyng pharmacy... or maybe chromatography. Or even organic chemistry... Problably pharmacy, though. Decisions, decisions...

I guess you could do worse than mechanical engineering, or?

Pharmacy sounds quite interesting to me !

Well, yeah mech eng is alright, the best thing is that most people studying it (mostly men of course) are nice, easy-going and down to earth...and you can work in a lot of different jobs in the end.

Do you have to pay for your studies in Norway?

Oh and another good thing about mech eng, in most courses things are either right or wrong, it's not such a dodgy kind of thing...