I have three half-started posts blinking at the top of this page..

And this one isn’t one of them.

So now that we have established that I have serious problems finishing stuff that I started, (You might have had the idea about 4 months after I stopped posting due to lack of time.) we can move on to more.. eh.. other stuff.

Well, I do actually have a good excuse for not posting in July: I was sleeping in a car (aka “without internet access”) for three weeks touring the westcost of the USA with two friends of mine. That was quite amazing. I met them in San Francisco (They had started out in Seattle where Vicky was an au-pair for a year) where we stayed at a family whom my parents knew quite well for a few days which was absolutely wonderful. We toured San Francisco during the day and stayed at their place on the evenings talking and eating – really great. They put us up at their relatives place who were extremely nice as well and so we had a great time there. After that we went on to Los Angeles, staying at the place of a friend of my dad’s, who drive us around LA the following days. We saw Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air and a lot of other stuff I can’t remember just now. Oh! Universial Studios – amazing!

Then we went on to San Diego (which I would have liked to explore more thoroughly) for a day which we spent at SeaWorld (great, but I still think I would’ve prfered the city itself). We left San Diego in the evening to head on to Las Vegas (hot, extremely hot. really.) and then went on to Salt Lake City (not as hot as Las Vegas, but quite boring actually).

The following two days were not that exciting cause we spent them reading in a park at the Columbia River and then we went on to Ephrata, WA where we became (locally) famous. But this is a story for another time..

After Ephrata, we left for Seattle where we spent the last 5 days of our trip. I got to know a few really nice people there, saw Seattle at night from the SpaceNeedle and from an awesome view point and bought around a billion CDs.

Yeah, I’m planning another trip already.

Apart from that I have managed to do a lot of catching up since I returned:

I cought up on all my web-comics, TV (which I normally do not watch, so it was all the more interesting to “catch up” on that), a lot of newspapers, magazins and books and friends, family and stuff. A very productive two weeks I guess. (That is if you forget that I feel that I ought to do a bit of catching up on physics, but we will forget that for the moment.. )

And the best thing is: I’ll be flying to Canada on Friday!

Friends will be friends..

or so..

Anyway, not really a post about Inter Rail itself, but about the things it does (can do?) with friendship.

Yesterday I fell rather sick. We were running around Berlin quite a bit and were actually planning to go out later in the night, but when we lay down to get an hour of sleep I felt that I was developing a fever and wasn’t feeling so well generally. So I stayed in bed while the others went down to the bar of our hostel, I took some antibiotics (cause I don’t seem to get well without them.. :/ ) and fell off.

At about midnight I was woken up by all three of them handing me pills against fever and my cough. Apparently one of them went to Alexanderplatz and somehow managed to get all that stuff in the middle of the night.

Now, the thing is the three of us weren’t best friends when we left Austria. We knew each other well and we liked each other, but it wasn’t a really deep friendship, I guess. Sometime during those last three weeks that changed. We know each other really well – our weeknesses, our strenghts and we care for each other. I guess that is the most valuable thing I have learned from Inter Rail.

Hope all of you are having a great time as well (wherever your are)!

I guess I’m naive..

First of all: Check out thetechnomads.com, it’s a site by four MIT-Students who are trying to raise a whole lot of money for two charities by driving from London to somewhere in Mongolia. Don’t ask me how, but you can anyway help them by donating.. Definitely worth supporting IMHO..

Another story having to do with MIT.. sorta.. If you know me from before this blog you probably know that I wanted to study there at one point of my life. Long story short: they didn’t accept me (not too distressed about that though.. was great fun and with an acceptance rate of something around 4% there’s nothing to be ashamed of.. ). So anyway I was under the impression that MIT’s 1000 freshmen were sort of low, but I had no idea just how low..

So I enroled online for the University of Vienna and decided to finish enrolment on tuesday shortly before work – I arrived there and found about 10 to 15 people waiting in a line and decided that I didn’t want to wait that long, so I left again. Later I talked with a few collegues of mine about this and was explaining that I hoped to be more lucky next time whereupon a girl explained that 10 people waiting is pure luxury at the University and that she was waiting behind like 50 when she enroled. This was my first moment of revelation. The second was today.

I found myself behind like 5 people (University begins again in October, so I’ve finished enrolment very early actually.. ) waiting and when finished with the whole procedure I was given a coupon for being “one of the first 5000″ to enrol. I mean – “under the first 5000″! That’s actually near the whole student population of MIT! I actually felt really quite taken aback – and sortof stupid..

Anyway I was informed in the mean while that there are only about 150 physics freshmen, so that sounds a lot better and I don’t plan to stay here anyway for much more than two years, but I’ll see.. playing with the thought of studying in Berlin beacause the city is supposedly very beautiful – going to see for myself when I do Inter Rail with a couple of friends.

On another note: I really need to get a digi-cam now. Went past some guy on such a tiny motorbike yesterday and I was completely supefied! This guy was just amazing and the thing looked like one of those toys.. regretted not being able to take a picture, but thanks to google I found this:

Imagine this reaching like up to your knee.

And with this I leave you.