Month: June 2012

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More from Donetsk

(There will be a lot of pictures from here.)

I walked around Donetsk and looked for nice places. There was an abundance of these.

This ball is supported by a fountain of water.

 More pictures from around the stadium:

 Elsewhere in the city you can find a lot of iron figures:

Not the real cup, of course. A present of the FC SD trainer.

Guess who?

A lurking crocodile

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Thousands of kilometers…

Let’s reconstruct my last days’ journey.

June 15: I departed from Norway and arrived in Dortmund

June 16: Decompressing in Dortmund
June 17: Departing to Kiev, walking around in Kiev and getting on the train to Donetsk

June 18: Arriving in Donetsk, decompressing.

June 19: Football ENG-UKR. No good pictures from the match itself (only mobile phone quality pictures), but some of the surroundings:

Today I took a walk around the city center (which is, by the way, HUGE) and made some nice pictures I hope you’ll like 🙂

These funny towers are kinda typical here.

This monument is known among the locals as “the guy with the brick”

Main text: “Say NO to violence in families” Sub-caption: “The strong ones do not bully”

Metaphotography!

These windows must offer a great view.

“Sorry, do you know where we can find a McDonalds?” – “Er, right over there” – “Thank you very much”

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Last hours in Trondheim

So yeah, in five hours a plane will take me to Oslo. I am leaving this town with mixed, but mostly positive feelings. I want here to thank all the wonderful people I have met here and had fun with, this was an unforgettable experience.

You might ask what will happen to this blog when I’m home. The answer is, I will try to update it on a more or less regular basis with random experiences — be it my current scientific adventures or sketches from life. And, obviously, pictures, as I became quite a photography addict.

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Last exam

Yesterday I had my last exam in this term, in a course called “Natural Language Interfaces”, which is just computational linguistics in disguise. Truth to be told, the course was not that hard and the hardest part in the exam was to keep writing despite the pain in my right hand and muscle fever in my arms. I would prefer to take this kind of exam orally, anyway, since the questions offered a lot of room to talk about. For example, one task asked me to describe a language that is convenient from a computational linguists’ perspective. I got creative and wrote that it would be nice if a language would have

  • an LR(k) grammar, or at least a context free one
  • no pronouns, but explicit variable assignment

which is very unlikely for a human language, but still, a nice feature 🙂

Bonus photo: A swan figure in a totally unexpected place

And afterwards I made a mistake and went again to a club where the student association was inviting to. Going to (mainstream) clubs here means

  • getting hit in the liver by some over-the-top partying people
  • walking on shattered glass
  • watching improbably drunk people trying to keep their balance
  • being always there where everyone tries to get through
  • dancing to music that is only okay after two beers which you cannot afford to drink

So yeah, great fun. But I still managed to extract some profit out of the whole thing and made a picture:

Sunrise, 2:40 in the morning

 (Sorry for the probably lousy quality, this was just my phone’s camera. I am not carrying my real camera everywhere with me)

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Air show in pictures

I managed to witness an air show of the Tigers, which is an air unit of the NATO. Despite my rather suspicious attitude towards that organization, I could not just walk past a major display of toys for big boys.

This is Gripen, a proof that SAAB makes not only good cars, but also good planes:

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