11.03.2017 (Saturday) – After the recovery from the last night, I met up with Olli around 11 o’clock in the morning to go running in Vienna for the first time. For the run we met at the “Haus des Meeres”, unfortunetaly I had to wait some minutes. This gave me the possibility to closer inspect the building. (WIKI) It used to be a flak tower, but now it used as a aquarium and must have a nice view over the city from the top. Walking around the building I saw that they have a climbing wall, which goes all the way to the top. I think I found a challenge to do in the next 4 months. So Olli arrived an we went running around the inner city of Vienna. But this was not the end of the exploration of Vienna that day. At three in the afternoon the ESN organised had a subway hunt. So you group up in groups of 6 and then hunt a lion, which sends you his location via WhatsApp every 20 minutes. Yeah, it sounds dumb, but is fun and you have the chance to meet new student. (Writing these lines I just figured out that I have barly taken any picture, I promise to work on that.) The evening I spent with a group of two others (Paul & Olli) at a local brewery, 7Stern Bräu.

12.03.2017 (Sunday) – So it happens, I woke up with a cold. This is not a problem as I had to get the project running, on which I did have a meeting the next day and I had to write a small paper for the lecture Strategic Management.

13.03.2017 (Monday) – Every week from now on starts with the lecture “Strategic Management” at 10 o’clock, involving intensive discussions. This lecture really wakes you for the week. 😛 Followed by that lecture I had a lengthy initial meeting for the lecture “Advanced Software Engineering” in which we will build a whole Kassa (cashier machine) for small restaurants. The group consists of 6 people and all the other group members are Austrians, quiet entertaining group. But they know their business, I have never seen such a clean project set up in my university career. Working REST Server with Swagger, Lombok, Mapstruct, Angular2, JavaFX, Jenkins, etc. I am looking forward to code with you! This is nice work. Before calling it a day, I visited the lecture “Workflow Modeling and Process Management” with Olli. If you like BPMN, then this is your lecture!

14-16.03.2017 – Remember when I told you that I got a cold? Tuesday morning it really hit me hard and I had to spend most of the time in bed.

17.03.2017 (Friday) – The day I finally opened an Austrian bank account. You have to know, that for everything official here you need to be registered at the local municipality, mine is the municipality Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus. It is known to be the multi-culti district of Vienna. Bellow my window view.

18/19.03.2017 (Weekend) – After spending a whole week more or less not being productive I decided to stay home, buy food, solve my exercises, and watch the Tennis game. Yeah, that sums it up. 😀

06.03.2017 (Monday) – Waking up in a bed, which is wider than 90 cm and not having 3 other people sleeping the same room is a privilege! Taking a shower and just leaving the soap where you want it to be is nice. Sitting at a table playing some music (in my case Falco), eating a bread, and drinking some juices is something we do not appreciate enough. But this happened to me. Okay this part is okay, but there is something I haven’t told you yet. On Sunday, soon after I moved in, we had a power outage in our apartment. This outage was caused by a fuse between the street and the apartment. So we could not fix it by ourself and had to wait until someone comes by on Monday. This is not really a problem, because we had wine and good discussion during the Sundays evening. BUT, you need to understand how the warm water works here. There is no central boiler for warm water, they have flow-type heaters (Durchlauferhitzer). Bravo, a cold shower in the morning. That was a very quick shower, probably my quickest ever.

This day marked a very important event in my studies in Vienna. For some courses you have to take an entry test. Because of the evening before I was not able to practise a lot I was a bit nervous. This does not happen very often. I will get in touch with my tutors and try to make you the test example available. This test is the entry test for the lecture “Advanced Software Engineering”, a 6 ECTS lecture, in which you have work in a group of 6 and develop a whole application. The test itself lasted for four hours and was hard. Quiet a lot of people failed and some were crying. I managed to finish the test 15 minutes before the dead-line. But I sweated some blood drops. Man, this was not a visit to the local pet store. Not one of those lecture were you prepare some slides and start throwing around buzzwords (my fellow consultants, please do not feel offended).

Happy to pass the test, I treated myself with a nice Schnitzel and a local beer for dinner. Important to mention here, I spent the last two weeks writing to professors to arrange a meeting for my 12 ECTS project, but after the entry test I talked to the supervisors and he encouraged me to organise a meeting with him for a project. So you spend endless hours writing emails and then of a sudden you are confronted with a project just by talking to people.

Note to myself: First, the good old form of verbal communication is the most efficient one. Second, to understand a system you have to talk to the people within. Third, “Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied” – Every man is the artisan of his own fortune.

07.03.2017 (Tuesday) – During the first weeks in the semester you normally visit the introduction lecture of a lecture. So during the morning I came across the lecture “Computational Economics”, which in contrast to the other two lectures mentioned before involves scientific research rather than coding. I will go more into details of all lectures in a future post, as at the moment (18.03.2017) I have to finalise the learning agreement and the arrangements with the professors. During the weekend with ESN I got the meet a lot of exchange students. In a mater of fact too many. (Not in a negative way, I would love to know everyones story, but then I would not be able to do any thing else.) Two students with I got a warm hearted. Finnish people, hell they are fun, respectful, carrying, dark humoured, and entertaining. Their names are Olli and Hannes, one from Tampere and one from a small city Espoo (you really have to zoom in Google Maps to see it). With those two great lats I was fortune to spend the evening with. I will ask them to portrait them i a future post.

08.03.2017 (Wednesday) – Nothing special happened during the day, except that I enjoyed a coffee with Jeanine. I will get back to her in a later post.

09.03.2017 (Thursday) – Studying life becomes very routine now, but it is different. So first of all I met my academic advisor for the first time in Vienna. A professor in nonclassical logics from Italy, a carrying lady with a friendly smile, a sharp mind, and takes her time for me. (Dear Mrs. if you reading this, I hope I am not portraying you in a wrong way.) On a side node here, she as well a former room mate of me in Switzerland used to study at the University of Bologna, I only have heart the best of this university.

Every Thursday is the ESN Stammtisch (fixed repetitive event) where all Erasmus students meet a the bar “Beer World” in the inner city of Vienna. Very important to mention here are the 40 tabs. So you have 40 open beers from all of Europe.

10.03.2017 (Friday) – Sleeping in, writing some emails and in the evening we went to one of those ESN parties. It was in an old Victorian building. Again everyone was smoking inside, but more impressive was the gorgeous interior. The location is located at Getreidemarkt. In the image bellow you can see one of the oil paintings with me.

02.03.2017 (Thursday) – Days pass quickly. Spending the day stumbling around the city and trying to grasp how the people are living here, I had the first chance to visit the first shared apartment next to Hauptbahnhof the day before. It was close to one of the many train stations in Vienna. The shared apartment would have been 10 minutes by foot to the TU Wien. Would have been, as it was not a match. No tears spread.

The apartment visited that evening, is close to Westbahnhof, another train station in Vienna. Just a bit further from the TU Wien, but a very nice shared apartment. Two girls sharing the household, and me soon to join. One is working at the UN and the other one at a pharmacy.

03.03.2017 (Friday) – A big day. Being informed by Lisa, on of my now roomies, that they are happy having me, was a good start in the day and brought some concrete happenings in my Austrian life. Until now I had been living in a state of “unrealness”, a state of being in the present but somehow somewhere else. Constantly thinking, where should I get breakfast, who will be my new three room mates for the night at the Hostels, or where should I learn. Little to no privacy makes you doubt things. Adding the constant changing surroundings demands great flexibility, as you learn so many things about other people, but you start loosing control over remembering things. After time you really appreciate walks alone, sitting in a library, listening to music, and proving theorems.

But do not get me wrong here, it is Friday and the start of the legendary ESN Intro Weekend. So do not get comfortable yet! All the mayor ESNs of the universities in Vienna gathered for some game and then went out to club. That was the first encounter with how it used to be in Switzerland when I was younger. You are allowed to smoke inside, which gives the clothes a less appealing smell. Which I figured out the next morning.

04.03.2017 (Saturday) – After a good nights sleep and a quiet morning I was about to meet my landlord. Having a coffee for a longer time than anticipated he informed that would be very happy having me for the next 4 months and that I should come by on Sunday, sign the contracts and move in. This was good news as I was very happy go back to live a life with anchors. Breaking out of the holiday-ish mode. Nevertheless the ESN Welcome weekend was still on. Due the talk with the landlord I missed the city tour. But I was in time for the dinner and the party afterwards.

05.03.2017 (Sunday) – Seven days in Vienna, I survived the first week! I managed to solve the first exercises at TU Wien, managed to get a room in a shared apartment, visited the city, and started establishing a social network. So far so good, I am ready to live here.

27.02.2017 (ff)  – After getting in the bus at ZOB, the final travel towards Vienna started. The last barrier of things known to me has gone now, no more comfortable bed sheets, no more easy walks in a room at night without lights, no more having known people around yourself. From now on everything was new. The bus was filled with Slavic languages, the landscape took shapes unfamiliar to me, and I did not know where I will sleep in a 7 days future.

During the time before going to Vienna I paid little attention where exactly I end up. I got very comfortable with not knowing where I am heading, it gives a hard describeable kick, a feeling that you only will be able to succeed. Nevertheless, back to the bus trip. Around 4 o’clock I finally arrived at Vienna Erdberg, eventually the bus terminal of Vienna. The Friday before I booked a hostel called “Wombats City Hostel -The Naschmarkt”, wonderfully located, next to Naschmarkt, an area of many restaurants and a fixed food market. Needless to say it is next to the Technical University of Vienna. The idea at that time was to put myself in a nice spot to find a shared apartment in the long run.

The first evening in Vienna, I treated myself with a nice Schnitzel and a good local beer. You might ask yourself who took the picture. After a few minutes after I moved in the shared room in the hostel I had a small talk with a room mate. It turned out he will be studying in Vienna as well and more importantly he did an exchange year with YFU. So making first contacts in Vienna was not that hard. (Small disclaimer for my fellow readers. YFU stand for “Youth For Understanding” and organises cultural exchanges for teenagers between 15-18 around the whole globe. I highly recommend my readers with kids to send their kids away in the young age.)

Sven is his name, I will ask him if he is willing for a portrait in a future post. Spending some time with him he informed me that he will be moving in a dorm on the first of March. But this will no bring me away from plan to find a shared apartment and get to know local Austrian people.

28.02.2017 (Tuesday) – How should I spend my first day in Vienna? Start writing emails and making calls to find a shared apartment, get the camera out and explore Vienna, or start writing the blog? I stayed in bed and listened to EAV (Link To Youtube). But no, this was just for a couple of minutes, I packed laptop and camera in my bag and went out to the main building of the TU Wien. TU Wien is the university I will be staying until the end of June.

After having a small breakfast in one of the surrounding cafés I sat down at the university to write emails. So many emails I hadn’t have written for a long time. It did not take long and the first people replied. So it came that the first visit was organised in a matter of hours for the second of March.

Spending some hours wondering around the inner city I decided to head back to the hostel as I was planning to meat Sven for dinner. So far I have to make you happy with this image bellow, but there will be whole series coming. 😉 No worries.

01.03.2017 (Wednesday) – Official start of the academic summer semester of TU Wien. Starting with an introduction lecture for incoming exchange students I already missed my first lecture, because of the overlap. I was told that the first lecture is more an introduction to the field of Econometrics of Business Informatics rather than jumping right in the topic, so no big harm done. After the introduction session of the TU Wien we were introduced to the ESN Buddynetwork (Link), this great network will take care of the social aspects of studying in Vienna.

// First weekend out of Bangalore. We chose Hampi, its a village north of Bangalore, with the night bus in reach of 8 hours. Its an UNESCO world heritage, judged by the experience, yes it is. Alex and me spend the journey with three other interns from Bangalore.

// As we arrived early on Saturday we quickly found a guest for 800 rupees, for 5 people, for one night, two rooms. This is around 12 CHF. After a quick morning sleep we had breakfast at a place nearby and then proceeded to get our 3 bikes. The day we spent driving around the south of the river, visiting the temples and enjoying the nature flying by.

// On Sunday we took our bikes around 10, left our luggage at the bike rental. Our mission was to come tot he north of the river and have a look at the Anjana Matha Temple. On our exploration we encountered the problem that we have no bridge in reach to cross the river. So we found a boat which took us over. It can only can handle 6 bikes and 20 people. So we had to wait a few moments, which wasn’t too bad. So we had time to walk around the small harbor. During our hike up the Temple we were surprised by heavy rain. Quickly hiding in the temple we came in the joy of a holy celebration. In which I got my bindi (red dot on the forehead). Later the same evening, we made our way with the bus to Hospet and from the there we took the night bus to Bangalore.

// After a long and very enriching week we finally made it into the weekend. But let’s start first with the beginning of the week. On the arrival weekend in Bangalore we stayed at a Hotel in the south, the Double Tree Hotel. Having our first day at the office, we (Alex and I) got to know all our new team members and were brought to our apartments in Block 8. Even though Block 8 is only 13 km from the working place, it takes us 45 minutes from door to door in the morning and evening. Alex and me are working on the same project. He is an EPFL student studying in his Masters in Computer Science, around my age.India brings a lot of new challenges, few I already though of and many I haven’t, it is a privilege being here. The people are very friendly and like to help (but often don’t know more than oneself does). The next quest is to find a valid SIM card and a dual SIM card phone.

// During the weekend it rained a lot (mostly on Sunday) and we spent our time visiting different places. The evenings on Friday and Saturday we enjoyed together with Jonas (the third intern with us but working on another project) and a friend of his. If you ever will be in Bangalore you have to eat dinner at Punjabi Rasoi, near BDA complex (my favorite: Afghani Chicken).

// Excuse me for the bad quality of the picture, they were taken with the iPhone camera. Better ones will follow as soon as possible.

/* Normal road */

/* cows are everywhere */

/* Sweet Sounf */

/* Super Market*/

/* Goa fruit, very spicy */

// 03.07.2014 Last day in the USA. Waking up at the beautiful Kodachrome Basin State Park Campground we had to pack our stuff tight so it will be easier to handle when we go on our flight on the 4th. To make our last journey the most interesting we drove by the Zion National Park. After it we hit the interstate to Las Vegas, it’s becoming hotter and hotter as we approached Las Vegas. A city build in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by desert, around 110 degrees hot and unbelievable surreal. We resided at the Golden Nugget and enjoyed multiple Casinos and the Strip.

Hello everyone

I hope you are doing all good. We safely arrived in Bangalore and enjoyed the first impressions and contacts. Unfortunately I struggle to get a stable internet connection to upload more. Stay tuned!

Cheers sebi

// 02.07.2014 After a night at the Deer Greek Campground we were able to sleep in due the long lasting shadow of the surrounding rocks. The campground lays between a wall and as the name says next to a greek. At Boulder we encountered a Coca Cola Truck at the local gas station (as seen in the movies around Christmas). Short after we called the Kodachrome Basin State Park our new home. A park surrounded by red, yellow and white rock. Quickly set tent and then enjoyed the Cottonwood Road (man, probably one of the most interesting roads I’ve seen on this trip). The journey leads over a steep carvel road, which turns into a dirt road. You will get a time-lapse as soon I have constant internet. On the way back home we made a quick visit at the Bryce Canyon National Park.

/* Coca Cola Truck at Boulder */

/* flowers it Escalante Staircase National Monument */

/* pass at Escalante Staircase National Monument */

/* army of ants */

/* wash at Cottonwood Road */

/* Bryce Canyon */