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.