09.21.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:44 pm by tesstess
This tuesday 18 people from my department went bowling. It was great fun, especially as I was in the winning team 
Gregory, in black t-shirt, is one of the tutors for my project.
And here is Eric, my other tutor
Brice was the one fixing this bowling night, and he was in my team.
Look at my finger positions, they are well worked out to give the best performance 
And afterwards some of us stayed at the place and had some food together. So very nice people at this department!
09.11.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:24 pm by tesstess
Returned to Nice from Gothenburg today. How did I come up with the brilliant idea to take the plane on the eleventh of September? Anyway there were no signs of higher security checks than usual and everything went as planned. I’m safe on the ground and home in Sophia Antipolis again.
I am single. Feels weird, and I am more sad than ever before in my life. This is the most difficult decision I ever had to deal with. Only time can say if this really was the right choice, maybe I’ll not know until I’m old and can look back on my life with all the wisdom life will have brought me.
I just found wireless internet on my balcony. Feels comforting, now I will at least be able to feel closer to my friends in Gothenburg (and on Hawaii, and on other places around the world), and hopefully not feel too lonely down here. The connectivity is not so high, I have to pay for it and icq and seems not to work with it but Skype and msn works.
I’m half way through my internship now. I will finish the first of December and the only thing I need to do at Chalmers is to present my work.
I haven’t told very much about the internship here in my blog, it might seem that I’m only doing fun things, but actually I’m working a bit as well. For you who haven’t read all posts I’ll tell that Amadeus is a company who builds flight booking systems. I have designed and am currently implementing a GUI (graphical user interface) in Java which will be used by people within Amadeus to monitor the creation of reports of sold tickets for the different airlines. What I’m doing is obviously a tiny, tiny fraction of this enormous system but still I feel a little bit important since my application is needed and will be used as soon as it’s finished. I learn a lot, something new every day!
I feel more and more that I like Amadeus, the region and the people I’ve met here. I won’t be finished with France in three months from now so I will explore the opportunities to get employed by Amadeus. In addition I will also start looking around for companies in Gothenburg to see where I would want to work. All suggestions or wise words you might have to give on my way towards getting out and work for real will be very appreciated!
09.06.06
Posted in Hollidays, Visitors at 2:19 pm by tesstess
Today is the last day of my parents visit. They have been here for two weeks. The first night they slept in my appartment Katarina were here as well, so then we were five people. That was crowded. Still crowded with four and it will be quite empty now when they leave.
Dad got the best place: on the balcony. Or, it was the best solution for the rest of us not to have to wake up from him snooring. Luckily it didn’t rain once!
The first day of their visit I was working, and their goal of the day was to find Carrefour (the supermarket) and to eat at a nice French restaurant (the one you can see above). Unfortunately they didn’t manage to find Carrefour because of all roundabouts and the lack of a good map. And I’m sad to tell that the restaurant was one of their worst experiences on the whole trip. They have explained in great detail to me exactly how awfull and uneatable the food was.
Can you spot us?
In the weekend we wanted to take the boat to outside of Cannes (where Katarina went), but when we came to Cannes we found a nice parking which was just at the beach and where we could only stay for two hours so we decided to stay at the beach there. Definitely too many people for our tastes, but it’s fun to have seen once. The icecream was good.
After swimming we took a walk in the harbour. The boats are so luxury and expensive it’s difficult to understand that anyone with a normal job can afford them. Probably they can’t, probably they’re rich of other reasons than working hard for it.
Story to be continued…
09.04.06
Posted in Visitors at 5:47 pm by tesstess
The 15th of August Katarina, my very best and oldest childhood friend came to visit me down here for ten days.
It was a real pleassure to have her here with me! I hoped she wouldn’t get too lonely when I was working all days, but she was surprisingly good at making up things to do so I didn’t need to worry.
Of course I brought Kat with me when climbing. Here she is up on a, for beginners, quite difficult route.
Here is the view of Monaco from La Tete du Chien. We climbed on the other side of this cliff so we didn’t se the view when climbing, but here on the way back we stopped and enjoyed the wonderful view.
This is the view at the Nice side of the cliff. At the middle you see the climbing site.
One day we went to Monaco where I never was before. It was fun to go exploring together. Kat and I makes a good couple for touristing since we have so similar tastes on what to do.
We took the tourist train around the city. It had headphones where the story of the place were told. Luckily for us, one could chose the language so we didn’t have to have it in french.
For example we learned that what you can see on the picture above is part of an extension of Monaco. They have built houses out in the water and in this way increased the area of the land with 17%.
After being in Monaco we were quite hungry and drove up to La Turbie above Monaco and found the perfect restaurant where we could sit in the sun and have a view of the mountains and the sea.
On the way home we didn’t want to take the highway directly so we crossed it and drove up into the mountains. Here we found cute villages. Unfortunately it was a bit dark for taking photos, but I’ll include one just to show how beautiful the sky was.
On the friday night we went to a party in a house in Antibes.
Unfortunately I don’t have so many good pictures from here, people tend to look quite strange at photos taken at parties… so the one above is one of the best ones even if half the photo is fille with a pink shirt.
Here is Kat and Eric. I had heard that there would be a cafe in Golfe Juan where there were swing dancing on Wednesdays. It was a bit early for the dancing when we arrived so we spent most of the evening eating ice cream and chatting. I and Kat danced to a few songs later on, but since I am not a very good leader and the floor allowed no twists we went back to the table quite soon.
Kat brought her pearls, so some of the evenings we sat at my small table and made bracelets and ear rings. A very nice hobby which I miss doing when I have none of my pearl loving friends from home around.