tiistai 19. marraskuuta 2013

Some critics after over 2 month stay and comparison with facilities of Lappeenranta University of Technology

It's still generally good to live here as all the services I want for now are rather nearby and relatively cheap, but...

KIT campus is sad as it's just bunch of scattered buildings. In LUT of Lappeenranta, everything is nicely in one building making it more or less like a big home where you meet people from different schools and branches of science. In LUT everybody more or less go in every day trough the same main doors and pass the big dining hall or stay there for coffee or whatsoever. In KIT my 5 courses take place in 5 different buildings. There are no other visible activities happening during the same time so you won't see other people during breaks or just idling in the hallways excluding a few exceptions. It's yet different thing that does seeing other people actually lead to interaction but at least it feels more warm than just lurking into the lecture and sneaking out when it's already dark at streets with the other 30 course mates or so. Of course LUT hosts only for about 5000 students whereas KIT has 25 000 but still.. matter of design.

The big dining hall is also a separate building and certainly a cross-faculty meeting place, but it boasts huge queues during peak hours and nutritionally poor food (I wouldn't complain about taste though, but that ain't important factor for me anyway). Yeah you guessed it.. library is separate building also, like just everything.

Facilities are old and small, and poor. Maybe I was under too much expectations thinking of Germans as the ultimate masters of technology and efficiency and everything... well they are, they invent a lot, but they are terrible at implementing. Buildings are ages old and energy-inefficient, have barely nothing smart inside (ok wohoo there are projectors!), some headband microphones are clearly just coming as one professor tried to use some silly neckband with old school hand mic hanging from it producing zero amplification to sound, but luckily found himself a modern and working one after probably facing some feedback. Many classes or lecture halls seem to seriously lack electricity sockets as they clearly are from era before major break trough of laptops (or maybe they are just ahead of their time and anticipate leap in battery technology). One class keeps hardheadedly on taking place in such a class room where about 10 people (out of 40) don't have access to table.

Computers are scarce and sticky. For some reason first time when I used computer here in one computer class it was amazingly fast! I was impressed... only to find out that it was probably broken. All the later sessions on computer has been blood pressurizing experiences of pure hell thanks to many systematic internet failures (other computers experienced same problems simultaneously). During peak hours it's also rather troublesome task to find any free computer anywhere. Printing is cheap, some 3-4 cents for double sided black/white sheet, but only at central printer. You usually have to wait 0.5-2 hours because it has processing queue. And then you will fetch your finished print-work from a locker with student id indications. Somewhat complex but yeah works anyway. If you order many printouts, the central printer combines whatever orders it has received from you probably up to the point when it's your work's turn in the queue. They all come stapled together. So better to order one course's all available material one day and another's other day... If you don't have a nice heavy stapler at home. You can also print double sided at every computer class and there are not much queue but it costs some 6 cents a paper. I think in LUT printing costs 5-6 cents/sheet and every work can be chosen to be individually stapled and punctured for mapping. Here you have to puncture your own holes, even central printer doesn't have the option.

Earning ECTS feels mainly more laborious here than in LPR. These courses have quite a lot content, but on the other hand they are new to me and I probably don't have some of the base knowledge that some other students may have as these are master level courses. Anyway, you may expect to work rather hard here to survive. One course, namely Entrepreneurship, has proved to be incredibly boring bla bla bla course with no new insights. Others are still rather interesting and demanding.

Germans still don't use blinkers of their cars'! ..just saying.

Otherwise I seem to miss animals and nature here. In Finnish cities nature with exhaustive (soft surface) jogging routes are always relatively near. Here for some freaking reason they have asphalted paths in these few tiles of forest in central city. I guess one just has to humbly take some 10-15 min tram-trip to outskirts if willing to go run into real forest without asphalt.

Next week I'm off to Malaga and Granada, Spain, to relax a bit and a week after that seems to be snowboarding trip to Austria. Christmas is good time to recap the courses.. right?


sunnuntai 10. marraskuuta 2013

Sports

Sport offering of KIT is fairly comprehensive: http://buchsys.sport.uni-karlsruhe.de/angebote/aktueller_zeitraum/index.html

10 € insurance payment is obligatory for a person who wish to attend any of those courses and sport courses themselves cost ~6-16 € per semester.

The not so funny part is that the subscribing period started on 14.10. at 9.00 a.m. and most courses were full 5 minutes after. The website experienced also hardships with staying up and proper functioning under pressure of thousands of activity hungry people.

  • Plan in advance what you would like to take, also the plan b's and c's.
  • Read carefully course instruction: some courses don't take subscriptions on this date but have instead a meeting somewhere where they give password personally for appealing applicants
  • About the gym (walk-in) of the school: I think you can go there to register up whenever you please, also before 14.10. after you have enrolled to school. I went there on 14.10. because I didn't yet know how my sport course selection would turn out to be and was told that next possible time for obligatory pre-examination and show-around would be in January; the gym was fully booked already and no exceptions for that. Class activities like bodypump or zumba etc. are a different matter and I guess there is space for 80€ semester fee. Overall costs of the walk-in gym would be some 175e for 6 months. 
  • I subsidised walk-in gym by going to commercial Venice Beach -gym on east side of centrum. It's open 24/7, costs 6e/week for a student and is fairly spacious and has good quality equipment. Minor flaw is that they have only 1 squatting rack and quite a toy-like-quality, disappointing weightlifters. However I'm able to do everything I could wish for there more or less and the price also includes variety of classes to participate. The gym also has mixed gender sauna open all the time. The contract is binding for 1 year but if you move out of city during that period, you get a certificate of unrolling as citizen from city office and by showing that can break the gym contract. Highly recommended. 
Other interesting activity I found here is a climbing hall on the west side of city: http://www.kletterhalle-karlsruhe.de/
I had no prior experience about rope climbing, but I just happened to bump into couple of friends there accidentally and they taught me how to ensure that my partner would stay alive and how to keep my own life also and after that I bought my own shoes and harness here and climb on Mondays when it's cheaper, 6-7€ entrance for unlimited time period. Renting gear costs 5.5€ if you don't have your own but i'd recommend buying it right away if you have any intention to continue every now and then. Altogether great hobby and good complementary action for bodybuilding.

I also attend HipHop class from KIT sport offering once a week. Annoying thing is that the class takes place from 21.00 till 22.30. Otherwise it's been this far quite nice. Unlike in Finland, here also some guys dance hip-hop and gender distribution is something like 5 men - 20 girls in our group. The hall where this class is run has good floor and is spacious enough. Mirrors are there but they are apparently very old and therefore bend image awfully.

Yet another activity is pair dance class taking place on every Wednesday for 2 hours from 8 p.m. It's completely free of charge and offered by local student organization. There we dance standard style dances with lead of an instructor. Audio systems are good and teaching is clear and progressing rather slow giving changes for those with 2 left legs and sometimes boring the life out of me. There are a little bit more guys than girls at the moment but it's fairly balanced and I haven't experienced problems getting a pair. Gentlemen get to choose every other and Ladies every other time so pairs are mainly constantly changing between every dance.

lauantai 2. marraskuuta 2013

Railtrip Frankfurt - Mainz - Bonn - Köln

We (5 man team) made 3 day - 2 night -trip to mentioned cities during holiday week after the end of German pre-course and before the beginning of lectures.
The companions ready to hit the rail
Start was at 10 a.m. after waiting for one oversleeper for one hour and first target was Frankfurt. Nevertheless quite good timing since it took something over 2 hours there and check in to hostel is available earliest at 1 p.m. so we got to drop our back bags right away.

How: whole Germany train ticket for 5 persons in any day costs 68€. It covers buses, trams, REgional trains and InterREgional trains, but doesn't allow for utilization of faster CE or ICE trains, sadly. Those 2 types of trains are highly expensive and probably only CEO's and Ministers travel with them...

Hostel booking in advance for one night in Frankfurt in Five Elements (central location, in red lanter district, cheap happyhour coctails and spacious common room) and one night in Köln in The Black Sheep (20-30 min walk from old center, nice location, nice colorful rooms, nice showering facilities, quite small common room (kitchen)). Both were about 20€/person/night half a week in advance and highly recommendable. Sheets included, bring your own towel. We could have wanted to stay in Köln for other night to see some more, but the whole city was full booked. 

Frankfurt am Main, a.k.a. Mainhattan. City of money. Fairly small city with 600 000 inhabitants, expensive streets and skyscrapers (tallest being 259m high Commerzbank Tower). Mainz tower is only one accessible for public and provides really worthy view at 200 meters (~4€ for students). 
View from Mainz tower
There would have been couple of interesting museums, most notably Naturmuseum Senckenberg, but we were too late to visit that. Frankfurt Stock Exchange is also one central point of interest to see. Oldest parts of the city lie in Römerberg, not visited this time. Frankfurt was the first city I've been with skyscrapers and mainly therefore an interesting experience. 

We ate our stomachs full, and more, in a Chinese buffet with Sushi for a little less than 10€. 

After strolling a while in the city, a beer would have tasted good, but it provided to be challenging task to find a pub. We visited one promising looking one, but inside an old guy came talking to me that "yes, you may stay, but we are over 60 year old men here discussing about impotence". I didn't too much look around, but friends noted that some of them were also kissing each other. So we bumped into a veteran gay impotence discussion club. We didn't stay there to find out whether or not we would have been solution to their problem. 

Walking a little more, we saw a beer advertisement sunshade and went in to a cozy looking bar. There was interior space made of glass walls and bar counter in there, and out of that in the hallway of that building were some sofas and tables. Ok, fairly priced beer, we chose to stay for one. I wen't to toiled and saw there some gay concert advertisement poster. At least we had a good laugh and got to drink the beer to drive away biggest thirst. 

9 p.m. or so we went back to the hostel and stood in the common room drinking and playing some pool and slept well after long day.

Opera

The next morning we headed to Mainz with intention to visit 1-2 places on the way to Köln and to arrive there at evening. Mainz really is a beautiful city with nice atmosphere and it's landmark is rather huge cathedral with big fascinatingly-detail-rich sculptures inside.

Cathedral of Mainz
After seeing that and strolling a little bit more, it was time to take train to Bonn. Bonn is the old capital of Germany and therefore culturally rich. It's also well known for being the home city of Beethoven. Hour was already quite late, around 6 p.m. so it wasn't possible to visit any potential museums or anything. Neither we had proper plans or map about locations of interest. There happened to be markets taking place and 1 kilo of grapes for 1 euro. Great bargain for sweetest grapes I've tasted but that was pretty much all the city had to offer for now. 
Typical style of center of Bonn

Some minor Roman ruins
The train trip down the riverside of Rhein was worthwhile. Between Mainz and Köln, we could see approximately 50 castles, some more and some less impressive, and also the landscape is something as such. Would be nice experience to have a boat cruise on Rhein. 
One of those castles, don't remember where
We finally arrived in Köln at 9 a.m. perhaps and wen't to eat 6e hamburger/steak meals into a close by place called Barbossa or something. Köln is the proud city of Kölsch, local beer served in ridiculous 2dl glasses, to make people angry, I'd guess. Taste wasn't anything special. After that, it was time to go rest for the exploration of the city being in turn the next day, especially after finding that we would stay only 1 night in the city due to the full reservation books in hostels. 

The big day in Köln: walking to center took about 30 min from the hostel and we had received a nice map from there with all the points of interests to see. There are lot's of churches but after seeing the one in Mainz, and when expecting for Kölner Dom, these were not much. Striking feature of Köln were those ugly concrete cubicles everywhere (Köln was pretty well levered down in WW2)! Oh a church, oh a monstrous building from soviet union, oh another church...
Definition of massive
Köln is hometown of candy firm Haribo, has a nazi archive which we actually visited and which would have been quite interesting with good German skills (no English text anywhere, ofc), chocolate museum, a Roman museum with some outrageous 6e entrance fee, didn't go there, hey it's not Rome anyway and then the Dom. We paid the couple of euros to climb the tower up to sight stand at height of some 100m. It was a nice experience even though the views are not very good because the place is so thickly covered with a cage to prevent suicide activities probably. The Dom is simply massive. It was impossible to make a decent picture of it because it just won't fit in one meaningful photo. Also it has astonishing amount of detail in it's construct, but hard to say if it's very beautiful or not. Worth experiencing definitely. One day was well enough to see the main points of the city, and to see too many concrete cubicles but they also say that both Köln and Frankfurt have very lively nightlife. Don't know about that then since to me it seems to be the (mostly boring) same basically everywhere. That area remained unstudied. 
The city of Beton
Six hour or so train back to Karlsruhe was rather ass numbing experience.