Poof and He Was Gone

Our new neighbour, Benjamin from Bordeaux, has made himself sparse recently. His compartments in the fridge, freezer and cupboards are completely empty, and none of us three has seen him for days. Yesterday, we finally learned the reason for it: Benjamin has moved out. We know this because some of SiT’s cleaning ladies dropped by to clean up his room. The timing suggests that he dropped of his key some time last week. Note that he didn’t make any mention of it to us, and that he has been away a lot even while he still lived, or rather slept, here.

I am rather bemused at such unusual behaviour; Ole, however, is enthused that he no longer shares a wall with an early sleeper. Music until two is once again the order of the day. I am not particularly upset, either; it will mean more cleaning duty, but the three of us get along very nicely and Benjamin was hardly contributing to that. As for why he moved out… I have no idea, but the most likely cause in my opinion is that he found a nicer place. It makes a certain amount of sense: Go to Trondheim, stay three weeks at the student village while you’re going on the hunt for a nice room, then move. Counterarguments are the high cost of living in Trondheim and the fact that he should only stay here for six months at all. But the only other cause I can see is some sudden return to home, which is highly unusual.

Speculations about ex-neighbours aside, we have just started a new project in solid-state physics. We have been divided into groups of five, and our monumental task is to fully understand one nine-page paper and reproduce its content in our own words, preferably with a little bit of background. Despite the groups, everyone has to write their own work; but since it’s only 5-10 pages, that shouldn’t take too much effort. We have decided to dedicate the first week to literature research; I have already checked my physics books and found minimal mention of liquid crystals. Tomorrow I will go on the hunt for online publications cited in the main paper. The entire thing does not seem particularly productive or interesting (no presentation is demanded, the work may be short, and the subject paper is rather trite), but my teammates seem nice and I will try to do some good work. For some reason, project work always convinces me to overcome my laziness.

Before I finish, I would like to utter a film recommendation: The Corpse Bride by Tim Burton, a macabre musical in claymation. Most delightful.

Preparing For Visitors and Self-Study

Hello! It’s been a while since my last post; that’s mostly due to the fact that very little out of the ordinary has been happening. Life proceeds with a smooth routine: Go to lectures, read, talk with people, sing, do some sports, repeat. Nevertheless, some things have been happening over the last week.

Most significantly, my brother Matthias is planning to come to Trondheim in early march and stay here for ten days. The travel arrangements are made to everyone’s satisfaction, but the main issue remains: What shall one do? Living in a city for six months and planning a holiday inside it are rather different things. I have been hitting travel guides in the past couple days, and I will be asking other Erasmus students who had family visiting. I am not too worried about it though, since both Matthias and I are pretty good at improvisation. Neither are we too picky with the weather. In general, Trondheim has many fine qualities: Several museums, nice mountains surrounding it, the largest indoor bath of all of Norway, several historical attractions, two cinemas and a number of concerts. We are also thinking about spending a few days towards the end in Oslo. There are several attractions that I particularly want to see before leaving Norway again: The Vigeland park and the Kon Tiki museum are just two of them.

Until that happens, I have decided to spice up my academic plans a little bit. Quantum chemistry and numerical physics are quite interesting, but advance d solid state physics continues to be far below the expected level. So I thought I could borrow some books from the university library and get some grounding in group theory. Over the past couple months, the importance of group theory has been becoming clearer to me, especially in chemistry and solid-state physics. We spent a lot of time discussing the symmetries of molecules and crystal lattices, and what consequences they have, but it felt… empty. We talk about what is and what comes of it, but I know I do not understand the mathematics that connect one to the other. I see patterns in the symmetry, but cannot describe them. I see a vague connection to linear algebra, but do not have the concepts to clarify it. All this is now coming to an end; I started reading two days ago and while a lot of it sends my head spinning, I am making progress. It’s actually quite interesting.

As a last piece of news, we have gotten a new neighbour, bringing us back up to four people. After Raza moved out, our stuff sort of gravitated into the empty space left behind, but we had to clean it out now. The new guy is called Benjamin and hails from Bordeaux. He’s here for the next six months to complete a project, and he speaks no Norwegian at all. I haven’t spoken to him much as of yet, since he has been pretty busy looking around town, shopping and meeting people at university. I remember what it’s like to come to a new town and be buried under well-meant advice, so I have been keeping rather quiet. In the next couple of days, I wanted to explain to him the various stores nearby and their strengths and weaknesses. But I don’t see him a lot, so that may have to wait a little bit. The only problem so far is that he seems to be an early-sleeper, which annoys Ole a little bit, since he likes to listen to music until around midnight.

Home Improvement and the Transport Problem

For the past six months, my flatmate has been on the waiting list for the Lerkendal student village. It’s newer, nicer and has two people per unit, instead of four like Moholt. Last week, he suddenlz received a letter saying that he could move in the next day, and had a total time of one week to decide. Rather shellshocked by the short time, he spent the next few days weighing the costs and benefits – a nicer flat with only one neighbour to keep from making a mess, against the EUR 110 this would cost extra per month. In the end, he decided to stay in Moholt, mostly because since the departure of Raza, things have become much more cleanly and responsible here.

Partly as a reaction to that, we have started thinking about ways to make our Moholt flat a little nicer. The object of choice is a shelf for the kitchen, to provide extra storage and cover the ugly yellow wall. After some browsing, we have decided on the 230x77x30 version of the Ikea Gorm kit, for EUR 30.
Besides that, we need a new microwave, since our old one belonged to Raza. We discovered a EUR 38 bargain at Elkjop, which is a little bit behind the Ikea from us. Here is the problem now: We know what we need and we have the money, but we have no car. Taking the bus requires you to go down to Midtbyen first and thus takes 50 minutes one way. Then we still have to walk around with a microwave (heavy) and a Gorm shelf (heavier). I don’t know if the shelf [i]can[/i] even be carried by one person. Tommy said that maybe he could borrow his girlfriend’s car, but that was a week ago and I haven’t heard anything further. Normally, I’d just say “screw this” and walk, but with objects this size, that is hardly feasible. I have checked out the transport options offered by Ikea, and they do not rent out carsw they merely offer home delivery. On a side note: Bodø and Tromsø both lack an Ikea. Trondheim/Leangen is the northernmost in Norway, and possibly in the world, Reykjavik being the only competitor. Ikea’s solution to that is to offer special shopping flights from Bodø and Tromsø. Imagine; two flight trips just to get to an Ikea! Well, I have thought about maybe renting a car for our tansportation, but a look at the prices delegated that idea to the scrap heap.

I guess we will just have to wait and hope that Tommy’s girlfriend is feeling magnanimous.