Rain That Fell Like Spring

We are approaching the end of may; it is late spring and summer is expected to arrive soon. For the moment however, the warm sunny weather of the last weeks has been replaced by steady rain. Nevertheless, this actually makes the city feel more alive. The sky is gray and it’s wet constantly, but the trees and bushes take the opportunity to grow tremendously and fill the streets with an incredible green. You can virtually see them growing and sprouting. You can definitely smell them; a grassy humid smell that wafts through the roads. There is little wind, and the temperature varies somewhere around fifteen degrees, so it’s rather moderate weather.

For me, there is not much to do outside at the moment. Mostly I’m preparing for the solid state physics exam on june 2. This is made a little bit more difficult by the fact that the lecture was based heavily on one particular book which I refused to purchase, already owning two books on similar topics. Nevertheless, the topic is quite interesting, and if my preparation has fewer parallels with the rather flaky lecture, that shouldn’t do any harm. Besides: Superconductivity, magnetism and liquid crystals work the same in all modern physics books.

I’m using some of my free time at the moment to participate in some online forums on political discussions; one in particular is interesting because it is mostly visited by US americans, whose politics I am normally not overly familiar with. A few days on the forum has already taught me one valuable thing: American politics tend to be bipolar – there are two separate camps, and unless you intend to trigger a flamewar, you should be extremely careful not to blatantly offend either one. There are usually not too many intermediate positions, let alone a third camp with a significantly different opinion. To background my posts better, I have expanded my daily news readings to include the websites of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a slightly conservative german daily (very well-respected nevertheless) and the New York Times, which everybody ought ot be familiar with. Together with Heute and Zeit, two other german news sources, it gets rather interesting when several of them comment on an occurance.

Norwegian National Day

The 17th of may is Norway’s national day. A great cause of celebration throughout the country and something that the norwegians truly cherish. The day celebrates the signing of the norwegian constitution in Eidsvoll in 1814, and is referred to variably as “søttende mai” and “grunnlovsdagen”, i.e. constitution day.

The night before wednesday is one of the big party nights, so ESN took the opportunity to throw a barbecue party in Moholt, the first one of the seaon for me. I chatted with people, but I didn’t join the late night parties, since I wanted to be up early the next day.
My friends from the choir had put out word that they wanted to spend national day together and would start it off with a breakfast in the sunshine in front of the NTNU main building. So I woke up, packed some supplies and my camera and went down to Gløshaugen. The weather was excellent; blue skies, sunshine, twenty degrees and a light breeze. People were already congregating towards downtown, the men in old-fashioned black suits with wool stockings, the women in the traditional Bunad dresses. Everybody apparently wanted to look their best.

After breakfast, we went down into Midtbyen. It is here that I started taking pictures, so please avail yourself of the link on the right hand side; they are on page 19 of the main folder. The main attraction of may 17th are the three parades. The first one is the childrens’ parade, which is organized by the schools and features the various grades of the Trondheim schools. There’s some older support personnel for music and banner-bearing and such. Due to the masses of people already lining the streets, it was difficult for us to get a good place to watch. As a result, most of the pictures of the morning feature the backsides of a lot of heads. We nevertheless had a fun hour watching the school classes and various marching bands parade by.

Some of our group left for the church service, while the rest of us went to have a break in an open air cafe. The second parade would start in early afternoon and comprise all the numerous clubs and associations of Trondheim. The Tensing choir, which is kind of Aks’ sibling choir, would also participate. In order to stand a chance against the numerous marching bands, electronic amplification would be needed. For this purpose, there would be a trolley with a generator, two large speakers and three microphones that would be pulled ahead of the choir. But first, we had to get it from the car (parked in the southeast part of Midtbyen), put everything together in a reasonably safe fashion and then move the cart to the assembly court. What met us there was the largest mass of people and banners I have seen in a long time. From brass bands to gay rights, from farmers’ youth to marine engineering students, from choirs to jazz ensembles, from Judo to folk dance. The acoustical background was quite interesting as well, since everybody seemed to play their music as some sort of competition. The most memorable club present, however, was Heia Bortelaget, one of the two football fan clubs in Trondheim. The other is the more convention Rosenborg fan club (remember than Rosenborg is the name of Trondheim’s main football team, which routinely plays in the champions’ league). Heia Bortelaget, however, was founded with the express purpose of cheering on other teams which come to Trondheim to play against Rosenborg. The name roughly means “hurray guest team”. The club was founded in 1992 by physics students who felt that Rosenborg losing once in a while would make the norwegian league that much more interesting for everybody.

Well, eventually, the parade set into motion, and after watching it pass by for a while and noticing oddities like the Norwegian Mustache Association, I walked back to Moholt, where I spent late afternoon relaxing. Then it was off again, to the Aks barbecue. The evening concluded with various discussions and a nice (if somewhat drawn out) game of Kubb on the front lawn. I eventually went back home after midnight, since I was still a little bit tired from waking up early.

On a side note: Sundown is currently about 22:10, with dusk lasting until 23:30. The first signs of dawn appear at 02:30. Waking up with the sunrise is starting to be a very bad idea.

Freshmaker Fountain

The past days have mostly been dedicated to exam preparation. I’ve spent time revising lecture notes, checking literature sources and solving exercises. The first exam will be the numerical physics home exam, and I’ve spent the last three days programming intensely to make sure I am acquainted with Matlab and have seen every basic algorithm we have covered. I’m making good progress and the programming is actually very interesting. Nevertheless, I can’t be serious all the time.

To alleviate the situation, I decided it was time for another experiment of the “just because” class. I had read in some science magazine that dropping Mentos into a bottle of cola would cause the coke to foam wildly and make a huge mess. Talk is cheap, of course, and I’ve read more than one cool-sounding suggestion that turned out to be wrong (rememeber the frozen shaving creme?).

So a test was necessary. I recruited Tommy and we bought some cheap soft drinks and a pack of Mentos. I wielded my camera (veteran of many experiments) while he put the Mentos in. The results surpassed expectation. Just four Mentos in a bottle cause an immediate fountain of foam that can reach up to two meters, depending on the kind of soda you are using. Out of the ones we tried, Eventyrbrus turned out to be the best. Most likely because it is sticky and tends to foam, so while the amount of gas released is the same, the effects are much more visible. For the same reason, mineral water is unspectacular; it bubbles a lot, but no fountain.

Taste testing showed that the Mentos had drained most of the gas from the drinks, making them flat and tasteless. We suspect that the gummi arabicum (E414) in the shell is responsible. Coincidentally, the previously colored Menthos were bleached to a healthy bone white in the process. They still tasted okay, though.

All Sung Out

Hoarse throat, sense of accomplishment and a lot of stuff to unpack: The aftermath of a weekend away with the Aks choir. Receiver of our august presence this time around was the town of Verdal at the northern end of the Trondheim fjord. We departed Trondheim late friday afternoon on the local train which connects Oppdal/Røros-Trondheim-Steinkjer. I rather like going by train; it’s quite and comfortable, you get a good look at the land and there’s enough space to move around if you want to. Loads better than going by car or bus, in my opinion. The trip itself took us mostly along the south bank of the fjord, past Værnes airport and through the agricultural heartland of Nordtrøndelag. I had always wondered where all the farming was supposed to be happening, since there isn’t a lot of it going on near Trondheim. It appears that the region between Stjørdal and Steinkjer possesses good soil and comparatively flat hills which now that spring has come are mostly plowed stretches of brown earth.

Our accomodation turned out to be the combined kindergarten/prayer house of Verdal; mostly a community sort of place. It had a piano, several rooms and a big kitchen, so we were quite satisfied. Being inside also had the bonus of not having to see the aesthetically challenging outside. The weekend in general followed the maxime “less play, more work”. We got to have meals and do some fun stuff in the evening, but in the course of three days, we had a concert, provided music for a church service and managed to practice about nine hours in between. That’s the reason my voice has been stretched a little bit. Nevertheless, I see no reason to complain. The Aks choir is in a position where it would be very easy to be just a church choir – a small choir that sings mostly in church services and works with songs that are not too challenging. But our conductor is making us work quite hard and I feel that it’s pushing us to a good level.

My primary reason for saying so is the concert we held on saturday evening in Stiklestad church. Stiklestad was the site of the battle in which St.Olav, the patron saint of Trondheim and first king of Norway, fell. But we weren’t actually there for the historic appeal. We had a small band (drummer, pianist and bassist) there to support us and a small microphone setup for use in the band pieces. Our concert program, however, was quite beyond my expectations. We managed to deliver sixteen pieces in good quality and style, with two text readings and two instrumental pieces interspersed. It may not be Live Music Live, but it is a big step up from a service in Strindheim church. There was only one disappointing thing about the event: The number of spectators. There were [i]eleven[/i]. Appearantly, we had really bad timing: There had been a concert the evening before nearby and that had a full house. The spectators we did have, however, were enthusiastic and since we had charged no entrace fee, they decided to be generous and donated almost a hundred euro to us – a sum per person that we would not have dared charge in a hundred years. A hurray for the generous people of Verdal!

Despite practicing a lot, we did have some time in the evenings to have fun. Friday evening saw another round of the “Great Norwegian” quiz game, in which my team actually won by virtue of complementing each others fields of knowledge – I’m pretty good at technology, geography and european history, whereas others are strong in biology, literature, sports and norway-specific knowledge. On saturday evening, we all went to bed a little bit earlier since the day had been quite tough, but we did get to play a round of adjective fable first. Someone draws up a story but leaves all the adjectives blank. The other players are then asked to name random adjectives which get dropped in the blanks. The end result is then read out and usually pretty hilarious. I don’t know that many norwegian adjectives (it’s the word group you can best do without), so I resorted to foreign words, such as nepotic and secular. Too bad the thing being nepotic was not even alive, let alone had relatives to favor.