Great Weekend in Amsterdam, but..

So I know it has been a while since my last post, and Amsterdam was awesome so you should want to read it. While I've done some work on it, it won't be ready for a day or so. Annnnd, this turned out to be longer than I wanted, twenty minutes of sleep gone...

My plan was to do it up tonight, but... surprise! Another group meeting this week! This of course means free lunch and dinner, and as the Norwegians do dinner, its an all night thing with way to much wine.

Couple that with the fact that I got about 5 hours of sleep a night for 4 nights in Amsterdam, and then the amazing 2 hours I got last night on the concrete in the Oslo airport, I feel obliged to a good nights rest. :)

But heres some pics just cause I'm awesome like that!

This one will get some more later, but its for you Anthony. This has something to do with Guilds! Yes, real-life guilds, so cool!

I have no idea what this means, but it used to indicate the use of a building...

Now this is a European car, and that is a Canadian!

A bike parking garage anyone, theres gotta be thousands there!

George, you've been a bad boy!

Gotta bend it like beckham, hes actually a small guy, and check out who's with his small wife!

I've waited years.

School, Work and Architecture

I've got a request to tell a bit about my work and some architecture too, so here it goes...(listening to Marky Mark and the funky bunch)

Some of my work in confidential, but I haven't signed the confidentiality agreement yet ;)

I'm doing some thermogravimetric analysis on the oxidation of a common aluminum magnesium alloy. It has applications for improving current methods used to recycle aluminum, which is neat cause it could have significant implications in that field...

If you remember the Vigeland metal from earlier, that is being turned into my samples, which I'll oxidize and collect valuable data... I think, I haven't done anything like that yet, but I should be getting into a good groove next week or so.

Now on to some pics.

I guess Norway is known for its wooden stave churches, and it just so happens there is one by my place.

They also have really strict rules about what new buildings can be made. The result is that all new buildings are really 'artistic', or cool in some way.

Like this condo building, I'd live here.

The power substation they've got by my place is also pretty interesting. It seems to be an old mansion turned into a power station.

My guess is that it is something left over from the war, as all of those occupation war items were either destroyed or turned into 'no-so-glorious' government buildings, like the sub pens they have in the bay which is now an archive for the government. They even painted it a hideous pink!

The university buildings also follow the same trend as the rest of town, and are pretty cool and modern looking, with some pretty sweet pedways. FYI, NTNU is mostly a materials science and engineering school with 30 000 students, thats a lot of Mat E's!

A cool dicotomy that is present here in Trondheim is that the buildings are either cool modern/industrialist or they are old stone, perfectly displayed by the main administration building, a stone castle-like building. Just compare that to the GSB (general services building) at the U of A!

Trollstigen and Trollveggen, bring on the Trolls!

I took the weekend to go to see some great Norwegian Fjords, and man was I not disappointed.

I took the train (on Friday), which is awesome just in itself, but Norwegian trains are awesome, they are comfy, quiet, and you can walk around, buy six dollar coffee, and sit in the little restaurant car!

The rain was intense on the way there, not really encouraging, but it turned out to be a good thing because the waterfalls were intense!

Saturday rain was ridiculous, I got soaked on Friday on the 30min walk to the hostel from

the train station, and it hadn't stopped raining all night.

The only option was to take the bus to Trollstigen, or 'Troll stair'.

The 'less steep' part of the road, remember one lane in a coach bus makes for very tight turns!

Rain makes big waterfalls!

The bridge across the waterfall, a roman arch is memory serves me correctly.

The one lane on the bridge, not much room...

view from the bottom, you can just barely see the bridge.

Me at the bottom, after having conquered Trollstigen!

Yah I know, pretty cool right!

The Glorious Urinals of Norway!

What is currently a growing collection of photographs I will share with you now. Of the things I have found different from Canada, one is the things that are peed in.

Ladies you may not find this quite as interesting as some, but heres a little taste of the various urinals and their arrangements; from the lone ranger or dangerous duo, all the way to the elegant trio of porcelain pee pots.

Enjoy!

More Aluminum Recycling!

The aluminum recycling conference has come and gone, I definitley learned a lot and got some good networking done.... Job potential me thinks!

I have no idea why that was underlined (gotta work on getting my own blog software... later project)

Anyways, so the conference was based out of a historical hotel, like most things in Trondheim, it is way older than 100 years old, but has been renovated and repaired, due to the large number of fires in the past.

We had breakfast and lunch in the hotel, and heres the impressive dinning room, complete with live piano music and fountain! and excellent food too!

Monday night after dinner at the history of music museum, which was awesome. It was in an old estate house turned museum in the 50's, some rich Russian lady founded it. It has themed rooms and lots of instruments and things, but the best part was definitely our guide. He was this skinny guy with a pony tail, and his accent wasn't quite British, just a hint. It had a flavor of snob, but he was also very delicate and careful when he spoke, but gave off the subtle feeling that he would murder us all in the next room as he gently ushered us it, calling us 'dear guests', I'll have to do the impression the next time I see you, just remind me. I don't have pics cause they weren't allowed, hog wash!

O that was a tangent, so after dinner, I guess I was seated next to the partakers at the conference. The three of us, and my boss, (mother of 4 by the way) proceeded to shut down the museum bar, the hotel bar, the bar and grill next door, and ended up across the street at 'Frakken Bar', which is a piano bar, pretty Frakken cool if you ask me (Ha!)

I was gifted the whole night with free drinks(the aluminum recyclers were way too generous) and a piano player who also happened to be Canadian so he played whatever I wanted. Long story short, found out Norwegian bars close at 330, late night bike rides are fun, and that getting up at 7 for a conference the next morning was not fun!

But I did get something good out of it, other than knowledge of course. The world's purest aluminum is made in Norway in a town called Vigeland, and is known as Vigeland metal, rated at >99.99% Al. Anyways, I got kilos of it! Fo Free!


Another great development, I got some free curtains from another student, and now my room is dark enough that I may be getting some sleep!

And as a reward for reading my blog, I have some candy for my fellow MatE's! The back side of the Vigeland metal is full of dendrites! Big ones! There centimeters long, and 3D even! I've a picture of them.

Aluminum Recycling Conference Kickoff!

It has been another week in Trondheim, and not too much has happened, I think I have pretty much adjusted, although not to the food situation yet(twice as expensive and not that good :( ) See below, never before did I know that you could buy prepackaged, frozen pancakes! So I bought some, very tasty!

I had to cancel my trip to Trollveggen due to bad weather, cause its not good to climb a mountain in the rain, and not that much fun. But it didn't turn out too bad, I started the weekend off with a couch surfing BBQ at a nearby surfers house.

It turned out to be really successful, about 15 people showed up, which is quite a lot for a couch surfing event. I remember at least nine different countries represented there, I'll see if i can list them off. Canada, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Macedonia, Portugal, Cambodia, and Samba, maybe more. But it was really cool and interesting to talk to all of these different people about their cultures and preconceptions and stereotypes and learned that I really don't know that much about other countries. But an important thing is that I am going to have to get very good and quickly and effectively explaining the difference between Canada and the States, cause I heard a lot of "but they are pretty much the same, right?" uhhh

And to bring in the title of this post, today was the social event to start off the conference on aluminum recycling. It is in Norway because there is a huge aluminum industry here due to the large quantity of cheap electricity available here. How they do it is to drill up into a lake from underneath, because they have so many high lakes, and then build a hydro station underground, so all that you see is a tunnel and power lines, and there you go, cheap power, and you don't even have to build a dam!

The social event was a little tour through the old part of town, starting near the wooden palace and ending at the docks.

Our tour guide with his two dogs, this guy was hilarious, knocking the evil Swedes and the capitalists from Oslo! His dogs loved eating aluminum foil they found on the ground, which was quite a hit with the aluminum recycling crowd...

The oldest remaining building (brown one) on the riverside. I think it was built in the mid 1700's, there have always been houses and things on the river, but they have a tendency to burn down, and there have been at least 29 major fires where a large portion of the town burns down! :)

Then we got a boat ride out the to old prison/monastery/WW2 gun station island in the middle of the Fjord.

The entrance tunnel to the island fort, I guess they needed walls this thick to keep out cannon balls.... yah ok.

The build circular prison building on the island, I didn't get a good look, but I'll be back to snoop around ;)

The meal was free (pretty awesome) and we had served beer and wine, and cognac after dinner (more awesome). And I got to learn about some Norwegian food culture, like having to clean your own shrimp, which is really time consuming, messy, and kinda made me not have any shrimp tonight ;)

Our dinning room in one of the old buildings on the island, very rustic!

Weekend Number 2: Part Two

After the fort I decided to check out the old part of town which has the big Cathedral. It's called the Nidaros Cathedral and is the most northern Cathedral in the world... congratulations. For being a relatively small city today, and much smaller in the year 1100, when construction started, I was really impressed by the size of it. Its got a huge wall full of larger-than-life sculptures and really cool flying buttresses.

Flying Buttresses

Choir

Statue covered wall

Some of the statues were of rather interesting characters.

Gandalf Anyone?

So the guy on the left has a flat head, and the guy on the right is holding his?!

As there seemed to be some sort of music festival going on ( there was a choir singing in front of the Cathedral, and another orchestra in the Cathedral's graveyard, and one in the town square, all very good, (I enjoyed a coffee (36 Kroner!) and a waffle (30 Kroner) (cause they just love waffles, they are everywhere))) - there, I think all my brackets are closed.

Anyways, what I was saying was that of the only rap concert going on in the city, I had to stumble upon it, and I decided that it was sooo good I would share it, notice the enthralled croud!

Weekend Number 2: Part one

Wow, I turn around for 2 seconds and I've got followers and some comments, awesome!

For my second weekend I did some of the tourist site seeing I felt I was obliged to do.

I decided to check out the old fort they have at the top of a hill near the center of town. On my way I found 'The World's Only Bike Lift'. Yah it's an escalator type thing for people riding a bike. You put your foot on an accerator pistion which is located in that box thing on the ground, which shoots out a foot pedal that will take you up the hill at 3m/s. Apparently its really popular, but its been around since '97 and some of the locals had never seen it before...

I made it to the fort, its on the top of a hill as I said, and I guess it used to be important, but my boss told me that the town kinda thinks that it is a bit of a joke, as its cannons couldn't reach the water. I guess in the old days you had to attack people at their fort if you wanted to take them over, gentlemanly warfare I suppose... Instead of just blocking them off and letting them starve.

And I went up to the third floor, not much headroom, and I imagine that the cannons would make all the soldiers go deaf.

Still got the vintage cannons in place, which were still movable and swingable, (don't know how I know that...)

Outside they had some cool passages and walls, which overlapped, and by their construction style you could tell which ones were made before or after, and the differing build quality.

And right as I was about to leave, they fired off a cannon to welcome a marching band into the fort, cause I guess they were having a festival that I was unaware of, lucky me :)

There were also some people dressed up in old style wool outfits, which would have been really hot in the sun. A guy smoking a cigar was making old school lead bullets, and all the little children were very interested in the big pot of molten lead...

A wind orchestra started playing after the marching band. These two characters showed up to watch, and film in the top hat's case the orchestra.

To top it all off, they brought out all the seniors with their muskets, there in the back, standing in a row, to fire off their muskets to Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture, which was pretty cool, definitely loud.

However... as a little history lesson to the unreliability of muskets, several of them went off a little late, like in the guys hand when he was trying to figure out why it didn't work the first time. Haha, he scared the crap out of himself!

End of part one...