Weekly Review 14

Woosh… and another week passed by and I got nothing to talk about. Seriously, nothing worth mentioning happened this passed couple of days, so I’m going to talk about all the other things until I run out of them, too.

We didn’t play football on Tuesday, because we couldn’t get enough players together. I had actually planed to finally take my camera with me and take some pictures, so I could write an article about it (it is about time isn’t it?), but I guess this has to wait another week. It happens quite often lately, that the football game gets cancelled, due to a lack of players, which is quite a sad thing, because it is a nice change to all the reading and work we have to do for our classes. And believe me, it is a lot. We only have three classes and not six like the rest of the fourth year students and we can hardly manage it. No idea how they do it, but I guess they are more used to it, (and probably not as lazy as we are ;-) just kidding). But classes here are different from Gießen and probably different from the whole German system, which I frankly like better. Not sure why, but I don’t think we get much more done here then in Germany, although the classes are twice as long with only a seventh of the students. But maybe that’s just a feeling. It’s hard to compare. Something I do miss however, are copying machines and powerpoint presentations.

If you want to get a text photocopied, you have to hand it to the guy at research center, fill out a form and then he will photocopy it for you. If he got time he will do it instantly, but sometimes you have to wait until the next day to pick up the copies. It’s a little strange if you are used to the Gießen way of doing it, which is copying the texts you need yourself.

I don’t want to say, that powerpoint presentations are the best thing that ever happened to teaching or that they are essential for a good course, they are definitely not, but sometimes they do help to keep a certain structure and are a nice support in terms of repeating the content of lectures, especially the theory parts. But that’s just my opinion and I accept it, that not everybody shares this perspective.

Although I have to read a lot for uni, I managed to finish the first book of Stieg Larssons Millennium Trilogy. I got “Verblendung (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) as a birthday present and started reading it on the plane back from Germany to Colombo. It was a nice ready, although I think it is a little overrated, or overhyped. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still recommend it and I liked parts of it quite much, but there were points during the reading were I thought “Get to the point! Will you!” But that’s again just my opinion. If you’ve read the book, feel free to let me know what you thought about it. Maybe we can get a little book club going? (That’s something I want to do for quite some time now, start an online book club.)

What else is there to talk about, or not to talk about but to tell anyway? I think it is quite annoying that you can’t find red peppers in this country. Ok I haven’t searched for them to that extant, but you can’t get them at the supermarket where we do most of our shopping and that’s annoying. Do you know how many really good looking recipes are out there that require red peppers? But, what to do, you can’t really find nice looking tomatoes either. I still have the idea of starting a new section about food, as I don’t have much else to talk about.

Well, enough with the rambling and complaining. I should get back to work. There is a presentation due on Monday, but I’ll tell you about that one next week.