School Has Started

After one month of Swedish language intensive course (the exam was on Saturday) my normal classes started today with a course in Language Engineering. The different topics are related to natural language processing in general, featuring everything from basic linguistics and mathematics to speech reception and production, language understanding and also grammar validation and text summarising.

At the beginning kursledaren Ola Knutsson asked if there are students present who don't speak Swedish. I was the only one. He told me that the course language is Swedish (which I knew) but that I am welcome to speak English at any time (questions, emails, presentations, assignments, examinations). The first session was more or less understandable for me, but it was mainly administrative stuff and an introduction to natural language processing, which wasn't totally new to me. I'll see how it'll work in the future.

At least the course literature is in English and was already recommended in Stefan Kopp's HCI-lecture last summer term in Bielefeld:

Jurafsky, D; Martin, J.H. (2000): Speech and Language Processing. Prentice Hall.

How to Fold a Shirt

Since I did alternative civilian service I never learned how to fold a shirt - until today:

When I scrolled through del.icio.us' popular items, I discovered a a Japanese shirt folding technique (here is a mpeg) said to be popular in the blogosphere for a month or so.

As a "hands on" training I went to the laundry this afternoon and practised to fold my shirts afterwards. This technique really works.

Thanks to the Internet military service can be abrogated now.

Some Kind of Chili

Yesterday we improvised some kind of chili. As the result was very good, I am going to share the recipe here.

• 1 hot chili pepper (more if you like)
• 1 small courgette
• 2 Spanish onions
• 2 red peppers
• 1200 g canned tomatoes
• 300 g maize
• 400 g kidney beans
• 500 g mincemeat

Dice the onions. Then stir-fry them and the minced meat in some butter. Add the tomatoes, the beans and the maize. Slice the courgette, the chili pepper and the peppers and add them after a while. Cook for about 45 minutes and season it with salt and paprika. Serve the "chili" with rice.

Comments and suggestions are very welcome for this post.

Postcards

Would you like to receive a postcard from Stockholm?

Just send one to me from the town you live in or the place where you spend your holidays and you'll get one in return afterwards. My address is:

Hendrik Buschmeier
Röntgenvägen 1-1404L
141 52 Huddinge
SWEDEN

Don't forget to note your address on the postcard (if necessary).

[Update]

This address is not valid anymore, my new address is:

Hendrik Buschmeier
Oberer Steinbrink 8
32657 Lemgo
GERMANY

Sorting at Source

I live in a house where it is obligatory to sort out ones rubbish. And it is not as easy as it is in Germany (e.g. there a three different sorts of paper to distinguish). All in all there are the following seven categories:

• Clear glass
• Coloured glass
• Stiff plastic
• Cardboard and corrugated cardboard
• Newspapers and brochures
• Paper packaging
• Metal

Additionally to these categories there is so called "household rubbish" which includes biological waste and food leftovers. To "boost the burn process" and "for reasons of energy efficiency" it is recommended to throw milk, yoghurt and juice cartons as well as plastic bags and other soft plastic into the household garbage, too.

Anyway, the situation is actually a bit different: "There is a garbage room, throw your garbage there and everybody will be happy."

Although I think that the garbage room is only intended for bulky rubbish and household rubbish, nobody seems to care.

»Ja till Europa«

When I crossed Sergels Torg today I saw these Swedish teenagers campaigning for Europe.

I was rather surprised about this kind of "promotion" and asked if I'm allowed to take a photo of them. Afterwards I wanted to know more about their motivation, but they told me that they "don't stand behind it and are just displaying the sign for a documentary".

One shouldn't expect too much!

Bookstores

Today I took a look at Scandinavia's biggest bookstore: Akademibokhandeln in Mäster Samuelsgatan 28, Stockholm/City. They have got about 125 000 titles in stock (among others a lot of academic books) and of course you can get a tea, a Kanelbulle and a nice place on a sofa inside. If you want you can order a book in their onlinestore and pick it up in one of their subsidiaries.

A very specialised store I visited last week is the Sweden Bookshop in Slottsbacken 10, Stockholm/Gamla Stan. They have got literature about Sweden and/or from Swedish authors only (for example nice pictorials on Swedish design, Swedish novels, Swedish poetry books and many books on Swedish history, culture, society, food, language, landscape, ... and the Swedes)

The Kårbokhandel (studentkår = student union) on the KTH main-campus seems to have mainly books which are compulsory for courses. Unfortunately there is no bookstore atmosphere in this shop but instead you get the books for low prices as they buy them in great quantities (there is no fixed price for books here in Sweden).

Good Things Come ...

... to those who wait. I finally got my broadband internet connection! A short test proved, that I've got a 10 Mbit/s downstream (approx. 800 KB/sec). Not too bad.

The View

I totally agree with Florian's comment. I should really post a photo with the view I have from the 14th floor. Unfortunately I've taken (so far) just one photo strait out of my window and that doesn't show a nice surrounding ...

... but I promise you to photograph both other direction and post the photos soon. And as you already see on this photo there is a lot of wood all around. Apart from the nearest neighbourhood (the photo shows a thermal power plant) we live "ute i naturen" - which is quite pleasant.

First Elk

Today I saw my first elk in Skansen, an open-air museum on Djurgården (one of Stockholm's districts / islands). The whole trip to Skansen was very entertaining - we saw ancient Swedish houses (which differ completely from ancient German houses), Scandinavian animals (apart from the elks, we saw bears, wolfs, lynxes, ...) and walked around for nearly four hours.

For those of you who are crazy about elks (a lot of people are), here is the photo I took:

Still No Internet Connection

Although I was promised by Tele2 Sverige that the internet socket in my room will work by Monday, it does not. And it seems to be my fault:

I plugged my iBook in the socket of my appartmentmate's room. Tele2 doesn't like this kind of sharing, so they "shot me of". According to their technical support they don't accept it, if you plug in more than five different computers (identified by the Mac-Address) into one socket or use one computer with several sockets. Now I have to wait until they update their blacklist (they will need some days for that).

Bad luck!

Roentgenvaegen 1

If you are curious about my "house" here in Stockholm:

(It's the left one.)

First Week Review

My first week here in Stockholm is already over and it was really exhausting. There were many activities for exchange students at KTH and in addition to that I had to move to my flat, clean it, buy stuff, open a bank account, get a prepaid card for my mobile phone, request an internet connection, apply for a residence permit, write two essays and do exercises for my Swedish language course, puzzle my timetable (it's not even complete), remember a lot of names, ...

But I should not complain, because all in all it is fun to be here - I'm just a bit unhappy that I didn't had the time to walk around in the city and to do the "tourist-program". I hope this will be possible during the next weeks.

A Long Way to University

Sweden is a wide country. It is nearly 1600 kilometers long and has got an area of 450000 square kilometers. As there are only 9 million Swedes, the distances between two places are usually quite long. Of course this is not true if you live in a big city like Stockholm. Excluding my accommodation (a suburb in the south). But I am used to travel a long way to get to university and it is not shocking for me to ...

1. take the stairs from the 14th to the 13th floor.
2. take the elevator from the 13th floor to the ground level.
3. take a bus to Flemingsberg station or go there on foot (the bus stop is in front of the house).
4. take the commuter train (pendeltåg) from Flemingsberg station to Stockholms Central.
5. take the red line of the tunnelbana from T-Centralen to Tekniska högskolan.

All in all I need to travel 45 - 60 minutes to get to the KTH. So there is pretty much time to read the newspaper, listen to music or talk to other people.

Studentroom

Well, you may have noticed that I neither mentioned my flat nor the house I'm accommodated in. There is a reason for that; everything was dirty and I didn't like it at first. But it is said to be impossible to change your accommodation (due to the number of students) and so I have to live with it.

On the day I arrived I cleaned the fridge for 40 minutes, I cleaned the bathroom and I cleaned the furniture in my room. On Wednesday my appartmentmate Matthias and I washed up all the kitchen stuff. Yesterday we washed the floors of our rooms and of the "living area". It was really dirty and there were lots of long black hairs everywhere.

Today I went to the large IKEA store in the south of Stockholm. I bought a lot of stuff, e.g. a carpet, a pillow, a plant, some picture frames ... . As you can see on the photos I took this evening, my room is quite comfortable and nice now.

I think that I begin to feel at home here.

Confused?

As I have not yet access to the internet from my accomodation, it will happen that I post several stories on this weblog in "batch mode", each with a different time-stamp. So please don't be confused, if you suddenly discover some new stories, although they haven't been there at the time of their timestamp.

3G-Revolution

I could not imagine the use of mobile video telephones until I saw a great application today. There was a deaf person, who phoned someone else using sign language over a UMTS video phone.

And here's the clue: It all happened in the tunnelbana. Which means there is full 3G-coverage in Stockholm's subway system (there isn't even GSM-coverage in Bielefeld's subway)!