A working life
Exchange year
Posts written during my Erasmus stay in Toulouse, France 2008-2009
COPENHAGEN & ROSKILDE
Jul 16th
My inverted blogging continues and I’ve now arrived to the Roskilde Music Festival 2009 – June 28th to July 5th.
Cate, Geir and me arrived in Copenhagen the 25th of June. We stayed at Nina’s where Johannes and Anna-Mari also cutched for a few days.
Copenhagen is truly beautiful and we saw the little murmade, the opera and even got to see a very good Veto concert in Tivoli!
After some good days in Copenhagen we packed our bags and headed for Roskilde Saturday night (big thanks to Nina for such great preparations). The official opening of the festival is Sunday at 8 o’clock, but the fences are normally cut down a few hours in advance. We figured arriving at midnight would give us enough time to prepare for the running to get an ok camp.
Sunday night: Coffee and Irish cream (Feeney’s)
This year it was all different – the fences were cut 9 o’clock Saturday night and the camping site was practically full when we got there. We managed to squeeze ourselves into a spot in J camp, as far away from the festival area as you can get. We got the tent up in the dark and were pleased to have a slot!
Left: Beer system. Right: Happy people in our camp.
Sunday we got our camp properly together and chilled out by the tent. We did this most of the four first days, but we also listened to some of the up-and-coming bands at the Junior Pavillion.
Festival life is good!
The big names started Thursday. Kanye West did a good concert, as did Trentemøller and his friends (great show), but my absolute Thursday favourite was the danish rock band Volbeat!
No Roskilde without Tuborg beer
Friday we saw a really good concert with Negash Ali, we got disappointed by the Fleet foxes but re-energized by Baddies.
One of the main names Friday was Oasis, that we saw earlier this year in Toulouse. This time it was a lot better (a good crowd too makes a good concert)!!! We got to see Röyksopp too – but it was too crowded as they played on a stage that was too small in my opinion (Arena).
Oasis!
Saturday was a great day. We saw Lily Allen, Tim Christensen, Håkan Hellström, Slipknot and Petshop Boy.
The crowd at Gogol Bordello – best concert ever!
The American rapper Lil Wayne was supposed to have a gig on Orange stage, but cancelled and he got replaced by Gogol Bordello!
BEST LIVEBAND EVER! The ground shook underneath the thousands (20-25k) that jumped to their Balkan inspired punk music!
Gogol Bordello!!!
The last and final day we got to see Peter Doherty, Ida Maria (I like you so much better when …!), a bit of Madness and Coldplay. In my opinion, Coldplay was beaten by Whitest boy alive, who had a super concert in Arena.
I realize that this isn’t the best post ever, all I’ve done is to mention some of the bands we got to see – but hey, that’s what a festival is all about – the music and the bands!
We got on the train straight after the Coldplay concert and returned to Copenhagen. The following day I flew to Oslo and work :)
A heavy duty backpack in the chaos (bad organisation at the train station)
Roskilde is without a doubt my best music experience ever!
WEEKEND TRIP: WALES
Jul 13th
Crowded at the Wirral show
I’ll do it a bit different the coming blog posts. This blog is mostly about my adventures during my exchange year, but I haven’t been very good at keeping the blog up-to-date. No wonder really, ’cause there’s been a lot of things going on, but now – and in the coming weeks, I’ll have more time to write down all the things I’ve been able to do.
I always write down everything I do on my iPod Touch, but I’ve managed to lose my charging cable, so I cannot reach my memoires for the time being. Therefore I have no recollection (“ish”) of what I’ve been up to the past 3-4 weeks.
My remedy for this is to do inverted blogging: I’ll start with the present and go backwords in time – until everything has been told and I can return to the normal way. Clever – here we go:
WEEKEND TRIP TO WALES
It was all planned a few months ago when I figured I could visit Tom in Wales without spending too much money. I left straight after work last Friday (July 10th).
Already the same night we headed to the local pub, Clayton Arms where I got to try Bitter ale. Very tasty indeed. I even won over Tom’s brother George in Pool (shame on George).
Saturday morning, Tom and I went to Moss Valley golf course and a round of golf. Neither of us have played for more than a year, something the number of balls heading for the woods clearly showed. It’s amazing how we managed to get through all 18 holes without running out of balls. The definite highpoint of the day was when Tom pithed in a fantastic Eagle from about 45 meters (Par 4)!
When we got home we played some Guitar Hero on the Xbox 360 – my favourite game, I think. Still can play Muse’s Knights of Cydonia on Hard :D
Tom’s 21st birthday with food, drinks and good friends!
It was Tom’s birthday and it was celebrated with lots of good food and drinks and ended in the early hours of Sunday!
Sunday we had a chill morning, and then I joined the Cheesbrough family to the Wirral Show, a huge event with stands, funfare, airshows and much more!
Crazy Motocross show!
FUN!
Back home again we had a good meal before we ate the fancy fruit cake Tom’s grandmum had made for him!
It was time to go, a relaxing weekend was over before it ever started. Thank you for a great time Tom :D
MUNICH, BERLIN AND ROSKILDE
Jun 26th
The Roskilde festival (Photo: Once again I’ve been very bad at updating the blog, so I’ll give you a heads up on the events of the past week.
My year in Toulouse is over, it all ended June 19th with a big BOOM! The party, BOOM Mousse (foam party) was very fun, even though I don’t really get the point of having foam in a party (messy and your shoes smell).
Before the BOOM I cleaned my apartment and will get my entire deposit back (Promologis is often hard to please aparently)!
The day after the BOOM (Saturday) Cate, Geir and I left for Munich by train with short stops in Bordeaux and Paris. We spent two days there and then we headed to Berlin where we stayed at a friend’s place (thank you Dinah!).
We then took a plane to Copenhagen where we now are staying at Nina’s. We’re staying here with Johannes and Anna-Kari who’s traveling around Scandinavia these days.
It’s been great so far and Cate, Geir, Nina and me are all super excited to go to the Roskilde Festival on Saturday!
Because of that it’ll be more radio silence from me, but bigger updates will come later!
WHERE NEXT?
Jun 6th
Aaah! How good it feels right now. I’m tired, sleepy and have soar throat, but I’m done with the tiring period these 2-3 weeks really have been!
It’s all over now, we had our final presentation of the project that has been ongoing throughout the year. I’m not a big fan of presentations, but I guess it went ok.
Now that it’s all over, what to do next?
Well, the weather in Toulouse was yesterday, and continues today, to be really bad. It’s pouring down! That didn’t stop 21 of us to go out on a good restaurant last night as a goodbye dinner for Malena, who is leaving on Monday. It’s weird how people have been disappearing one by one the last few weeks.
It’s not too long left of my stay here in Toulouse either. To be exact, I’m probably on my way by this time (Saturday 10:30) in two weeks. That is short! Ouh. Tough to think about.
But, it’s going to be two great weeks! I have plenty of time and I have good friends here and good friends coming from Norway! First out is Eivind and Line who are coming today, and then Øystein and Christina are visiting!
And since I’ve booked great weather for the next two weeks, nothing can “ungreat” the last part of this stay!
PS. The voting for “Best international Exchange/Experience Blog 2009″ ends June 7th. Thank you in advance for voting on my blog “Åsmund Abroad”!
IX09 NOMINATION
May 28th
I just got back from the first three quarters of the DELF B2 test (French) and found a pleasent commentary on the blog:
My blog has been nominated in Lexiophiles.com‘s Best International Exchange and Experience blog 2009 award!
I’m right in the middle of the final 24 hours of this years multidiciplinary project, so I am running short on time, so I’ll leave you to it:
You can vote several times :P
Thank you very much for voting, this will be fun!
