A working life
Exchange year
Posts written during my Erasmus stay in Toulouse, France 2008-2009
EASTER HOLIDAY PART 1: RISOUL
Apr 12th
The first week of this year’s two week Easter holiday is over. I’ve had a great week in the French Alps, more specifically in Risoul.
The short story of the week is as follows:
The bus picked us up at 23h on Friday 3rd of April. I got food poisoned by something I ate the same day and puked three times during the bus ride (9 hours), the first time after 5 minutes of driving. Great start.
The slopes were good, but the snow a bit slushy in the afternoons. We had grouped ourselves in dinner teams and it worked perfectly, good an varied food each day!
Geir got sick after 2 days with high fever and only got four days of skiing, Nina caught his fever the two last days. I sprained my ankle during snow football (which we won by the way) and missed one day of snowboarding. A bit of tape and snowboard boots stabilized the foot enough after the first day.
All in all we were a bit unlucky, but it was still a great trip. I’ve learned to do goofy and 180s properly, but I’m still struggeling with 360s. We’ve done a lot of off piste, amazing fun!
Next up this Easter is the Road trip to Spain!
The apartment for four (Nina, Cate and my head)
The dinner teams made great food! (Roberto, Synnøve, Kristofer, Tom, Cate, Geir and Nina)
Beto won the jumping contest
Lluís with a big grab
Friday we had a common 4th floor dinner in the corridor!
Kristian attacking a steep off piste hill
CANET-EN-ROUSSILLON
Apr 3rd
Regatta in the Mediterranean with a great view of the Pyrenees
Wow, I’ve had a few busy days, walking from activity to activity (mostly school related stuff – boring to tell about). I’m still in a hurry, as I’m heading for The Alps tonight! Risoul in the southern Alps is the place to be and we’re about 10 Erasmus students going. The trip is arranged by Ski INSA, one of the many clubs of the school.
This post is about last weekend’s sailing trip outside Canet-en-Roussillon. Fadia and Michelle (her sister), Tom and I joined FX and Pierre in INSA Club Voil (INSA sailing club) in their 35″ sailboat.
We got to the boat Friday night, slept in the boat and sailed Saturday and Sunday. Saturday we had rain in the afternoon, making it a bit cold. We had great wind though! Sunday we sailed a regatta, it was absolutely awesome! Plenty of wind to make it a memorable experience (15-20m/s wind)
A few pictures will tell the rest of the story from this fantastic weekend! Enjoy!
Something as unusual as a picture with me in it. We spent a nice Friday night in “Shoot first”, the name of the sailing boat.
Happy sailor Tom
Hapy sailor Fadia
Pierre, the captain
Lunch break on Saturday (Fadia, Michelle, Tom, Pierre and FX)
It got really wet Saturday afternoon, Pierre and FX.
Sunday = Regatta day = Fantastic day!
I wish you all a happy Easter holiday and hope to see you in blog space when I return!
SAIL AWAY WITH ME
Mar 27th
Photo: Stefano Liboni (flickr.com)
A short short update! Since my last post I’ve managed to get my glasses completely smashed. They fell on the floor in a crowded room and someone stepped on them. I’m now in the process of getting new ones, but it will be an expensive accident.
As the title suggests, I’m going sailing this weekend! It’s my binôme FX that invited me, and I asked in turn Tom to join. Fadia and her visiting sister is also joining us.
We hope for good weather, but the current forecast doesn’t look too promising, not for Saturday at least.
I’m bringing the camera and hope for some nice shots!
Have a great weekend, enjoy life!
TAG CLOUDS AND VOLLEYBALL
Mar 24th
Everyone that knows me know that I’m a big fan of volleyball and specially beachvolley. It might therefore come as a surprise to some, but yesterday I played the first “real”, organized volleyball match in my entire life!
Roberto and I have started playing for AS INSA, the school’s volley team and we had our first match with the team yesterday, and lost. We’re not disappointed, but we both know that we and the other team members could have skipped a whole bunch of errors and maybe won. We won the first set, but lost the second and third (3 set match).
Anyhow.
As you can see, there is a new “widget” on the right, the cloud tag. iPublish has recently launched this new categorizing feature, so I figured I could start using it right away. I’m not completely sure about the cloud tag image, it might be changed. What do you think about it? Too much, boring, really cool? Tell me!
Now I’m going to sit down and complete my part of the QSE project (Qualité, Sécurité et Environnement).
Have a splendid evening and let me know if the cloud tag box looks weird in your browser!
HOLIDAY ON ICE
Mar 21st
The diversity of my activities here in Toulouse never stops to amaze me, this life is so much fun – always new stuff to do!
Thursday afternoon I joined Tom to go with AS Golf (The golf group at INSA) to shoot some balls on the driving range. We have both played golf actively for several years, but several years ago. We noticed this on the arbitrary direction each ball took. I don’t have any pictures from the driving range, but we had lots of fun!
Yesterday was BOOM night, something that is normally pretty fun. Instead of the normal preparty in the “Trou” I joined Juha, Annika and Cate to the ice skating show “Holiday on Ice – Energia“.
Backflip on ice skates!
A ticket costs at least 80€, a price way out of our price range – so how could we go anyway? Well, luckily Juha know one of the performers and got four freebie tickets!
I got really positively surprised by the quality of the show. It got better and better with more and more energy! We had a great time, followed by a short followup-preparty at Juha’s before we left for the BOOM!
A great show – “Energia” by Holiday on Ice
