Possibly a perfect drive. At least a spectacular view!

The past year, almost two years now, I feel I've started my posts with the following: "Now it's a really long time since my last post". Well, I'm not going to do that this time (even though it's no less true this time).

Last year, my good friend Tom and I went to South Africa for two weeks, mainly plaing golf. Now that we're both working men, we had to shorten the time span some, so we met in Manchester, England and drove to Wales for four days of golf!

Friday
I arrived early Friday morning at the airport, and Tom picked me up in his new Mazda. We drove straight to the first golf course, Royal St. David's Golf Course in Harlech. Harlech is a small village on the west coast of Wales, about an hour south of Caernarfon. Harlech is known for its Edwardian castle (approx. 12th century). The St. David's golf course is located in the sand dunes just below the castle, so you see the castle from every hole on the course. Being a links course, the greens are big and undulated. And it's windy. Despite the heavy winds, I played very well, scoring 34 points (with 20 additional strokes). The best part of the St. David's golf course was the front nine and the beautiful weather.

Royal St. David's golf course seen from Harlech castle

Tom's favourite - fairway bunkers

Saturday
We stayed in the caravan cabin of Tom's parents. It was located with a beautiful view near Conwy in the north of Wales. The second day, we drove back south again, this time heading out on the LLeyn peninsula and Abersoch golf club. This day, Wales definitely showed us from a different side, it poured down all day long. Both Tom and I realized that our waterproof kits were spectacular, keeping the rain at a comfortable distance.

After a moist morning in Abersoch, we headed back to Conwy, hoping to get a glimpse of the Celtic fayre, but it had closed for the day. So we headed on a small pub to pub round, trying some great beer at several different, great pubs.

Sunday
It was time for another try to golf on the LLeyn peninsula, but this time on the north side. About 1h 30 min from Conwy, we arrived at Nefyn, where we found an absolutely stunning golf course - Nefyn and District Golf Club. Six of the back nine holes are located on a narrow peninsula, allowing no errors on any shots longer than 5 yards. We offered some golf balls to the Gods of the sea, of course, but managed surprisingly well. We both ended the round with birdies on the 18th - the day ending with a tie in the Erasmus challenge 2011 competition! The day was a mixture of clouds and pouring rain, but ended with beautiful sunny evening sun.

In the evening, back in Conwy, we had dinner with Tom's brother and parents. It was very nice to see them again!

Monday
No long drive on the last day, we were challenging the local golf course, Conwy (Caernarvonshire) Golf Club. It is infamous for its difficult back nine. I perfectly understood this and played well the first nine, and failing miserably on the back nine. Tom on the other hand, had a less than happy front nine, but played great during the narrow, bushy back nine. He won the last round of the Erasmus challenge 2011, but the overall winner was me (wohoo). I crushed Tom with two wins and a draw (2.5 wins), over his 1.5 wins.

I won this time, but the Erasmus challenge adventure isn't over, and other challenges are to come!

Hopefully I'll be able to add some more pictures later, when I get pictures from Tom's camera as well. 

The weekend is already over, it's incredible how fast the days have past!

My dad works in Scotland these days, so left for Skien to after work Friday to visit my mother. Straight from the train we went for a quick tapas dinner before we saw the Frikar dance show at Ibsenhuset. The show was a great mix of different traditional Norwegian dances, impressively stitched together to an hourlong show. Back home we enjoyed shrimps for a late meal.

Saturday we spent most of the day shopping, I bought myself new shoes, a suitcase and some guitar related items :) The same night we saw the Norwegian movie "The Troll Hunter", a mockumentary about the troll hunter Hans and his government job to control and kill the Norwegian trolls causing trouble. The movie was absolutely fantastic, a MUST SEE this fall (it's coming to European and US movie theaters in 2011)!

Today, Sunday, we went hiking not too far from my parent's house, down to the Norsjø lake. My mother is watching some friends' dog, so we were accompanied by two dogs. A very nice trip!

Now I'm on the train, ready for a new week of work. I'll be most of the week in Trondheim for work, but will have the Friday and weekend there to visit friends. I'm really looking forward to that!

I went for a hike on Saturday and went for a swim in one of the mountain lakes. It was cold, but really refreshing! My left knee isn't great these days, after I hurt it during beach volleyball practice, so both the Saturday trip and the trip on Sunday were quite short. But enjoyable!

Before my parents arrived at the cabin, they sent my younger sister of to Germany for a year as an AFS student. You can read about her experiences on her blog (in Norwegian)!

We also paid Chester a visit, one of the oldest Roman cities in Great Britain. We got to see some sights and I bought myself some proper golfing clothes (trousers and polos) so that I will be allowed entrance in South Africa. Tomorrow we leave for London and the day after tomorrow, the trip to South Africa will finally begin!

Below you see a couple of shots taken with my phone (and the very cool Hipstamatic app).

The clouds making shadows between Oslo and Manchester.

Rosie playing in the bushes.

BBQ with Tom's friends. Here: Matt, temporarily playing BBQ chef - Matrix style.

Picture of my dad and the scenery at Kjerringøy near Bodø.

First of all, I managed to hand in my project report January 15th. It felt good and I'm pretty happy with the outcome. Just a few hours later, I left for Austria to snowboard.

The week in Austria was really exciting, and the 13 of us going had a great time. No injuries! The Gastein valley was great, with plenty of resorts to visit. If I were to complain, I would have loved 30-50 more centimeters of snow. We had, nonetheless, a great week with loads and loads of snowboarding, on- and offpist!

15 minutes walking for 6 great turns in Sportgastein. Worth it!

When I got home, I started to work on my master thesis, but spending night time finishing my home theater PC (HTPC) project "Radionette Menuett". It's practically ready, more in a later post.

One issue with the HTPC was that our old TV doesn't work with any output from the PC. I therefore decided to invest in a new TV. After a quick lookaround I ended up with a 37" Samsung LCD-TV (LE37B535). It'll be exciting to see how the HD world looks and feels.

PS. Andreas, one of my flatmates won a Playstation 3 the other day, the timing couldn't be better!

I'm back in Trondheim!
Christmas holidays have been great with my family, good food and time to play guitar, some piano, reading books and playing Fifa with my younger sister. I got several great books for Christmas, a new duve and Trivial Pursuit :)

New year's was celebrated on Kjerringøy near Bodø in relation with my uncle's 50th birthday. We stayed at the old minister's house and it was great, though without water for three of the four days due to ice blocking the water supply. The scenery on and around Kjerringøy was truly mind blowing, it's easy to understand why tourists love the northern parts of Norway!

As I said, I'm back in Trondheim, now eager to finish my project report!

Mustache Weekend 2008

I'm off to a weekend trip to Copenhagen. Many of my good friends from my Erasmus stay in Toulouse are coming too.

It's reunion time!

I know it's going to be great, we're going to have such a great time together -  talking about the present and walking down memory lane! Excited!

A few tiles in memory lane. Barcelona, Toulouse, Ax-les-Thermes