Austrian ice hockey

Hi again. Last Sunday we went to see some Austrian ice hockey. As a Finn I’m a big ice hockey fan and especially of my home town team Oulun Kärpät. I always enjoy going to see games in different parts of the world to see what the hockey culture is elsewhere. When I was in Nottingham few years ago, I went to see some British ice hockey and it was blast even though the level of the game was not what it is elsewhere. So on Sunday we went to a game with the Graz’s own team Graz 99ers playing against Red Bull Salzburg. The season is so far here in Austria that its “playoffs” for what I can tell, or the top six teams from the season play their own winners league and I think who gets most points is the seasons champion.

Game was good fun and I was super pumped because the Graz team played into the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger is from here. The team’s entrance music was the Terminator theme and in all the player cards that they showed on the screen all the players had their other eye made to look like a machine’s eye. I always appreciate fun stuff like that. The team played also really well. Seeing that Salzburg knocked out my home town team in the European hockey league in November, so I knew there was quality on the enemy team, but the Graz team was a mystery to me. Graz played the game really well and controlled the first period easily but failed to score. In the second period they got the breakthrough and hammered three goals in little time. In the last period Salzburg managed to score once, but Graz went on to win the game 4-1. I attached a Youtube video of the highlights. Don’t think you can see us in the video, but we were there. Pity the video doesn’t have their introduction video and I didn’t manage to find it online. Check the pics and see you next time.

Good times with some beer and ice hockey

You can kinda see the red eye on the players card

So into the game

Teams shakin hands

Museum and an online party

Good Friday evening people, or whatever the time happens to be when you read this. I wanted to talk about the past weekend here in Graz. On Saturday we took part to a party back home in Oulu over Skype. Reason for the party? On Christmas my sister Outi gave birth to her first-born daughter and on Saturday was her naming celebration. Unfortunately, we could not take part in the party in person, but luckily, we set up Skype so we could watch the families gather for a good time and give speeches and finally announce the name of the little baby girl and her name is Aamu. We gathered around a laptop with little cakes from the corner store to follow the party. Even with the sounds sounding like they were coming from an aquarium it was fun and we heard all the important parts and it was so lovely to be part of the celebration in anyway. 

After the party we went to our first museum in Graz. We would have probably gone to one already, but it is really the offseason in here so many touristy places are closed at least until March. We went to the illusion / perspective museum (Museum der Wahrnehmung) we had heard about. The museum ended up being quite small, but still charming. The museum had three different themes in three different levels. Upstairs there was a small exhibition on medieval women’s coats of arms and signets and seals. Along with them was some mirror contraptions that created a 3d image for you when you looked into the piece. Slightly hard to describe and the pictures don’t explain them any better than I do, sorry.

Bottom level had more perspective art pieces that were little dull. Couple of them we did not understand at all what really was supposed to be experienced and why. There was one fun mirror piece again where you use your other eye looking at a rock and the other looks at a mirror where you move your hand. The experience is that you vision combines the visions into one and you seem to be trying to catch the rock which is nowhere near you hand. Middle level we did not really go through because on the weekend they had rented the rooms for some school workshop or other so there was a lot of people and tech around, so we didn’t feel like moving among these people. Luckily though because of this the museum was free for the weekend so, nice for us.

We also got our bikes in pretty good order and we have been starting to go around on them, so you might see them in some o de pics. Think that’s about enough for this time, I have a few small posts lined up and next week we will go on our first trip outside Graz so I’m not sure how the next posts will line up. Still anyway happy weekend lads and lasses.

This was one of the contraptions that made you see a picture in 3D

This is a hard piece to explain, but somehow it made the bricks look like they go into the earth instead of being above ground.

I look like a corpse using this mirror piece

Some sights around the museum

Pretty pink building on our way back home

Hi gang

Hello. Sorry, was supposed to have a nice post about all the wonderful things we did past weekend, but I ended up getting sick on Friday evening so it’s just been resting and healing up even through Monday, so had to miss a day of the intensive German course, but hopefully I feel better tomorrow and we can make it. Maybe next weekend we get to doing all our plans we had for this weekend. 

On Friday we did go out for a drink and some dinner at the local opera’s Operncafe which had some live saxophone music during the evening. We got some “white pizzas” where the tomato sauce is replaced with crème fraiche or something similar and there was no cheese, soo basically a flatbread. For desert we got some non-alcoholic natural lemonade drinks. After that I just started to feel bad and at night, I got a bit of fever and been nursing that since. 

So, over the weekend we just relaxed and watched series and movies and did a little home cooking. Besides that, it was little walks in the evening to get some fresh air. Starting to really love the sights at night in Graz. The Herz-Jesu church near our place is a nice landmark and often a destination for our evening walks, because it’s pretty, not just because it has a Pokemon GO gym or anything. Also, the Uhrturm clock tower is visible to many parts of the town and looks like a second moon when lit at night. That’s probably it for now see you later in the week. Later.

Who dis good lookin S.O.B

Making of a home made lasagne

 

Church peeking from the windom

Home away from home

Hello people. Life is going on good over here in Graz. This week we had our orientation session for the German intensive course and overall for the studies in here. There is so much burechratic, byrocratic, bureaucratic whatever close enough, legal and system hurdles and hoops to hop through. We had to register to the city, but on top of that we have to do an additional registration to let them know we are staying here for more than three months. Also, the school system has unfortunately many little tasks and forms that evenings have gone mostly trying to sort them out. Hopefully we are through them soon as the intensive course kicks off on Wednesday.  The sessions have been nice and all the international staff from the Uni are really helpful. 

Since there has not been a great amount of happening, I thought I would keep this otherwise a smaller post and just talk shortly about our apartment and the neighbourhood. Our apartment is on the edge of the old town where the blocks start to turn into living areas. The name of our street Nibelungengasse, comes from some German legend based on my 30 second Wikipedia research : ). The place is nice with little over a kilometre to the different university campuses and to old town. So far we have been moving on foot, busses and trams, but today we bought me a bike and hopefully one for Anne in the coming days. Graz likes to advertise itself as a very biker friendly city, so we will see how it goes. 

Our apartment is on the top/third floor of an old building, there is no elevator so we get a nice little calf exercise every day in these old steps. There is not much in stores in the immediate vicinity, besides a corner Spar for groceries. There is a large church Herz-Jesu Kirche few blocks from us and it is the tallest building in Graz. The church looks great, but the only problem with it is its damn loud bells. For some reason they ring the bells once quarter past, twice at half and thrice quarter to and at the hour as many times as the clock is. That means its ringing quite often, but luckily its not that bad in our apartment. We can hear it if its quiet but I’m usually blasting music from something, so it gets drowned out and it doesn’t wake us or anything.  The apartment is a nice 42 squares so just about enough for the two of us. Our hosts live in the same building and they have been a good help with finding restaurants and other small things. They have two cats who roam pretty free and sometimes they pop into our apartment if our windows are too open, I ain’t too fond of cats but these two don’t seem too bad, they mainly want to scratch our couch. That should be enough for this time, later peeps.

Hasta la vista, birthday baby

Hello He-men and She-men … hmm is that how it would go. I actually just realized that He-man is a double masculine, weird. So, the female version would be She-woman, but I think that’s too far from the original so people would miss the joke. But if it was She-man it would be half and half, so would that be balanced or masculine or feminine? Is there some sort of sexual term formula like in math where plus and plus is a plus and minus and minus is minus, but a plus and a minus is a minus? This is confusing. Soo whatever that was an example of my thought process that goes into this blog, on with the show.

Hello everyone. So, on Friday it was my birthday as it happens to be on the first of February every year. For my birthday I wanted to do the very thing I wanted to come to Graz in the first place and that was to visit the Arnold Schwarzenegger museum in the little town of Thal. Thal is about a half an hour bus ride from Graz around one of the nearby mountains. The weather is still cold so the lake in Thal, Thalersee, was still frozen and there was snow on the ground. 

Instead of actually explaining everything in the museum I’m going to let the pictures do the work. Instead I could explain in a few words my “obsession” with Mr. Schwarzenegger. Of course, it started when I was a teenager and watching all his action movies and silly comedies. The man is just a force of charisma and entertainment. I still watch many of his movies every year and movies like Predator, Terminator 2 and Conan the Barbarian are among my all-time favourite movies. Even to this day I try to see all his new movies where ever I can, and I do enjoy the newer movies like Maggie, a slow personal movie about his daughter turning into a zombie, or Escape Plan where he teams up with his long-time competitor/bromance Sly Stallone. Arnold is a man of many careers as his museum room setup tells us. I am aware that he is the most successful bodybuilder in history and the success of the sport is mostly build on his back. His political career I understand that he was a republican governor in a highly liberal California, where he focused on pushing the use of green energy. 

Not many men or women can put up one career like he has put three. The most I admire about Arnold is that he has always been passionate, determinate and above all disciplined. Latest of I sometimes do lack myself, but that’s where I try to draw energy from the image of my icon. Also, the fact that he was born and raised in Austria which had just lost in the WWII where things must have been thought. He wanted to move to America and become a movie star and the greatest bodybuilder in history and the man bloody did it. I don’t say everything he has done has been great, but I admire the passion of a man to make his dream come true. Lot of that comes to my personal passion to see the world and just be who I want to be.

There was some artists transformers statues on display in the yard.

 

Sorry this post runs a little long, but our school starts on Monday so maybe then the posts settle into a decent rhythm. Anyway, after the hotel visit, we went out to eat for the first time here. We went to a Styrian (the part of Austria Graz is in) restaurant where we enjoyed the local foods. I think that’s about enough see yall in the next post.