Slovenia, something brand new

Hellooo. Been a few days since the last post. We have been having my parents here in Graz as guests and that has taken most of our time. I will post about those adventures next week, but now I want to look back to last week and our trip to Maribor, Slovenia. 

The trip was arranged by the ESN student organization for exchange students. They do a bunch of great events in Graz and some trips too. Neither of us had ever been to Slovenia before so it was a new country and experience for us both. Maribor is the second largest city in Slovenia, but still only around 100,000 inhabitants. Maribor is quite near Graz, being only an hour on bus straight south across the border. It was a nice little change to travel with a group and at Maribor there were local ESN students to give us a guided tour of the town. The tour was a fun quick run through the town. There wasn’t really massive surprises or special things around. The weather was really great, so it was just fun being outside and walking around the town and especially the riverside. There was some water rescue training at the river so there were folks with scuba gear and different kinds of boats and other rescue gear around. There was a 400-year-old wine tree at a winery near the river. Wine made from the trees grapes is highly regarded and a tradition for the new presidents of Slovenia is to get a bottle of that on their first visits to Maribor. They also said that the wines from that time are made “differently”, that they are closer to ethanol and somewhere in history people used to get blind and deaf when they got old, so the particular type of wine is no longer supported.

Main square

Maribor's largest church

In the main square there was a monument to remember the people who died in the plagues

Weather was nice and the river side very pretty

Here's the old wine tree

After the city tour, we got to eat some traditional food at a local restaurant and after that we had a tour of a winery followed by some wine tasting. I mentioned in an earlier post that traditionally me and wine don’t go well together, but on occasion I can make exceptions. It was fun to get a tour of the wine cellars where it was cool and humid after being in the sun most of the day. The huge barrels where the wine is aged were interesting. There was a room they called the “cathedral” where they kept the “altar” which was a cabin holding some really old and fine wine. Only way you would get to taste it would be by being the Pope, Dalai Lama or the President of the United States. An interesting set up. I wonder how many of them will visit the winery tho. Also, is there much of a separation between me and Trump. I just need some carrot juice to dye my hair and a lemon to suck on and I would totally look like Trump. Unfortunately. After the tour we got to taste some wines. This was fun. I’ll add a picture of the bottles, cause I can’t remember in detail what they were. First was a prosecco which I’m not fond of since it gives me heartburn. Rest were a nice Muskat wine and something sweeter to the end. This was fun since they were all white wines and I have not tasted a good red wine in my life.

The "altar"

The rare and reserved bottles of wine

Map of the wine zones in Slovenia

The cellar was cool and refreshing after a day in the sun

Tastings

After the tours we had a little bit of free time and we decided to head to the local park. The park seemed nice since it had three small ponds and there was supposedly over a hundred different tree types in the park. It was nice to just catch the last few rays of sun before heading back to the bus stop. On our way back we did stop for one bucket list item. On the tour the local students pointed out a bar where you can get Slovenian green beer. This I had to try. I was suspicious since I had tried a “green” beer in Finland which contained some fruits and it tasted blasphemous. It is hard to describe the Slovenian green beer but, in the end, I think it was nice. They do something different with the hops for it to make it green. Definitely suggest you try it if you are passing by, but just beware it might not be for everyone. I might go for another pint if we ever head back there.

White trees

yeah this thing

Gotta give it a try

Studying riiiiight

Hello again all you beautiful people. Its been about a month since the German intensive course ended, and I have been attending my normal studies at the Technical University (TU) of Graz. I wanted to wait a few weeks before writing about my courses to see if I liked them and would stay in them. Also, the first few weeks were kind of slow, so I didn’t have much material anyway. Currently I have three courses I am attending at the TU, but I’m little unsure about continuing one of them so I will leave it out for now. I don’t have that many pics to add this time, so read if you want to and check the very little I have to attach this time.

First course is Social Media technologies. The title is rather vague, but the course focuses on using social media as a data set for research and what kinds of information and research, we can utilize it for. The course is rather slow as we just had our second lecture today, but the main assignment of the course is to perform a research into something we want to look into, using social media sites as our platform. This means crawling the sites for wanted information and then analysing the data and reporting it. I am mostly interested in how we are going to crawl or gather the information for our research. I have done some analysing of data sets in previous courses and it can be fun breaking down large sets of data and trying to find interesting points to talk about. Currently we are doing a presentation on pre-existing research articles that used social media as platform. They are fairly interesting topics, but in the end many of them get really number heavy and at least my brain starts slacking off. We have not set a topic for our group yet but will in a week or so and I will tell about it when I post more about school stuff.

My favourite course I am attending currently is called Animation and Simulation. I have done some animation, 3d modelling, game development and image editing courses in the past, but this seemed more of an in-depth look into methods of spicing up games or animations. We have this course weekly with lectures about different methods of animation. I find them really interesting although sometimes it can get really heavy on numbers and vectors of objects and that confuses me. Still I always understand the examples and the “real world” uses for the methods. In this course we are to create a simple game that utilises two of the methods we are learning about. My game is currently called Moomin Kart where I combine my love of the Finnish Swedish children’s characters, the Moomin and basic idea of Mario Kart games. The methods I intend to implement are motion blur and pathing. Motion blur to visualise increased speed from a power up and pathing to have objects moving on the track. I have a veeeeeeeeery early version that I am working on and I added a shot video of it just to give basic idea what I am doing.

Original sketch for my game

Football ladies and gentlemen

Hellooo everybody. Life is going good here, I hope you are all doing fine. Last Sunday we continued our Graz sports tour started by the ice hockey game a few weeks ago. We went to see some football and the hometown team Sturm Graz play. The Austrian football league was on a winter break for a good while and the season continued at the end of last month, but this was the first home game we could attend. The game was played at the UPC Arena here in Graz, formerly named Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadion. 

The game was against one of the two major teams from Vienna, Austria Vienna. The game was the last game of the “regular” regular season. The league system is little confusing here, but basically the 12 teams in the league play against each other twice and after that the top 6 play their own “champion’s group” to determine the champion and the bottom 6 play a mini league to determine who gets relegated from the league. Before the day’s game Sturm Graz was on that precious sixth spot two points ahead of the seventh team, so they had everything to play for to make it into the champions group.

The weather was nice and springy, just perfect for football. We got our seats in the “view obstructed” cheap seats in the main stands. They were cheaper because the covers for the team benches covered a bit of the view, but it was no problem for us and didn’t affect our enjoyment at all. We just got drinks and pretzels and enjoyed the show.

Happy boe

Familiar Puntigamer are a major sponsor

Austrian league is pretty good quality, definitely higher than Finnish. The clear number one in the league is Salzburg and they made it to the knockout stages in the European Europa league where they even managed to beat the Italian Napoli at home. The teams were not at that high level, but the game was good, and Graz pressed very well and got a few chances early on. Their striker just seemed clumsy and could not score from the early chances. Vienna clearly tried to be patient and weather the early pressure from Graz, but at around 25 minutes their defender got sent off with a red card for clumsily judo choppin a Graz player on the chest in a running race. After that Vienna just sat back and tried to defend. Graz was not great with their attacking and had something like 12 corners from which most went to the goalkeeper or into the first defender. Luckily, they kept their cool and around the 70^th it payed off when they scored the only goal of the match. It was a nice ball from a defender behind the enemy defence and a Graz player was fast enough to it and played it to the middle where the clumsy striker got a good enough shot off to pass the goalie. After that Graz managed to hold the ball basically to the end. The end team celebrations were fun as Graz managed to jump to third in the league before the champions group.

Graz fans ready for the game with some fireworks

Away fans from Vienna brought theirs aswell

Fans celebrating the goal

Little catchup, with a few random adventures

Good day everyone. I just realized that in all the events and shuffle of exchange life I missed a few smaller things to write about. This will be a collection of a few smaller adventures and events we have made. I’ll go over them in a few words to give context to the pictures.

Few weeks ago, we did a little design / modern art culture trip here in Graz. There is a little man made “island” bridge thingy that goes across the Mur river called Murinsel. Murinsel has a small outdoor stage where they hold small concerts and poem readings and other small scale events. Inside the island is small shop highlighting different designs in Graz. There also is a fancy little café / bar where we stopped for a late breakfast. Luckily the weather was nice and it’s really close to all the other sights so you can see some familiar buildings in the background.

Walkway to Murinsel

Familiar sights

Following Murinsel we went to the modern arts museum in Graz, the Kunsthaus or as the locals call it “the friendly alien”, or as I call it “the nipple building”. The museum has shall we say a personal look as it stands out among the old red tile roofed buildings around it. I attached an earlier photo from the mountain so you can see it in all its “glory”. Never the less they had just started a new exhibition at the museum and since many of the other places in Graz are still closed til April why not. The current exhibition is from Jun Yang and deals in what makes an artist, where inspirations come and where is the line of inspiration and plagiarism. Themes like that were searched in this shall we say interesting exhibition. As a space the friendly alien is lovely on the inside and has lots of space for the exhibition to breath, but the exhibition itself felt lacklustre. There were some interesting pieces and stories, but still I didn’t see too much art in it. Still the museum is a lovely building and from the top floor the views to Schlossberg and the river are beautiful.

Kunsthaus on the right

Entrance to the exhibition

Nice view from one of the "Nipple windows"

Last small adventure for this post was that last week we attended our first exchange student event and that was a tour of the local Puntigamer brewery. Puntigamer is the most popular beer in Graz and the brewery is the largest one in Graz. I had tasted it a few times before the tour and the promise of “tastings” at the end was worth the 5-euro price. The tour itself was a simple but informative, taking us through all the processes and different places and facilities at the brewery. It was nice and we got to mingle with some of the other exchange students as well. In the end we got to tastings and that meant we got a pint and free access to two taps of Puntigamer beer. Both of the beers are what they here call Märzenbier which is very similar to Lagers all over the world especially back home in Finland, still good tho. We also got some free pretzels and then got to chill with the tour guides and the fellow students until we left home after a few full pints.

Brewery

Ready to go

Aah the circle of life.... i mean beer

Pouring that perfect pour

Have a good time everybody