Jani Bizjak

Yesterday (or today to be exact), just before I went to bed, snow started falling again. The wind was blowing and snowflakes were big and many. It was fun watching cold winter, from a nice and warm room.



Today I’ve decided to go up the ski slope hill, to stretch my legs and take a photo or two. Sadly it was cloudy, combine that with strength of the sun up here and you have a twilight lighting at best; not good for photos. Still it was fun plowing through about 15cm of freshly fallen snow.





Hah here is a picture from my weather forecast for this day. Look at icon for 9 and 14’o clock. =)

Today and yesterday I finally received grades from the two courses I took in the first quarter. I’m not sure what took them so long, exactly 1 month, to correct our papers. It’s true that here professors correct exams and not assistants but still, there weren't more than 20 people taking these courses.

As I said earlier exams weren't that hard, here I think program is more “bolonian” than in Slovenia, here focus is on projects during quarter, exams are only worth around 40% of final grade (of course this differs from professor to professor). So yea I've passed both of them with flying colours 5/5. Though grade scaling is weird, 3 is lowest possible grade (except fail) and 5 is best. Even so translation of grades to % is something like this 5 => 90%, 90 > 4 >= 70, 70 > 3 >= 50.

Ah I almost forgot, despite me complaining about my project group we did really great. At end we scored second best. If I take in to account how much work we put in to it I think we were light years ahead of others, since I always had that feeling when you know you failed at something since we did minimum amount of work to pass.

Talking about grades I don’t remember if I said how Swedish exam went. I've passed it with grade 4, thus proving once and for all that I suck at languages and will avoid them from now on.

In the following week I've volunteered to help at a computer science (multimedia) conference that is held here at LTU. I've never been at science conference before so I'm quite excited how it will look. More on this in next few days.

Ok let’s start first with the good news. Now its official, Veronika will be here in exactly . I can’t wait to see her after all this time. I actually get butterflies in my stomach when I think about it. Can’t wait to see her and can’t wait to see her expression when she leaves train just to step on icy cold air of -20 or something. It will be so fun, and all the things I have planned to do here with her. Can’t wait!

Now to the sadder part. My stay here is coming to an end. Yesterday we just did our last bookings and traveling arrangements and now everything is set up for my return home. We will leave Lulea on January 1st in the evening. After a night’s ride on the train we will arrive to Stockholm where we booked a really nice hotel. Though for that price in any other country we would probably get much more, but heh, this is Sweden. Do you want to know how pricy hotel and Stockholm is? Well buffet breakfast at hotel costs 14€ per person for 1 time.

After 3 nights in Stockholm it will be time to leave Sweden. We found a semi cheap plane that goes via Amsterdam so yey another country added to my list of visited ones, though only for few hours. On Sunday evening around 11pm we’ll arrive to Venice and my trip will be over.

I’m really sad to leave this place. I would love to stay for at least second semester but it is impossible to do so with my IŠRM program in Slovenia. Here there is only 1 course of mathematics offered in English and I would need 4.

On the other hand I can’t wait to see Veronika again and finally be with here again. So it’s not that bad in the end.

So I was walking around through the forest when I heard a strange noise. Upon further examination my heart stopped and I think I broke world record for sprint over 3km.