Skiing

My ski trip to Kirchberg/Kitzbühel was awesome. It was my first ski holiday ever. (You know, telling that fact to people I know instantly lets me know how well-off someone is. Europe is so tiny that anyone wealthy enough to afford a second holiday has fled to a ski resort in the Alps at one point or another.)

I had great lessons and went from angstily making 'pizza curves' to whoosing down a hill in the span of an hour or two. At the end of the second day and the beginning of the third day, my unexperienced ski buddy and colleague made the mistake of picking awfully difficult 'blue' routes. It was disheartening and scary, because you start to doubt every ounce of technique you think you have when you stumble down for the twenty-sixth time. But after that we went to the easy blue tracks, I finally 'got' how to make corners (lean forward and outward!) and made real, tangible progress. We ended the day by going to one of the tops and skiing down a route that I would have never thought I'd be able to conquer just days earlier. That third day was beautiful, not just because of the satisfaction that learning a new skill brings, but also because of the drop-dead gorgeous views. And lighting (see above).

There was also plenty of time for aprés-ski, I had some great food and got to know a surprisingly large amount of my new colleagues. Which brings me to the second heading...

Work

I technically haven't worked more days than I've gone skiing. I also don't really know yet what I will do, but I have a bunch of good ideas already and I'm already enjoying this work tremendously. Today I had this realization that I don't feel a student anymore - that I'm starting to feel like a professional.

The only issue now is my god-damned commute. It's looonngg. I walk to the bus 07:30, take the bus to a train station, take a stop train to an intercity station, transfer to an intercity train and walk fifteen minutes to my destination. Total time: almost 2 hours to traverse 60 miles. It's an hour by car but if I'd do that, I would be caught in the traffic-jam-vortex of 4 different cities so it would not be a whole lot faster. In a weird way I am proud of the proper timetable planning that's behind my commute: each transfer has around 8 to 10 minutes of transfer time. My bus is meant to arrive just before my stop train, which is synchronised with the IC train. It means I don't have to rush and small delays aren't a big deal. Plus, with my tablet I can read and shoot off some emails on the go.

And it's only temporary, or so I hope. We sent the final documents today - well, if they don't pester us again and just write the damn rental contract for us to sign, that is.