1. New propeller hat. My propeller hat was stolen in June when I wore it at a club. So I bought a new one and made a new propeller. This time the fixing is made with a thin metal tube instead of wood, so it’s a lot lighter and stronger.

2. I tested my homebuilt sailboat I built last summer, and found out that the sails I had made fast didn’t work well. So I added a boom in the front of the boat and made bigger sails. Now it sails really well. I also worked with my cousin on a real sail boat that belongs to my and his family. The autumn came too fast, but now it’s ready for next year!

3. This summer I finally bought and played the games Portal and Portal 2. And since I really liked them I made a portal sentry turret egg cup. The instructions are on instructables.

4. Modular origami. I have become a fan of modular origami, which is geometric shapes made with for example 30 pieces interlocked in each other, as is the case with this one. To make them go to Tom Hulls webpage or his youtube channel (easier to learn).

5. A camera bag/pouch. I needed a camera bag for a travel, but the ones I looked at in the camera shop costed a lot. So I used the same tissue as for the model boat and sewed it together with some rope to make a simple bag. Inside it I have another thicker pouch to protect the camera.

Getting there

To get into Russia is not to hard if you plan ahead and get your visa in good time before you travel. I did not. Since I travelled for a geography congress, the congress organisers had sent a invitation letter that I should use to get a visa. But it didn’t come in time, so I couldn’t wait any more and had to order a tourist visa. To get a visa you have to go to the embassy, and the nearest Russian embassy is in Oslo (I live in Trondheim). So to avoid a travel to Oslo I paid someone from a visa service office to go to the embassy for me. I paid them well, and I also paid a small fortune to get my passport back with overnight shipping. It came at 8.30 in the morning on the 18th of April, and I left with the night train the same day. Coincidently, my invitation letter also came on the day I left. With all the paperwork done I finished packing my huge suitcase and left for Russia.

If you want to read the rest of my Russian adventure, click on “read more”.

The congress

The congress place was half an hour outside of St Petersburg, and since the bus there left at 15 in the afternoon I had to travel one day earlier and spend a night in a hostel. For hostels I can really recommend Hostelworld.com. Just pick one of the top rated hostels and in theory everything should work well (more on that later). The congress place was an old hotel that probably once was modern, now it looked like something we in Norway would demolish. No really, it was actually a very nice place on the inside. The theme of the congress was “EnLIVEning Energy“. The aim of the congress was “to study and discuss the modern state of two related systems: energy and ecology, to make St. Petersburg and North-Western region of the Russian Federation more attractive and closer to the rest of Europe by sharing the knowledge and finally to promote international contacts among students and young researchers of the Baltic Sea region as well as in the whole Europe!” (from the congress program). An important of the congress was the workshop, and I chose a workshop called “green energy – the potential of protected areas“. We discussed protected areas in each of the participants countries, and after that we visited protected areas in the region. We also had an excursion day, and I chose an excursion to St. Petersburg to learn more about the city. And since it was a student congress organised by students we also had fun parties every night.

After the congress – in St. Petersburg

Since I wanted to get the most out of my trip I stayed in St Petersburg for two and a half day after the congress.  And again I stayed in a hostel. In the hostel, a friend who travelled with me went to bed early. I stayed up and talked with the other guests at the hostel. Suddenly a man who seemed drunk comes in and shouts that he want to sleep there. We didn’t want him to and managed to push him out. The girls who worked there told us he had stayed there once before and not paid. So one of them had to pay for him. Suddenly this man came back with a bottle in his hand. While holding this bottle over his head as a hammer he actually threatened to kill one of the girls working there. The other guests (one American, a British guy and an Australian) managed to push him out the door, and after the events we had a discussion about what to to in these situations. But apart from that it was a really nice hostel. I visited the State Photography centre, the souvenir market and looked at shops on the Nevsky Prospekt (the biggest shopping street in St Petersburg).  I went up to the collonade of the St. Isaac’s Cathedral to get a view of the city. In front of the artillery museum I looked at tanks and canons. I also visited the cruiser Aurora. People told me I had to visit the Hermitage,  but since the weather was nice I decided to stay outside and walk instead of spending a whole day inside a museum. I liked St Petersburg and have to go back some time and visit all the museums I didn’t visit during my short stay. To see more pictures click here or on any of the pictures. The gallery contains all my pictures from the trip, including all the party pictures (sorry about that).

]]> http://bergersblog.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/st-petersburg/feed/ 0 bergersblog Fly away! congress http://bergersblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/helsinki/ http://bergersblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/helsinki/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:14:32 +0000 André http://bergersblog.wordpress.com/?p=337 ]]> Two weeks ago, me and some friends visited Helsinki and the geography students there. Since I only was there for 4       days, I didn’t have time to see much, but I still got a good impression of the city and the Finnish people.

Click on the images to come to the image galleries. Gallery 2 is only from the botanical garden.

When we came the first day we was picked up at the airport by our hosts. After a really good lunch we visited the Department of Geosciences and Geography in Kumpala campus. In the evening the first day we had a fun bar game. Day 2: We had a city tour, later we tried some luging and we ended the day in a hot sauna. Day 3: We visited the botanical garden in Kaisaniemi, and then we had half a day of free time. I used my free time to visit the Design Museum because I was interested in seeing some Finnish design. When I was there the museum had an exposition about Korea and another about Marimekko. I also walked a lot in the streets of Helsinki and did some shopping. I the evening we did something called Sitsit (click the link to read more about it). Basically it’s a party where you sit around a table and eat, drink and sing a lot. Day 4: Since I had to leave one day earlier than the other ones this was my last day in Helsinki. we used the day to visit Saurasaari, a small half-island outside Helsinki. This place has a lot of old houses and was like a big museum. In the evening before I had to leave we visited Pihlajamäki, which was the suburb where I lived.

I really liked Helsinki. I hope to visit the city again soon and also see more of Finland. The people there are nice and helpful. The way of living is “Scandinavian”, so for a Norwegian like me it wasn’t a very big change to be in Helsinki. I also understand and can read Swedish, so it was easy for me to understand the road signs which was in both Finnish and Swedish. The hardest part of the trip must be the sauna, because it was a lot warmer than I’m used to.

Now I have some big projects that I’m working on. The first ones are school projects which is a bit complicated to explain here. Another project is to backup all my pictures to my smugmug page. Now I’m soon finished with all my pictures from 2010, then I will upload all the pictures from 2004 – 2009, and at the end the pictures from 2011. I’m taking one month at the time, and since I have to look through all the pictures and delete the bad ones before uploading it takes a lot of time. Since the internet line at my home is really slow I also only do uploading at the campus. That means only some hours of uploading every week. But I plan to have all my pictures on the web in some months.

Here’s some pictures from a Datarock concert in September last year taken on black and white film. Click on “close” in the upper right coner to see the rest of the pictures.

The second movie I have made is of me biking between two of the campuses in Trondheim in the rain. In real time it took around 15 minutes, but in the movie it’s sped up to 4 times the regular speed to be more fun to watch.

The first picture is a close up of the head. The head is the part I’m most happy with of the costume (and it also took the longest time to make). The second is of me wearing the costume and the third picture is of the “interior”. Since I had to fit into the costume body it’s only 10cm deep, but it was still enough for a lot of chocolate. In that picture you also can see the chocolate medal I got for the best outfit of the party. But it got even more fun later in the evening when we all went out to “Samfundet” (the student building). I couldn’t walk 10 meters without being stopped by someone who wanted to take a picture of me or telling me that the costume was great. But now it only stand in my living room and uses a lot of space.

In November I was some days in Amsterdam and had a lot of fun with other geography students from across Europe. I visited the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum (museum of art and history) and biked or walked a lot around in the city. I also learned a lot about the city. I really liked being there and will definitely go back sometime. Since that trip I’ve had some exams. But between the reading and the exams I have found some interesting things on the web. I’m a fan of Daft Punk, but I didn’t know there was a Daft Punk movie until I learned about Interstella 5555. The movie is based on the album Discovery and consists of animated music videos put together to a one-hour movie. It’s possible to see it here or below:

Then I found this video of a Daft Punk helmet: You can read more about this helmet on the website of the maker or at this forum. I really want to make a helmet like this even if it never would be this nice. Maybe I’ll do it for next Halloween. And soon I will see the new Tron movie with soundtrack made by Daft Punk.

Today I borrowed the radio dramatization of  ”The Hichhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”  made by BBC at the library and listened to the first cd. And then as a coincidence I found out today that something like the guide in the book has been made and is possible to buy. It’s a device called the Openmoko wikireader which allows you to read a downloaded version of wikipedia, so it can be used in places without a network connection or paying for the cell phone network. Something I find nice is that it can run for a year on two aaa batteries. Now I only have one exam left before a long Christmas holiday. So then I will (hopefully) have some more time to write. And during the holiday I will put all my pictures on my online photo album. So then I will write about that process and put links  to the best pictures here.

Before I went to Romania I read in two different travel books about the country and the currency, the trains, the traditions I everything else. But since I didn’t know anything else than what I had read it was exiting to go there and see a new country. I only had some ideas about what to expect, but they turned out to be wrong. I expected a lot of poverty, pickpockets and old grey buildings. But Romania is a lot more than that. Maybe the capital Bucharest is more like that, but I didn’t have time to visit Bucharest. First I was two days in a city called Cluj-Napoca (commonly known as Cluj) since I would take a bus from that city to the congress place. Cluj is a nice city which has a lot of old and colourful buildings. It also has Romanias biggest university and therefore it’s the academic centre in Romania. The place where I stayed was a hostel named Transylvania Hostel. The staff there was the nicest people in the world and they wanted to do everything for me to make my stay the best possible. At the hostel I met some people that was members in the same organisation as me and was going to the same congress. We had a great party the day before the congress started with really cheap beer. And unlike Norway the clubs don’t close at 02.00, but sometime early in the morning.

Click the button below to read more and see pictures from Romania.

The next day we took a bus for four hours to the congress place. For the next six days I learned a lot, met a lot of cool persons from all over Europe, and partied every evening. The most exotic day was the excursion day. I had chosen the “village trip”. On that trip we met some people living in the Romanian countryside, and they teached us how to make a haystack. We also tasted some Romanian food and alcohol. After the congress I had to take the train for ten hours from Cluj to Bucharest because my plane home went from there. On the trip home me and a friend had to wait for three hours at Schiphol, Amsterdam. While we waited there I became a bit sick, probably because it had been a hard week with parties every day. But I think I will travel to Romania again some time.Under is a gallery with some of the pictures I took in Romania. In that gallery I have removed all the party pictures because they look exactly like party pictures do (a lot of people drinking and dancing).

Click on the picture below to get to the gallery, or click here to get to a flash slideshow.

For the trip I have bought a GoPro HD action camera so I can capture the nature and the fun in hd. I have made some test footage with it, and it looks really nice. Tomorrow I will put the camera on my bike helmet and do a more serious test of it. If I get time I will put my helmet movie out here. And I will make some films of Romania when I get home. In two weeks I should have some more hd footage to show. In the meantime you can go to the manufacturers website (link higher up) or youtube and see what this small camera can do. Under is a picture of my camera and a surf movie made with a GoPro camera.

Here is the helmet I bought.

I bought the propeller in a local hobby shop, but I didn’t like the original colours. I also wanted to make it like it was in the original series. So I painted it silver and gold with model paint. To make the stripes I used electrical tape. I had to cut the tape to make thinner strips of it. I found out that I could put it on food paper while cutting it. And finally I put the tape strips on the propeller at an equal distance.

The top of the helmet was easy to screw off. Then I had a 1 cm hole on the hat. To fix the propeller to the hat I made 4 parts (as seen in the second image above). The first part is a big nail that I cut to a length of 4 cm. Then I made a 10 cm round rod and cut to round pieces out of thin plywood. The smallest piece will go on the outside of the hat, and the bigger piece will be on the inside. And a small screw will hold it together. In the third image above the parts are fixed together. Below is how the finished hat looks like.