three weeks only

and I will be on a coach back to the continent, heading to the COP15 summit in Copenhaguen. Really strange feeling – three weeks isn’t a long time at all, especially compared to the amount of coursework to do until then. But that’s not what worries me – I rather feel as if I had not even arrived properly and was already leaving again (and I will be away for almost a month, two weeks at the climate summit and another two in Germany). A year in a different country probably isn’t such a long time any longer as it was when you were nineteen and just leaving a school – but

home…?

When coming back from the Fell Club mountain leader training in the peak district this weekend, I felt like coming home to Norwich for the first time (I spent two other weekends away before, but never had that sensation of arriving back home before). And yet I still feel like someone studying abroad, not where he is really living. Too much of my life, of what makes me happy or sad still happens in Germany, although I’ve got quite some things to do around here: studying – with people I catch on with quite more easily than with average chemistry students in Bremen – Kayak and Fell Club, where I met quite an amount of interesting people as well,

week 6 – halftime

Yes, this was week six of my first term at UEA – and a term only has twelve weeks. I handed in my second piece of coursework (a review about ice dynamics in Greenland and Antarctica – great but scary topic) and I am working on a worksheet and a lab report for weeks 7 and 8. After that, I’ll pass to an essay, a lab report and my modelling project, all due in week 12 but a bit more challenging than the earlier pieces. Today, it has been raining all day, but not that much – when I went for a half-an-hour run round the university broad, I got wetter from sweat than from rain. Notice it’s haloween –

a weekend in rain and wind

This weekend, I went on my first trip with UEA Fell Club – some interesting things probably happened last week, but they are somwhat overwritten by that wonderful weekend in my memory. According to the fotos in my camera, there was a least one sunny day I used to take some nice pics of UEA. Apart from that, I’ll mostly tell you about the weekend: We met at uni at five – I was in quite a hurry preparing my stuff and just arrived few minutes before five. I almost joined a group of people in outdoor gear standing around a minibus, but then realized they had ropes and helmets – that was the rock climbing society, not fell.
The other people with rucksacks were fell people, however – we had to wait for the minibuses a bit,

plume-chasing practical and great climate swoop

On Friday afternoon, atmospheric chemical change took us out to the countryside again, sampling air from different sites upwind and downwind from Norwich in order to learn something about photochemical reactions of different substances related to car emissions. We had a nice day out there although it was rather windy and started raining in the end of the afternoon. I took some pictures that I might upload later – for now I’ll go on to the more interesting part of the weekend: After leaving far too early from a nice birthday party on Friday evening, I packed my kit for the great climate swoop, slept about four hours and got to the train station at twenty to six

small boats, big fun

– that was my first session with UEA Kayaking today. They have those tiny sporty wild-water boats, not the big touring ones you use for longer distances as the lakes of Mecklenburg. Once we got to the water (packed in a long wetsuit, a special coat and a lifejacket), they asked if we had all done the capzise-test on a prevouis session. Well, as this was my first one, I obviously hadn’t. And although I knew that I was able to get out of a boat lying upside down in the water safely, they wanted us to show it, before getting started. All right, safety first,

Arbeit

gibt es gerade eine Menge – mein erster essay ist fertig und rechtschreib- und grammatikfehlerbereinigt (you just have to write German from time to time to be able tu use such wonderful words…) und ich entdecke immer mehr papers für unsere Diskussion über den Meeresspiegelanstieg, nachdem wir letzte Woche dachten, wir hätten die wesentlichen Fragen aufgeteilt. Unter anderem bin ich auf einen Text des NASA-Forsches James E. Hansen gestoßen, der sich mit der Zurückhaltung der wissenschaftlichen Community in Bezug auf den Klimawandel beschäftigt

as times pass by

Looking at my blog statistics, I just realised that I’ve been here for more than a month now, and that somewhat scared me. I still have the impression of just arriving and starting to look around what I might be doing the next year (I should rather say: ten months, as my course ends on August 5th 2010). And yet, only another two months and the first term is over, which covers half the taught part of my masters. The copenhaguen climate summit is approaching, and for the first time I have the impression that some people in Germany begin to care about it and that our mobilisation efforts haven’t all been in vain.

great autumn day

The sun has been shining almost all the day, and the colours of the trees in front of my window or in the nearby park are just wonderful – I uploaded some pictures I took today. At uni, I only had a taught practical on Matlab today – we were supposed to write a bit of code to compute a vortex motion (Rotationsbewegung). And maybe I am not able to write a working Matlab code on my own,

drowned in knowledge

that is how I felt after today’s lecture on the science of climate change. But before telling you about the last days, a small publicity slot in German:

## Klimabroschüre erschienen!##

##Nach harter Arbeit von Klimaaktiven bei Avanti und ['solid] sowie vielen anderen gibt es eine tolle neue Klimabroschüre, die auch EinsteigerInnen erklären soll, worum es bei den Klimaverhandlungen in Kopenhagen geht und was unsere Kritik daran ist. Hier downloaden oder bei ['solid] bestellen! ##

All right, going on in the chronological order,