adastra

12 March 2013

On TV, Toronto is the new New York

I watch a lot of TV shows and one thing I always notice immediately is when New York is not New York on screen. Lots of TV shows have been doing that for ages – good examples are Friends and Castle, both of which are shot in LA. Most film companies just don’t want to invest in the authenticity of shooting in the real New York, so they stay in Hollywood. But in the last couple of years, even LA appears to have become too expensive – as more and more US shows are shot in Canada. The trick is […]

1 February 2013

Welcome to Babylon 5

There are very few TV shows which send you on an emotional roller coaster beyond compare. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (2005), Downton Abbey and The Sopranos are among them, but none of the shows currently out there can live up to them. It’s a paradox, actually – we know that all those characters and events are fictional, yet we still invest emotionally and our capability for empathy makes us feel with the characters. I have seen so many shows by now, I daresay I suffer from TV show fatigue – the lack of emotional turmoil as experienced during […]

17 January 2013

How the Scandinavians shaped England

Exam time is coming up, that means it’s time for another verbose blog entry about the history of English stuff – in this case, the vikings (yes!). English, though rooted in the West Germanic family, has had significant influence from the Old Norse language (part of the North Germanic language family). So much, that a Norwegian professor even claims that English is a Scandinavian language. That’s of course ridiculous, you could just as well claim that English is a Romance language because of its huge amount of French influence. But the language is still very Germanic at heart. As Bill […]

31 December 2012

The Year 2012

Old habits die hard, and though my blog is slowly demising with a record low of 7 blog posts this year, it still deserves its annual year-in-review post. The decrease in blog posts is largely due to my activities on dailyfratze.de – whenever something slightly interesting or mildly life-changing happens, I tend to blog it over there these days. There’s an RSS feed for that, too… January My first BA semester was about to end with two exams. OMG, so much studying! I studied everyday and so much until I was completely bored with the material. Worked perfectly fine. February […]

14 December 2012

Excursions into the Chinese language

As a fresh linguist with two and a half semesters of experience, my linguistic curiosity makes me do wild and wacky things. This semester I dumped my Swedish course out of boredom (no offense Swedish, but you’re just not challenging anymore) and signed up for Chinese instead. In my linguistics courses I had heard so much about this language, which is always named as a prime example for analytic languages. But obviously most of my lecturers don’t seem to have ever taken a Chinese course. And you are probably still wondering what an analytic language is, am I right? Here’s […]

31 December 2011

The Year 2011

As usual, here is my review of this year. It’s been probably the most life-changing year since 2005, because I gave up my job and started university. January After a quiet New Year’s Eve at home with Fantasia movies, we shortly after started thinking about adding a room to our apartment – the attic above our kitchen would made a good addition once renovated. But now, one year later, we still don’t have a sale contract so we mainly use it as storage place for now. We finally got a new oven, after the old one died miserably. I created […]

11 November 2011

Five years of daily photos

Today I’m celebrating my fifth anniversary in the participation of dailyfratze.de. I have already blogged about my first anniversary, second anniversary and 1000. picture (with video) (and I’m kinda running out of original things to write about it). I’m very proud that I’ve reached this milestone of 5 years without missing a single photo, and I sure hope I’ll be blogging about the 10 year anniversary too. Goodness, how time flies… I can only repeat myself in saying that I love this close-knit community and the idea behind it. It’s been a pleasure to see it evolve over the past […]

19 October 2011

Back to school

I’m one and a half weeks into being a full-time student at the University of Düsseldorf, and by now the flood of information is gradually turning into an array of observations. I’m constantly torn between being both intimidated and unchallenged by the workload. Everyone who has caught a glimpse of my schedule has exclaimed “Wow, that’s A LOT of courses!”. For me it seems very little, considering that I’m very much used to a 9am to 6pm schedule every day. Now I only have two such days, with one day ending at 4pm and the other two at 2pm (AND […]

25 August 2011

Life Changing

It’s been a long, long time in the making and now it’s finally reality: from October onwards, I’m officially a full-time student! I don’t believe it either! I will be attempting a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf. How and why? A few years ago a new law was introduced in Germany, which allows people with a completed vocational training (Ausbildung) plus three years of practical experience in that same job to either apply for university in the same field or to take an exam if they want to study a different field. This January […]