Blog van Mart

Slowly, it is becoming time to think about big questions for the future: what kind of job would I like and where would I like to live? The first question can still wait for a bit. However, it would be nice to answer the latter. One potential option is Vienna and it would be nice to visit the city and see if we could imagine living here.

After spending a night in the train, it was luckily possible to immediately enter the Airbnb to catch up on some much needed sleep before Kate’s flight also arrived.

Both being slightly sleep-deprived, we only went to a pub for a bit and that night we had a very long lie-in to be prepared for a whole day of sightseeing the following day.

Vienna was surprisingly walkable and we could easily walk between the different tourist hotspots. We started with the colourful Hundertwasserhaus and afterwards we strolled around the city centre taking in all the pretty architecture. Of course we could not go to Austria without eating some Apfelstrudel and drinking Almdudler!

The big tourist attraction of the following day was visiting the Belvedere and looking at Der Kuss, very pretty but also the only museum we visited.

Vienna felt like a very hip and fun place, perhaps it was just the weather or simply the area we had the apartment in, but the vibes were amazing. There were still so many places that we’d like to visit, hopefully there will be a lot of time to explore all the nooks and crannies of Vienna in the future (some foreshadowing???).

Of course, there was a lot of time for good food and drinks too. Luckily next to our Airbnb we could immediately get our caffeine hit in the form of some flat whites and matchas, but let me tell you, this was definitely not the only cafe we explored!

Unfortunately we couldn’t spend the whole time eating, drinking, and looking at fancy paintings. So a good portion of our time was spent on relaxing in parks and at our favourite square, surrounded by many fancy museums.

In the end, the weekend was mostly about relaxing and hanging out. And to give a preliminary answer to the big question we asked ourselves: yeah, it would be amazing to live in Vienna :)

With my newly found freedom I decided to visit Max a bit before he leaves for a big world tour. I could say a lot about how nice it was to visit him for a bit longer than a weekend, about all the boardgames we played and the many hours of making music on the guitar bla bla bla. But we also had to take care of the Swiss Shepherd of his sister: Zazu!

Zazu is quite a large dog who needed a lot of walking throughout the day. Luckily the house was quite close to the water with some big fields where he could run as much as he’d desire.

But just walking was not enough, a lot of time was also spent throwing sticks and balls. To be fain I’m not sure who had more fun here: us or Zazu.

It was very hard to get Zazu tired, that dog has so much energy, probably more than we had. So it is important for us to fuel up properly (and maybe we managed to actually get Zazu a little bit tired).

But him being tired definitely did not last long and the next day we were out again for another long walk.

This day the weather was not as good, but just look at that dog, so aesthetic.

So it was a very chill week that was definitely elevated by good boy Zazu!

The thesis is finished! This means I had a bit more time the last month and we were able to spent some good quality time together. Initially Kate decided to come visit for one week and we spent most of this time walking around.

We also went down to Cologne, again it was such a nice sunny day.

Visiting Cologne was lovely, we mostly walked around a bit and looked at nice old buildings. Also we played a lot of cards and drank Kölsch, but of course you also can’t forget our performative matcha and flat whites.

After this week unfortunately Kate had to leave again. But oh no! The Deutsche Bahn had massive delays and Kate missed her flight, so she had to stay for another week!

Thereafter she had to go back for real this time, and immediately everything turned rainy, gray and dark.

This week I also received, my feedback from Kevin and I was able to process it much faster than I had expected. So quite quickly I was able to finally print my thesis.

So what do you do when you suddenly have more time than expected? Straight back to Edi! Again the first days we were so lucky with the weather.

Just a lot of good chilling in Edinburgh and Glasgow, which is always very nice. But all good things come to an end and after the short but sweet weekend I had to race back home to really hand in the thesis.

Well what a winter, one to remember but not necessarily in a positive light. I have been finally finishing up my thesis and the work is finally (almost) done. You could say that it was quite an intense process and I spent way too many nights in the office.

The first two weeks of writing went quite well, I was very motivated and felt like I could take on the world. The first chapter was soon finished and could be sent out for feedback to the supervisor.

But unfortunately after I had written this first chapter, the fatigue started to set in and I still had two months to go, fack.

Probably the worst part were the constant mood changes, one day I’d feel like I would finish the thesis with no problem but then the next day I’d think everything absolute trash.

Nevertheless the only option was to persist and keep going. In the first half I made the mistake of pushing away my whole social life and all my hobbies, however luckily in the second half the realization set in that I should start doing sports a bit more and this was a big help. Still not fun of course, but at least manageable.

Now it doesn’t matter anymore because luckily the work is finished. Very excited to move on to the next chapter of my life!

This year Tobi, Linus and me went on a little climbing trip to Mallorca. After arriving on a late Thursday we made it to our apartment. And the next day the climbing could start after driving to the first climbing spot.

Arriving there we had to do a little hike to the desired crack. Unfortunately, we did not know how to read a map and (I) spent almost an hour scaling a mountain (Tobi and Linus found the spot by simply following the path).

After a nice day where we were getting a feeling for the rock and difficulty of the grades, we went back to the rented house for an early night of rest. We needed a lot of rest because the next day we had planned to head out early to try a 7 pitch multipitch scaling the following mountain.

When we arrived, we unfortunately noticed we had forgotten one harness so we had to go back to the house to pick it up. But once we had all the stuff the climbing could start! We found out halfway that the climbing was harder and took longer than expected so after 3 and a half pitches we made the decision to turn around.

The next day we went out again but this time as a semi-rest day to an amazing climbing beach. After a bit of shallow water solo we could do some very fun climbs belayed from above the water.

Also took this very artsy picture (which definitely turened out as intended).

Then we had one final day of climbing left where we did some more climbs with very cool features, like climbing through a hole.

Over all very fun mini vacation with some very fun climbing and good chilling.