My Life - So Far

"Unbounded ambition makes an obscure existence simply impossible for me"
Lucien de Rubempré

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Internship VIII

Last week I got my diploma and I now officially hold the academic title "BSc ETH in Food Science". Actually my last lecture finished already in May 2008, but the bachelor thesis took its time and so did the bureaucracy at ETH. But what says the proverb: Good things come to those who wait!

Maybe you won't believe me, but I feel highly motivated for the next two semester and the master thesis which I'll start to write exactly in one year. What I don't know yet is if I write the thesis in the industry or at ETH.

Saturday was a beautiful day! I went to the gym in the morning and then met Valentina in town to walk to the Rhine and back up to the castle Munot. Unfortunately, it wasn't that warm as it seemed and we were pretty much frozen after our walk so that we headed back home to eat a hot selfmade pizza.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a few new books, as I got a voucher when I extended my GA last fall. First, I needed some english literature, therefore I bought "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. As last spring I was reading some novels by Balzac, I bought another one belonging to his "La Comédie humaine", namely "Splendeur et misere des courtisane". And the last one I bought was "The stranger" by Albert Camus, written during the Second World War.

Right now I'm reading the novel "The bonfire of the vanities" by Tom Wolfe. It's supposed to be the most famous novel by Wolfe. The story is a drama about ambition, racism, social class and politics in 1980s New York City. To make the story more realistic I use google maps to see the streets that Wolfe describes in New York. Or you search for the street names in Flickr, and then you're suddenly in the middle of the plot.
The novel evoked this feeling in me, saying "I have to go to New York!" Strolling around Fifth Avenue, going to the central park, seeing the enormously expensive apartments on Upper East Side...

Friday, January 02, 2009

Internship VII

Here it is, in full glamor, the new year 2009! It started good, the weather was fine and not too cold. The evening we spent at Güterhof, sitting in a lounge chair with a nice drink on the table. The Güterhof was bursting, nevertheless we tried to invite some friends, but unfortunately, most of them were skiing somewhere up in the mountains. The main thing is that we enjoyed it anyway. New Year's Eve was very funny but pretty unspectacular although we had a delicious dinner.

The day before we went to see the german movie "Buddenbrooks" in the small but authentic Kiwi Scala cinema. It's the adaption of Thomas Mann's novel which he finished in 1901 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. It portrays the downfall of a wealthy mercantile family over four generations. Again, a movie worth seeing!

The picture in this post I already used in my blog some time ago. It shows downtown Tokyo, shot in 2005.