NICE adventures

I have some peculiar desire to sing my heart out just now...I might just do that ;)

Music is my soul. You have probably noticed that i'm always plugged into my ipod. I'm totally and utterly lost without it, i kid you not.

Well, I'm back in snowy Finland now. Got back late on Friday night from my trip to Ostrava, Czech Republic, where they have delicious, cheap beer! love it! hmm, one could say that alcohol featured quite substantially on this trip, lol. The social sides of these NICE project meetings are always great. The other partners are just lovely, great banter is guaranteed! On the Wed night after an interesting visit to the Landek Mining Museum and a yummy traditional Czech meal (also at the museum restaurant), our hosts drove home and the bus took us to Stodolnie (an (in)famous street in Ostrava with the highest density of bars and pubs per sq m in the Czech Rep!) where we continued the party in the "Dublin Pub", obviously! At this point (I realised the next day when trying to understand my hangover) it was only "me and the boys" and being bought drinks, it was rude to refuse and thus I was drinking the same as them....oj, oj, oj! Later on we were joined by Judith and Dieter who had both flown into Ostrava from Germany in the evening.

I was very impressed with the Czech organisation of their workshop. There was a nice mixture of company presentations, a run-down of the actual project in the beginning and then 2 presentations from the partners, from Timo and Christoph. It was all very professional and the hotel was lovely. Thumbs up!

The only downside was the last stretch of the journey to Ostrava from Prague...we flew in a small, propeller jet aircraft and the turbulence was horrendous, I felt soooo sick! It's like being on a bad rollercoaster but you can't get off for 1 hour...I thought I might have died by the time we eventually landed in Ostrava. So, as you can imagine, I was particularly looking forward to the return leg of that part of the journey but it turned out to be fine! Judith, Dieter and I even got to fly business class for some reason, don't know how that happened really...also with an invitiation to the business lounge in the airport which, quite frankly, was a bit of a joke: there weren't enough seats for everyone who was invited there, it was way too hot, the only member of staff there was a Czech girl who couldn't speak any English (much to the annoyance of a Swedish woman who wanted some wine!) and we only had half an hour to sit there anyway...

Well, now i'm looking forward to my next trip abroad and it's this Thursday to Stockholm! woo hoo! Winter C and I will spend Easter weekend there, cannot wait, so much to see and I get to practice my Swedish, hurra!