two weeks ago, i was in bergen, attending the international workshop on coding and cryptography (the last one was in paris, which i also attended). unfortunately, bergen presented itself from its well-known rainy side. when i arrived (by train from oslo), it was raining. most of the days it was raining, and if not, it was cloudy. the only two exceptions where wednesday afternoon, when the sun almost came out (one could see it through the clouds). on that afternoon, we had a boat tour scheduled. the boat went four three hours, and one could observe how beautiful everything would look like with sun:

like half an hour after arriving back in bergen, it continued to rain… on thursday evening, the conference dinner was planned. it was happening on the fløyen, where we drove up with the bløibanen. a usually beautiful place, but on that thursday, the sight was not so splendid, as the following panorama picture of bergen shows:

well, finally, on friday, the weather became really beautiful. while it didn’t stay dry during the whole day – there were some short showers now and then – it was sunny with a few clouds most of the day. and it was possible to run around with just a t-shirt and trousers. finally! :) i explored the city, the famous bryggen, the bergenhus fortress, went up the fløyen another time – again with the funicular –, walked down on foot, and enjoyed a nice evening before flying back on saturday. enjoy some of the photos i took on friday:

on the second weekend of april, we returned to oslo for a long weekend. unfortunately, the weather was not as great as in february (and also last february), but at least on saturday afternoon, the weather finally got presentable. thus, all my photos are from that afternoon.

we first visited the holmenkollen ski jump. while it was still quite cloudy, there were at least some holes in the clouds somewhere in the distance. also on that day, there was a zip-line event happening, where you could whizz down the ski jump on a zip-line. (it was already sold out, so we didn’t had any chance to do this, even in case we would have liked to.)

later on we continued to the restaurant frognerseteren, where we wanted to eat something. we found out that the chef is swiss and had a nice chat with him. later on, the clouds finally ripped open above us, and the sun came through:

afterwards, we continued to the vigeland sculpture park, which we enjoyed together with a great sunset:

on the next day, i continued by train to bergen on one of the world’s most beautiful train tracks. unfortunately, the weather was not very appealing, whence i spent most of the time working and reading.

on the weekend before easter we were in kaiserslautern. the main reason for our visit was to attend a team meeting for matheraum, but then we also visited rebekka and m. i haven’t seen rebekka for … i don’t know how many years now. (ignoring a “train incident” where she saw me, but i didn’t saw her while changing trains in mannhein or so.) definitely longer as this blog exists, i.e. before 2007. anyway. even though the weather wasn’t too great most of the weekend, we were lucky to get a glimpse of kaiserslautern with sun on both friday and sunday (on sunday we met rebekka and m.).

on saturday, we went to the japanese garden. while inside at least it didn’t snow (it waited until we left), but the weather wasn’t very great and also the cherry blossom didn’t bloom yet. still, it was a nice experience:

next time i’ll go there, there should better be sun and cherry blossoms :-)

i have to admit that i haven’t been really updating my blog for quite some time now, even though there was a lot i wanted to add. now that i finally have a bit of spare time, i want to add at least some of these things.

after being on muottas muragl, we continued to the other end of switzerland, namely to the small village of broc, where the chocolate producer cailler is located. there, we signed up for a course on making pralines.

we first drank a nice hot chocolate in the cafeteria:

after that, we explored the shop, before finally our course began. at the beginning of the course, we began to prepare the filling.

for that, we started heating chocolate (cailler cuisine of course ;-) ) with a bit of cream, and later added some butter. that was put into the fridge to cool down. while it cooled down, we took a look at the available garnishments:

(the alcohol should be added when melting the chocolate. we decided against it since you have to decide between all your pralines having alcohol or none.) after some time, we put the chocolate cream into an icing bag and created little heaps (i’m tempted to write turds – the similarity was quite obvious). these were cooled again, until we transformed them using our hands to balls. these were cooled down again, and we were provided with chocolate for the shell. (producing that one yourself is quite tedious work, since you have to invest quite some time to preserve the glossy look. i guess at cailler they have machines for that.) we then put garnishments into pots and started to produce pralines. here are some results:

the process of getting to this point was to take a ball of filling, put it into the shell chocolate bowl, turn it around there, extract it and bath it in the garnishment bowl:

afterwards, the pralines had to be cooled another time. we then were provided with packaging and decoration material:

afterwards, we went on a tour while our pralines were staying in the fridge. after the tour, you end up in a room where you can try all pralines produced by cailler, and you can eat as much was you want. finally, we picked up our pralines and began to return home. it was a great and tasty experience!