Zurich Street Parade

So, last Saturday we all spent the day dancing our faces off at the Zurich Street Parade. For those who don't know, the Street Parade is Zurich's biggest party of the year. It's basically a huge, all-day, outdoor techno/trance show. There's a whole various stages, lots of awesome dj's and also a parade of "love mobiles" (aka, themed floats with lots of scantily-clad dancers on them). Lots and lots of people show up for this thing, many of them dressed in outrageous costumes to enjoy the free party.

Thanks to Richard, Travis, Devon and Kyle for the pictures.



At the train station, ready to party! Check out our wicked costumes (well, most of us...cough, cough, lazy KSB people, cough).











Another group pic. I'm not going to bother trying to name everyone.









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Alright, but let's start at the beginning. The previous Saturday, we had gone to buy fabric and other costume-making supplies. So on Thursday we got together to create our masterpieces. It was fun times, and I even taught the guys to sew (though they never really mastered the knot-tying, but I was still impressed). Thursday was also the day that Vance discovered a store in town that sold body glitter, body paint and spray-on hair colour (jackpot!). Between all of us praktikants I think we pretty much cleaned them out, lol.





Lindsey, me, Vance and Tommy hard at work on our costumes.










Tommy ironing on his logo, it was really nice! I wish I had a pic of Lindsey's logo too, it was like the Incredibles logo and looked really sweet.



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Saturday morning! Everybody met at Kehl around 9:30 to get ready in their costumes. The balcony was the designated hair-spraying zone, and pretty much every inch of our place was covered in glitter by the end of the morning, haha. Here's some pics of how everyone's costumes turned out, I was really impressed!




Tommy and Travis. Kudos to Tommy for having the nerve to go out in public like that (it took a couple beers, lol). Travis shaved a mohawk into his hair!














Devon and Shane...hands down the most frightening costumes of the group (I think it was the black eyeliner that did it, though they don't have it on yet in this pic.) Looking pretty sexy in their boas though, lol.














Ula, with her awesome home-made wings!


















Me doing Evans make-up. He went in full drag, complete with tie-on breasts, it was hilarious! I had to include a few pics to give his costume justice.















Very pretty...













Check out that thong!














All costumed up, waiting at the bus stop!










So we loaded ourselves up with shopping bags of discount beer and met up with everybody else at the train station. And realized in the process that we were pretty much the only people in Baden dressing up to go to street parade (at that point in the day at least, it was only noon). Haha, we got some pretty crazy looks, it was fun though.

Arriving at the Zurich train station, we took some group pictures (see above) and then went and checked out the party. We didn't have to go far, there was a dj spinning right there in the train station!




Me and Adrienn!














Richard, Kevin, Liisa and Vance.















Prabs...haha, I love the "To: Woman, From: God" costumes that he, Mike and Kevin all wore.












We decided to head to the Bellevue stage, since it seemed to have the biggest events going on (laser show later, and mystery surprise dj!). The journey was a constant battle not lost anybody while everyone wandered off randomly to dance, use the bathroom, buy food, take pictures, pose for pictures, etc...somehow we (eventually) made it to the stage area with our whole group. It was really cool to see all the crazy costumes that people had, check out this site if you want to see some: http://ch.tilllate.com/EN/partydetails.php?gid=204881




Walking down the river to Bellevue.












Olivier and Liisa













Devon's friend Kyle, who was visiting from Canada.

















Me, Tommy, Lindsey and Vance.

















Me and Richard being hardcore













There was this big foam pit where some people went to go dance (I opted not to). It looks like it was pretty fun!















At 3:00 the parade started, so we fought our way through the crowd to watch some of the float, and then join in the groups of people walking/dancing along with the parade. Naturally, our giant group did not last even 5 minutes, and we were all pretty much split up for the rest of the day. We (me and a few others) watched a bunch of the parade, and then went to chill for a bit.





One of the "Love Mobiles"













Chillaxing on the bridge.















At 8: 00 we headed back over the the Bellevue stage to watch the show. There was lots of awesome music, crazy dancing...all in all a fun time. At 10: 30 the laser show started, it was pretty impressive, a nice compliment to the music. At 11:00 the announced the surprise DJ: Armin Van Buuren! He had an awesome set, and then the music winded up around midnight (impressively late for Switzerland actually).





A glimpse of the laser show (hard to capture on camera)












Armin Van Buuren spinning.










After the outdoor show the party pretty much moved on to various nightclubs around the city. We decided that our day was finished though (over 12 hours of partying is sufficient, plus, the clubs were really expensive) so headed to the train station. On the way Ed and Devon decided to wrestle, and it ended up with Ed and then Devon going into a (not so clean) fountain. Crazy guys... We took the 2:08 train (last train) back to Baden and then pretty much just headed home. I managed to find the energy to take a shower before going to bed...best decision ever, otherwise I would have woken up in pink sparkley sheets, lol. All in all it was a really fun day, and everyone who went had an awesome time!




The aftermath...so un-Swiss


















Ed and Devon wrestling. Look how nice and clean that fountain is...it smelled pretty nasty too.

Quote of the Week

"Skirts...they're just like, capes for legs!"
-Tommy

Pickwicks, soccer, costumes

So, I guess I should update everybody about what I have been doing the past week. I spent the last weekend in Baden (a weekend without travelling, it's been awhile!), just chillaxing.

On friday we all went out to Pickwicks (the local pub where most of the english-speaking people in Baden hang out) had some beer, played some foosball...I need to keep my skills up so I don't make a fool of myself in 4th year (for foosball, not beer)! After the bar we headed back to Kehl and kept the party going well into the morning.

Saturday, after a few hours of sleep I was woken up by Vance in the typical Vance manner (over-excited to the point of frantic) to go costume shopping for the Zurich Street Parade (more about that later). After shopping I ran into Antonio, Holgar and George on the bus. They were on their way over to Antonio's new apartment (somebody with a Ph.D should certainly not be living KSB) to put together all the Ikea furnature they had bought that morning. I joined them, and had the satisfaction of creating some rolling side tables with nothing more than a screwdriver...it really makes you feel skilled, haha, yay for Ikea.

Went home for a nap. Back to Pickwicks that night, and then afterparty at KSB. Crazy fun times, bit of a different group of people, lots of Ed's English (and non-English) friends from the bar: Cat, Andy, Chris, other Andy, Britta, Olivia, and then of course the KSB crowd. Oh ya, and Dan, this random american guy that is in Baden for a couple days that we met at the bar. Wicked night, left pretty late.

On tuesday a whole bunch of us praktikants got together to play some soccer (or should I say football, since I'm in Europe). While walking on to the field, I realized that I hadn't played soccer since grade 10. I also realized that my left contact was lost somewhere in my eye. These two factors combined into me not playing very well...but it was alright because there were so many people that it wasn't a very hardcore game anyways. At one point Tommy gave the ball a good kick into my face (by accident....or was it?!?!) so I sat out for little bit, just out of shock. I was fine, but poor Tommy felt so bad. Anyways, while I was sitting on the side making sure nothing was broken I managed to fix my contact...woot, depth perception! After that I played a little better, got a couple good kicks on the ball in the general direction of the net. It was a fun evening, we played for like 2 hours. I think we are going to play next week too.

Alright: Zurich Street Parade
This is one or Zurich's biggest parties, and everybody wears crazy, colourful, glittery costumes. So, naturally we had to create crazy, colourful, glittery costumes too. On Saturday me and the Berg (aka, the people that live at Martinsberg) (aka, Vance, Tommy and Lindsey) went shopping for fabric and other random craft stuff. Last night we had an intense costume-making session (Adrienn came too) at Kehl, it was pretty sucessful. Man, did I ever miss the abundance of resources I have at home for doing this kind of thing: sewing machine, serger, random fabric, ribbons, paint, glitter, mom to help me do things. Lol, we managed though...we all made capes, and I created a skirt using only staples, iron-on glue and a little bit of sewing. For shirts, me and Lindsey just bought cheap tank tops and then attacked them with scissors. Vance opted for renting pants, and let me tell you, I have never seen pants so flashy and sparkley (not even in my 8 years of buying lame dance costumes for recitals). I'm not sure who's going to create more of a scene, him or Tommy in his yellow/green briefs, haha. Anyways, you will all have to wait in suspense to see pictures. It's tomorrow afternoon, and we are all meeting early to get dressed up and coat our hair and skin with glitter....mwah ha ha. To keep you entertained until then, here's an illustration of our costumes:


(Me, Tommy and Lindsey all shared bring fabric, so are naturally a superhero gang fighting the evil Vance, who's costume doesn's match ours)

Work

Everybody keeps asking me what I do at work, and how work is going, so here's your answer people:

Work is going really well. For those that don't know (or have forgotten) I work at ETH/University of Zurich in the bioelectronics group (there's a pic of me on the staff page, woot!). I have been continuing with my main job of scanning mouse femurs and processing the images for analysis. Basiclly that means putting little mouse bones into a holder, putting that into the x-ray machine and then pressing some buttons. Then when the scans are done I rotate the images to the right alignment, and then cut out 3d sections so that density analysis can be done.

Some other projects that I have worked with are mouse mandibles(see left), mouse vertebrates(see below), human bone biopsies , snail poison (strange one...), and silicon samples. A couple weeks ago I got to dissect some mouse legs that were sent frozen to us (something that I wasn't expecting in my electrical engineering career, lol) and then scan them, that was really cool.


















Everyone I work with is really nice. There is a new guy sharing my office now, he's from Vancouver (yay, a fellow Canadian), it's nice having an office buddy. In September I am going to a conference in Lausanne, and am apparently presenting a poster...I need to find out more about that.

Some of us eating lunch by the River
from left: Philipp, Jess, me, Romain, Tom, Martin, Stefan, Phil, Harry







And to answer my 3 most commenly asked questions:
1) Do you work at Alstom or ABB? Neither, I work at in Zurich at ETH/University of Zurich
2) Zurich, why do you live in Baden then? Because all the other Calgarian interns live in Baden and I am a sheep
3) So if you're an electrical engineer, why are you working in a bio lab? I'm really interested in bioengeering, and because it's a bio-electronics lab, so they mostly do programming, not dissections and such. Actually almost everybody I work with is a electrical or mechanical engineer. Besides, I was offered a job in Switzerland, as if I'm going to turn it down for any reason

Swiss National Day

Happy Swiss Day!




Pre-firework kabobs

from left: Jay, Robin, Vance, Ed, Olivier, me, Warren







A bunch of us went to Zurich to celebrate Swiss National Day on August 1. Actually, Adrienn and I went straight there after the plane home from Prague. We checked our bags in lockers, had a picnic lunch, and then met people coming form baden. We all sat on a dock by the lake, and were surrounded by people with amature fireworks. I think it's lucky that none of us got hit actually, the people shooting the fireworks really didn't know what they were doing. We were waiting for the officail firework show, but it never happened (no idea why). It was still a really fun night though, just chillaxing by the lake.




Adrienn making her picnic sandwich, yummy!













Chillaxing on the dock. Check out the cool lit-up ferris wheel in the background!













George (new praktikant from Toronto) and Holgar (praktikant from Germany)

Prague

Took a trip to Prague from July30-Aug 1. It was the biggest group I have ever travelled with, there was 18 of us! The two celebrations of the trip were Jay's farewell (he's gone back to Canada now) and Evan's 21st b-day. Once again, I didn't take many photos, so these pics are courdesy of Adrienn, Vance and Tommy.


Group picture!

back row: Henry, Evan, Shane, Bernard, Robin (Jay's friend from Canada that was visiting), Warren, Vance, Travis, Richard, Jay, Tommy, Olivier
front row: Ed, Adrienn, me, Lindsey

missing: Ula and Mike (they didn't hang out with the group much)



We all arrived at differnt times, on different days, by different means. I took a plane out on Saturday afternoon with Adrienn, Vance, Ed, Olivier and Bernard. We arrived at our pre-booked hostel to discover that they had messed up our reservation and had no beds for 10 people of our group. The hostel management did nothing to make up for this, and we were pretty much on our own to find a new place. Luckily, Evan and Shane (who arrived by train that morning) had already delt with this problem, and booked us in a different hostel across town (horray Evan and Shane!)

We left our stuff at the hostel (we would check into our new hostel later) and headed downtown. We rented some paddleboats and cruised up and down the river, it was a fun way to see some sights.



Me and Vance on a paddleboat













Heading towards Charles Bridge (most famous bridge in Prague)












Me, Ed and Adrienn










After our boating fun, we got some dinner. It is amazing how cheap everything is in Prague! The currency is called the crown (wrong spelling) and 20 crown ~= 1$. You can get dinner for a few dollars, and beer for about $1.50.

Prague has some really good beer: Pilsner and Budwiser are actually good beer here (not that Pilsner isn't already awesome, woot), they taste much different than back home.









We we picked up our bags and met up with the others to go to our new hostel. It turned out to be really nice, but a bit of a walk from the downtown area. We got changed, and then went back to the other hostel to meet up with the rest of the group.

The night started out with some partying in the hostel common room. Ed, Evan and Travis shared a bottle of absinte in the true Prague spirit. We left and had an exciting journey through the pooring rain to get to a huge club. It had 5 floors, with different music on each floor (techno, trance, hip hop, rock, etc). It was a really fun night, though lots of time was spent going up and down the stairs trying to find people (good workout at least, lol). The large group was split up instantly, and people made it hoe in smaller groups throught the night. The evening ended on a bad note for me, got burned in the neck by somebody's cigerette (stupid smokers...), but I survived. We walked back to the hostel around 4, stopping for some awesome greasy cheap vendor food (Switzerland needs more all-night food stands like Prague) on the way.

The next morning we awoke to discover that we missed most of breakfast (boo), but there were still a few scraps left. The plan for the day was casual sightseeing, followed by a city tour. We wandered around downtown, enjoying the strange street art that is everywhere in Prague (I don't really know why it's there)




One of the main streets we frequently walked down











Cool pic that I can't take credit for (yay Tommy)


















Poor superman...

Seriously, what is with the strange statues?









I decided that I didn't feel like going on a 4 hour tour, and would rather spend the day shopping and wandering, so Ed and I split off from the group. We had a nice day hitting all the stores, I bought some skirts and shirts. We had lunch in an Irish pub, and watched some rugby and cricket (man, cricket is a messed up sport...I don't think that I will ever understand it) . It was a chillaxiful day, and then we met up with everyone at 6 to go out for dinner.

Now imagine this: 16 people (no Ula and Mike) trying to find a good, cheap place for dinner that has enough room for us. This is no easy task, we ended up walking around for over an hour. Luckily, I had eaten not too long before, but some of us were starving by the time we found a resturant. However, there were isseus at the resturant involving price differences, and extra fee for music...basically they were very rude to us, and we ended up walking out before ordering. The next place we found was great however, and we had a relly nice meal.

After dinner, some people went back to the hostel and a few of us went out to try and find a nice bar. This proved somewhat difficult, since it was 1am on a sunday night. We ended up walking around for awhile, and then just settleing for the hostel bar, which was open until 4am.

The next morning some people had to wake up at 7 to catch flights home. I was so happy I wasn't one of them, since we had been up until 6 the night before. The rest of us got up later (in time for a decent breakfast this time!) and then Adrienn and I went out to do some last minute shopping and sightseeing.

We watched the clock strike on the hour, which involves a cool show with lots of moving people. The clock itself is really cool too, it has parts for the different months and sun and moon phases. Hmm, I wish I could tell you more, or what it was even called, but I have no idea. Here's a pic at least:















We went to te airport to catch our 3:00 plane, and then travelled back to Switzerland. I got stung by a wasp on the bus :( Poor me...although, it didn't hurt anywhere near as much as I remember (I haven't been stung since I was a kid).

Ooo, one more highlight of the trip: bought some new shoes at the Zurich Airport. Gravis shoes (my alltime favorite brand of shoe) on sale for $40, reduced from $100.

As you can tell, this trip was not about sightseeing or history for me. But you might still want to see some of Prague, so I will pretend I was on the tour, and post some pics from all over Prague: