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Cracks In Cork

General Vinnie: Comrades, the President seeks our help in fighting terrorism. So Major Tom, are we ready for the battle?
Major Tom: Sir, yes sir! I have already set up a recon operation in order to find out the hideout of the enemy.
General Vinnie: Good, tell me when Seargant Paddy is back.
Seargant Paddy: General Vinnie, we have made out a camp in the first floor.
General Vinnie: Okay, Team Blue and Team Red head out for the operation. Major Tom, you lead Team Blue. Seargant Paddy, Team Red is yours.
Seargant Paddy: Private 1st Class Fez, Private 2nd Class Terry, you take the matress and follow me.
Private 1st Class Fez: Sir, yes sir!
Private 2nd Class Terry: Sir, yes sir!
Major Tom: Now listen, I want complete silence in the corridor. No one speaks a word while on the operation.

[on the operation]

Seargant Paddy (whispering): Private, you open the door, Team Blue and Team Red, you immediately storm the room silently and wait for further instructions.

[in the room, whispering]

Seargant Paddy [pointing at a figure lying in the bed]: There is our target. Team Red, come here with the matress. When I say now, you slam it on the target and everyone gets on that matress. Now don't forget, the target will try to free himself screaming and acting pathetic, but we will show no mercy.
Now!
Target [poor boy sleaping]: What the fuck! Shit! What you want?? I can't breathe!
Private 1st Class Fez: Shut up!
Private 2nd Class Terry: Fez, he's trying to get away...
Seargant Paddy: Major Tom, we need your Team. Now come on everyone, get on that fucking matress!
...

This is no fiction out of my brain friends, this is reality. Everything described above occured in a youth hostel in Cork from 2 a.m. till 5 a.m. All students, between 17 and 23 years old on a weekend trip of the karting club to Cork. This happened on the second and final night, on Saturday. In fact I had initially planed to go to bed early as I was extremely tired from the fabulous outdoor karting session in the afternoon. But in the last moment some power persuaded me to take part in the evening activities together with the rest of the group. Otherwise I would have been that poor sleeping target buried under a matress with six people jumping on it. Instead I could follow all this safely in the second floor in the "headquarters" of General Vinnie, a fierce 150 kg bull of a man you better don't mess with.

Then there were some pub-crawl issues as well that night, but don't want to get into any further details about that. Its all more or less the same stories of little children drinking a lot and doing funny things. You know what I mean, don't you?

Its only on this trip that I realized that Indoor karting is for small kids. Outdoor karting, thats the real thing! You reach maximum speeds of upto 70 km/h on that small car and the curves, whew, there was that one curve right after the start, a long one going right. The centrifugal force you experience there alone is worth doing this trip again. Then there were some slow curves where you have to jump into your breaks (which were quite weak), and in case you don't manage to slow down on time, the go-kart does what it wants and that can cause danger. Like I lost control over the car once as I was too fast in one curve and it felt like viewing everything from that one camera attached on the top of a formula one car. You can't do much.

There were actually alltogether two problems on that particular day, and I am to blame for one of them. 1) It was damn cold and even if you wear those (cheap) gloves your fingers start to die off after 15 minutes continous racing. I think I experienced that last but one stage when you really have to cut off the finger. It was not only shivering, no I could feel my pulse on my fingertips. It was as if the blood inside the fingers were shivering!

2) I am quite weak in my arms. From Sunday evening till Tuesday morning I couldn't really use my right arm for anything as all muscles of my forearm were paining like hell. When you are in those tight curves you have to put in a lot of effort to turn the steering into the curve and that thing has no powersteering. So mind it, racing is a very demanding sport, even if you are sitting the whole time.

Bon appétit

Today's post is primarly meant for my mother, who's delicious dishes are actually the only things I miss here. So following the natural evolution of mankind - out of need rises skill (or based on Spiderman "With great need comes great skills") - I put some food and a bit of self confidence into the pan and hoped for the best. Attaching some photos of the outcome.

The item on the left picture is "Chicken Minimum", a chicken dish with minimum use of almost everything (masala, onion, tomato). This is the result of missing the top line of the recipe which said "1/2 kg chicken". My chicken was at least 1,2 kg. Nevertheless it stilled my hunger for a whole weak and was even tasty to a certain extent. My sincere thanks to that chicken.
The item on the right picture which looks like some colony of wurms is just a simple "Carrot Thoren". It consists of three mature carrots and two onions. To cut the carrots in that way took me a whole movie-time. So for the next time I found an easier way. More on that later.
The third picture is my whole meal with carrot upper-right, chicken in the middle and left, fish-pickle of my mother lower-right and fresh 3.6% fat-yoghurt on top of everything. I don't think I'll need more than that in my entire life. As long as I am capable of preparing such a dish I don't need to marry a woman to just cook for me. Hope my mother is listening ;-)

That dish you see on the left side is most probably the best chicken ever cooked (by me). It indeed had a dramatic prehistory. This time I had decided to structure the whole cooking process ("Business Process Management" from college is atleast of some use). Additionally I wanted more gravy this time, so I took a lot of onions and tomatos and cut them into small pieces. Then I went on with garlic and ginger, which according to the recipe should be grinded. Since I had no grinding machine I cut them into the smallest possible size, which took me quite a lot of time and earned me some witty comments from my flatmate Malte ("Da ist einer aber sehr gewissenhaft" - "Now there is someone being quite conscientious"). Afterwards I put together many spoons of masala powder, chilli powder and curry powder and mixed them with water. So now everything was ready actually. The only missing ingredient was the chicken itself. This time I had bought 1 kg of chicken thighs instead of a whole one, because last time the skinning and cutting itself took me like 2 hours or something. It costed only 2.83 € which is a fair price considering usual Dublin-prices. So I took it out from the fridge, opened it and now guess what happened. No, it didn't fall on a muddy floor. It just smelled awful. Of course it was not the chicken's or the fridge's fault but only mine. I had taken out the chicken 3 days ago out of the freezer to cook it in the evening. But that evening laziness visited me, so I put it back in the fridge. So no wonder the chicken was quite annoyed about me doing that, so it just decided to change its smell to get back at me. Honestly, I can't blame the chicken.

Now the problems were 1) I had cut everything else nicely 2) I was hungry and 3) One fucking pissed-off chicken was going to ruin me my dinner.

So I paused for a moment to think about this situation. Where would I get 1 kg of fresh chicken at 8 p.m.? Well, thats when I realized that I'm not in Vienna anymore, but in great Dublin where we have a Spar-shop just attached to our complex and its open till, now hold on guys, 11 p.m.! From Monday to Saturday, and Sunday till 10 p.m.! I know busroutes in Vienna which don't operate till 11 p.m., so Dublin, thumbs up.

Unfortunately this Spar is not at all a cheap shop here and their outlet here also only have a small collection of goods, a kg of chicken thighs like I wanted not belonging to that collection. All they had was 400 gramm portions of chicken breasts priced 4.5 € each. Remember, that one kg thighs from Tesco cost me only 2.83 €. But I was determined to cook a chicken that evening, even if it meant that I was risking my return-ticket to Vienna. Because now it was personal, either that chicken or me was going to succeed. Nothing else mattered.
I payed 9 €, felt a pain somewhere near my heart, ignored it and bought 800 gramms of extremely tender chicken breasts and the rest is history (as seen on the picture).

For a while I had enough of chickens to be frank. They taste delicious, but have a somewhat nasty nature. So that is when I saw Malte making Pasta and realized how easy it actually is. Next day bought minced beef, Madras gravy (yeah you can buy that in a jar in Tesco, a very useful supermarket), one hour later the result was what you see on the right picture. Of course its not Pasta, but a speciality of my mother, found nowhere else.

As I already mentioned, Tesco is THE supermarket. It has a innovative variety of products. One of them being already cut vegetables in different combinations, which saves the cook a lot of time. Just put them in the pan, add some powders you wish, cook for 15 minutes and the outcome is what you see on the plate on picture 3. Carrot, beans, peas and some yellow thing of which I forgot the name mixed together. Now imagine buying them all seperately and cutting. No thanks.

Boxenstop an den Wurzeln

Mal sehen ob ich das noch kann. Anfangs schrieb ich noch, dass ich beidsprachig schreiben würde, doch es kommt ja oft anders als man glaubt. Michael Schumacher wurde doch nicht Weltmeister, Schüssel kann brausen gehen mit seinen Eurofightern und ich hab letzte Nacht nach langer Zeit doch recht viel getrunken.
Wenn man eine Sprache verinnerlichen will, muss man anfangen in ihr zu denken, damit der zeitraubende Prozess des innerlichen Übersetzens wegfällt und das Sprechen somit flüssiger wird. So ähnlich wie mit analogen und digitalen Signalen. Zwischendurch merk ich selbst wie ich versuche in Englisch zu denken. Das geschieht meistens durch lautlose Selbstgespräche (was irgendwie nur eine andere Definition von denken ist). Und die Worte die ich dabei am meisten verwende ist "you know" und "like". Diese beiden Ausdrücke sind notwendig wenn es einem schwer fällt die richtige Formulierung zu verwenden um etwas zu erklären. Also probiert man während der Erklärung verschiedene Formulierungen live aus und verbindet sie alle mit einem "like", und hofft, dass sie einigermaßen verständlich waren.

Nach sieben Wochen Dublin ist es an der Zeit ein langes Resümee zu ziehen.

Studium

Die meisten meiner Kurse sind vergleichbar mit den VUs (Vorlesung und Übung) in Wien. Dadurch verbringe ich insgesamt gesehen nicht sehr viele Stunden an der Uni (10 - 11 h), doch zu tun gibt es dennoch genug. Dabei sind es hauptsächlich kurze und lange Präsentationen mit denen wir uns herumqäulen müssen. Was mich etwas enttäuscht hat ist, dass das Wirtschaftsinformatik-Studium hier sehr wirtschaftslastig ist und wenig bis gar keine reinen Informatikfächer angeboten werden. So darf ich nun zum bereits fünften (!!) Mal im Leben die Maszlov Pyramide vorgestellt bekommen (ehrlich, ich hab nachgezählt wo überall ich das schon gehört habe: Einmal in Psychologie in der siebten Klasse, dann im Kolleg, dann in "Organisation und Personal" an der Uni und dann nochmal in "Business English" wieder an der Uni) oder simple Prozesse mit Rechtecken und Pfeilen abbilden. Von Entwickeln (sei es auch nur HTML Seiten) nicht die geringste Spur.

Ein positives Erlebnis ist überraschenderweise ein Modul namens "Strategic Management of Information Technology". Das klingt zwar typisch nichts und allessagend wie die meisten Titel von Lehrveranstaltungen, aber wie uns das Resource Based View beibringt sind es immer die Menschen die den Unterschied ausmachen. Der Leiter dieser Lehrveranstaltung ist nämlich ein äußerst smarter und lässiger Kerl. Er kommt aus der Wirtschaft und behandelt uns daher nicht wie klassische Studenten der Klasse X (die, die nicht gern studieren) sondern wie Manager, die gerade ein Fortbildungskurs machen. Ein Teil der Inhalte sind zwar oft kaum verständliche akademische Papers, die sich meist als "rocket science" präsentieren, in Wahrheit aber nur aus dem Wiederkäuen von älteren Papers besteht, doch die Art und Weise wie Des (ja so heißt der "smart man") diese angestaubten Erkenntnisse immer wieder mit Beispielen aus der realen Welt erklärt macht die Sache dann doch interessant. Seine Lieblingsfirmen sind nach der Anzahl der Erwähnungen zu beurteilen "Google", "Amazon" und "GE (General Electric)".

Iren

Ein Volk kann man ja unmöglich generalisieren. Amerikaner sind ja auch nicht alle einfach dumm, nur weil George W. Bush über sie herrscht. Somit sind auch nicht alle Iren irre. Mir ist zum Beispiel die großzügige Freundlichkeit der Iren im Straßenverkehr aufgefallen, und zwar nicht zwischen den Autofahrern sondern zwischen den Passanten. Die Iren sind immer die Ersten wenn es darum geht "sorry" zu sagen. Wenn zwei Personen einander entgegenkommen, herrscht ja zumeist ein unsichtbares Verständnis zwischen den Beiden wer ein Stück nach rechts und wer etwas nach links weicht. Natürlich kommt es diesbezüglich hin und wieder zu Missverständnissen und man entgeht nur knapp einem Zusammenstoß. Doch selbst wenn es ein kaum wahrnehmbares Missverständnis war, wo die Gefahr eines Zussamenstoßes nur marginal bestand, bestehen die Iren auf ein sorry. Selbst wenn das Gegenüber gerade Musik in den Ohren hat.

Man wird hier sehr oft "Hi, how you're doing?" gefragt; selbst von komplett unbekannten Barkeepern. Im ersten Moment glaubt man dem erzählen zu müssen wie man sich nun fühlt, dass es zum Beispiel stressig war an der Uni und man einen Kater vom Vorabend hat etc. Doch dann merkt man, dass der Fragende längst hinter der nächsten Ecke verschwunden ist und sich nicht im geringsten für deine Lebensgeschichte interessiert.

Wie in vielen Ländern gibts auch in Irland das Nord-Süd bzw. West-Ost Gefälle. Süddublin ist z.B. bekannt für seine Studenten die täglich im Rover in der Trinity College vorfahren. Norddublin dagegen eher für die ständigen Polizei und Krankenwagensirenen und den Schauergeschichten über Schießereien und unnatürliche Todesfälle. Ich hab mich natürlich für die gefährliche Gegend entschieden und siehe da, gerade eben hör ich wieder eine Sirene. Möge seine/ihre Seele im Frieden ruhen.
Der Westen von Irland gilt als das wahre Irland, die grüne Insel, unberührte Natur und ähnliche Traumphrasen passen da ganz gut hin. Hoffentlich seh ich was davon wenn ich mal bald dorthin reise in den nächsten Wochen.

Sport

Die drei Säulen des Studentenlebens hier sind Partys, Studies und Sports (Jaja, nicht dreimal Partys). Letzteres wird hier ausgezeichnet gefördert und so beschloss ich diese Möglichheit so gut wie möglich auszunützen. Badminton, Cricket und Karting kennzeichnen meinen Sportalltag. Für Badminton war für dieses Wochenende ein Irlandweites Turnier in Limerick (im Westen) angesetzt. Doch just heute erfuhr ich, dass die Kosten dafür in die Höhe geschnellt sind (von 70 auf unleistbare 150€) da einige plötzlich abgesagt haben. Bin zwar maßlos enttäuscht darüber, andererseits laboriere ich seit zwei Wochen an einer Fußverletzung (bin umgeknickt), wodurch ich sowieso nicht ganz fit bin.

Cricket ist entgegen meinen Erwartungen doch kein ruhiger Gentleman Sport sondern recht anstrengend, vor allem das Training. Nach zwei Stunden ununterbrochenen Bowling (und ein bisschen Bating) war der Muskel seitlich unter den Armen für ein paar Tage zu nichts mehr zu gebrauchen. Der harte Korkball (der selbst Indoor zwischendurch verwendet wird!) raubt einem das Gefühl in den Händen wenn er einem mit Höchstgeschwindigkeit entgegen kommt und man ihn dann fangen muss. Der Schläger ist ein ganzes Stück schwerer als er sein könnte, dadurch kann man ihn auch nicht so locker schwingen wie beispielsweise einen Baseballschläger. Allerdings ist es mit viel Training natürlich möglich. Der Chairperson, Mr. Vipul Gangrya aus Delhi z.B. geht so locker mit dem Schläger um wie unsereiner mit einem Badmintonschläger. In den nächsten Sessions werden wir ein traditionsreiches Cricket-Duell namens The Ashes zwischen DCU England und DCU Australia simulieren.

Karting ist bis jetzt die mit Abstand aufregendste Sportart die ich betreibe. Es ist auch verdammt anstrengend, man glaubt es kaum. Aber so einen kleinen Wagen durch die Kurven hetzen beansprucht sämtliche Muskelpartien am Arm, Bein und Oberkörper. Nach dreißig Runden ist man oft schon einigermaßen ausgepowert. Obwohl die Go-Karts vollautomatisch sind (sprich keine Gänge) und man sich somit nur ums Gasgeben und Bremsen kümmern muss, ist es gar nicht so einfach diese PS-Minis zu steuern. Das Lenkrad ist recht mühsam zu steuern. Man muss das Bremspedal sehr geschickt (bzw. sparsam) betätigen um die Kurven richtig hinzukriegen und ja keine Zeit zu verlieren. Leider ist die Strecke auch extrem rutschig und die Reifen haben praktisch kein Profil, somit rutscht man ohne Ende wenn man Fehler macht. Bis jetzt war ich erst zwei Mal, und beide Male war es Indoor-Karting. Outdoor sollen die Bedingungen um einiges besser sein hab ich mir sagen lassen.
Ich hatte insgeheim gehofft, dass ich vielleicht ein besonderes Talent fürs Rennfahren bei mir entdecken würde. Doch die Rundenzeiten sind nicht sehr vielversprechend, bin eher im Mittelfeld. Letztens bei einem Vergleich unter acht Neulingen war meine beste Runde lediglich die Fünftbeste. Die Besten sind knapp eine Sekunde schneller. In zwei Wochen ist ein Trip nach Cork geplant wo es auch ein Rennen geben wird. Bin mal sehr gespannt wie ich mich auf einer Outdoor-Strecke zu Recht finde. Vielleicht waren ja wirklich nur der schlechte Zustand der Indoor-Strecke und die Karts Schuld an meinen schlechten Rundenzeiten. Es besteht also noch eine kleine Hoffnung auf eine eventuelle Rennkarriere.

Beyond Dublin

The main objectives of my stay here in Ireland are the following:

1) Survive in an alien (english speaking) country
2) Get back at least a bit of my english I left behind in Bangalore, India 15 years back
3) Tell people "Yeah, Ireland is like my third home"

Number one and two are going on pretty well, number three on the other hand has not gone anywhere, at least till last week. Thats when I decided Ireland ought to be more than just Dublin. My course coordinator Mr. Marcus helped me in that decision when he decided that doing a teambuilding workshop at a place called "Glendalough" should be part of the course. In that way I came out of Dublin, did something for the course and paid alltogether around 0 € for that. Fine deal.

Glendalough

Don't expect me to quote some guides. I'll just write what I saw there. Those ruines on the photo is told to be the remains of some monastry. The monks also built a big tower (which is not visible on the photo) where they used to hide when the angry Celts felt like visiting them every now and then. If you are not really interested in these old stones, then there is nothing much to be amazed about.
Other than that Glendalough has a nice scenery with two lakes coming together at one place. As we had a tight schedule, I didn't see this particular sight, so just attaching a photo someone else took.

Nice, isn't it? We actually went along this lake like for an hour or so. Reminded me of those places where we used to go from school back in Vienna for something called a "field day" (Wandertag in german). A lot of nature as you can see from the picture.
The actual fun-part of the day was unexpectedly the workshop. We were divided into four groups, each consisting of one of our lecturers. Then we were asked to come up with an innovative idea to set up a start-up company. In the first session we did a brainstorming (what else?) and comprised on a life management system. Actually that was only the initial idea, later we detailed it to a system primarly for health care. Therefore you have a device where you can "record" what you buy in the supermarket and what you eat. The system, which will be having your personal health records saved, will calculate the amount of nutrients you consumed and will propose the kind of food you should be eating in the coming days to maintain a certain diet, which was agreed upon before with one of our health consultants. An additional feature of this system would be, that it can inform you about the things you need to buy from the supermarket, as it has all these records saved in the device. That saving process will be realized through partnerships with supermarkets, who provide a kind of electronic bill, which would be transmitted from their system to our device (via Bluetooth for example). Well, and so on and so forth.
Later we had to write a business plan. Now what I meant with fun is that you could just go on thinking of futuristic systems and services, which would make our everyday life a bit more simpler through information systems. We even had the idea of a pen, which would recognize the amount of nutrients in a plate, when poked into the food. With some kinds of sensors it should be possible we assumed (but our lecturer unfortunately gave up on that idea at a later stage).

Well, assuming that the reader may not be interested too much in such technical details I'm moving on. So, that was more or less Glendalough. It was around 1.5 hours by car south from Dublin, so still in the same county.

My next destination was even much nearer, but far more to rave about.

Howth

Many people here told me that initially they didn't know that Dublin was this near to the coast. So they were of course very keen to go there. Me in my arising thirst for travelling naturally joined them as even being an Indian I haven't seen much of a sea or an ocean. That is when we decided to go to Howth, which is a peninsula near to Dublin (around half an hour with the DART, which is the Dublin Area Rapid Transit, or like we simple people would call it, a train).
The sceneries are really breathtaking. We walked around half of the island (not using that other word anymore as it sounds a bit strange to me) just a couple of meters away from the water at a bigger height though. There were no fences at all, so actually it was quite dangerous, like if you slipped a bit on that quite narrow path, you could easily find yourself lying somewhere between the rocks or even in the water. If you ever need to suicide, please do consider this place. You don't even have to jump, just slip a bit.

It was quite a long walk, like about 4 to 5 hours or something. The main thing you could do is just let your camera capture everything which is around you. Even as a bad photographer you were be able to take some good pictures.

As I raved so much about the scenary, i'll just conclude with a couple of pictures I took (supposed to be that good ones I mentioned in the above paragraph).

Clubs & Societies

One of the major advantages of studying at the DCU in Dublin I could make out is that there is never a shortage of sports activities, or more common, social activities. Its really a traditional campus university where everything is located at one place, be it the lecture halls, library, restaurants, super market, bank, sports ground, Entertainment Centre, Bar or heck, we even have our own theatre here! It's called the Helix and its a hell of a grand hall. What you see in the picture is an inside view. From outside it even looks more impressive. During the year they will be showing some really good classical stuff here (don't ask me what).
Anyway, there are a lot of things you could do in your freetime. I wished we had something like this in Vienna.

There are 100+ clubs or societies for any stuff you would wish to do, from Aikido to Yoga, from Cricket to Electronic Music or Fencing to St Vincent De Paul. In most cases all you have to pay is 4 € for subscription and then you are free to join the courses at certain times. Me for example joined the badminton club (which was quite an obvious decision), the cricket club (one billion indians rave about this game, now I at last need to find out why exactly), the karting club (yeah, michael schumacher started out with a small kart) and the film society (which is a real great thing, because you get to watch movies for free in big halls on campus. Or they make tours to other cinema theatres where you only have to pay 2 to 4 € to watch a movie). Some people even joined 8 or 9 clubs, which is quite crazy considering the fact that a week is not going to have more than 7 days.

Today the badminton classes started, at 8 p.m. and went on till 10:30 p.m. Quite strange timings to do sport, but once you start you don't care about the time. As there were a lot of people who joined this club, there were a lot of them present today. So we played for 10 minutes, then had a break, and then played again for 10 minutes and so on. Thats of course not what I expected, but they said after 2 or 3 weeks usually many people tend to stop coming, so you have more time and space to play as long as you want within those 2.5 hours. The next session is on wednesday. First I played with a lady, who was quite obviously a beginner, so even I made a lot of mistakes. But the next opponent was a guy who knew the game. After those 10 minutes play he suggested "perhaps we could play a game next time". And the third guy even asked for my name. Now thats what I call a good impression.

The library on campus is open till 10 p.m. and you can borrow dvds for free. Thats a great service which I used quite extensively in the past 2 weeks. Most of the movies they have are classics, like "Citizen Kane", "Easy Rider", "Seven Samurais" or even contemporary stuff like "Memento", "Donnie Darko" or "Pulp Fiction". They do have some series as well, like "Sex And The City", "24" or "Six Feet Under". Unfortunately as classes have picked up now I don't find much time to watch a movie every evening.

By the way I stopped going to those loud parties (clubs) which I didn't like anyway. Now I'm concentrating more on building communication bridges to some of the people with whom you can have a serious discussion about a movie or relationship issues. Marc for example is a movie-interested person. He even writes reviews in some local magazine at his homeplace in Hannover. But he really shocked me when he revealed that he was not quite aware of the enormous contribution people like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino or Martin Scorcese have made to the movie world. In fact he doesn't have much idea about old movies like prior to the 80s. Now I told him that I couldn't tolerate this height of ignorance and will introduce him to some of the masterpieces of that bygone era. We'll start with one of my most favourite movies, "The Godfather" (or "Il Padrino" as they call it in Italy).

Stephanie from Brussels seems to be someone who has quite a natural and likeable personality. She indeed has some unconventionals but still lavish looks which makes her a damn hot person. Like her 2 front teeth remind me of a lovely rabbit. Some dots under her eyes and on her somewhat big nose. Also, her husky voice sounds extremely intoxicating, especially when she speaks french. Thats like combining butter with spread cheese and nutella; one is creamier than the other. We already talked about being objective in generally judging the capability of women taking relationships seriously. Now the really impressive point here is, Stephanie unfortunately is quite weak in English, its not that easy to communicate with her some non-small-talk stuff like this relationship issue now. But still she managed to voice that wise comment about being objective and not generalizing too much. She is just 20, but seems to have experienced a lot in life (just my personal feeling). Her boyfriend's name is by the way Hubert (pronounced "Übaer").