Sadly, the Pittsburgh Penguins lost their game against the Detroit Red Wings last night. Watching the game downtown was fun nonetheless. Plus, while during the course of the game it became quite apparent that the Red Wings are the stronger team, at the very end the Pens put a tremendous effort into tying the game to get into overtime and they almost made it! In the last second of the game, the puck was literally *on* the Red Wings’ goal line.

I also got myself a t-shirt with the Pens’ captain’s name on it (Sidney Crosby) — I mean, when in Rome…

Here are three pictures I took with my crappy cellphone cam (click on them to see the larger version):

So, I arrived in Pittsburgh yesterday and so far it seems to be pretty nice. I am slowly exploring the university and its surroundings and I am quite impressed with how many food places there are around campus and how many people there are. (Even though it’s the summer so this really only is a fraction of the people I will see in August).

I am currently busy setting up my accounts and ID cards and such, and I haven’t found a room yet but I am working on it. With a little luck, I’ll soon have a place I can move into, so that I can start focusing on my master’s thesis.

By the way: The Pittsburgh Penguins (hockey!) are currently playing the Detroit Red Wings in the Stanley Cup Finals, so the locals are all going mildly crazy and even the buses show “Let’s go, Pens!” on their displays. Tonight is apparently the (probably) final and most important game in the series, and my friends and I may go see it on a public screen downtown. Time to get into hockey, I guess!

As far as soccer is concerned, I am still pondering options on watching Germany play on Sunday. It’ll be 8:30am here so besides getting up early, I’ll also need to find a place with an enthusiastic enough owner to set up a TV set in their cafe first thing in the morning. I’ll let you know if I succeed.

My take-off to Pittsburgh is coming closer and closer, and in the meantime, my to-do list seems to be getting longer and longer, but I am bravely fighting through it .

What’s kind of weird is the housing situation in Pittsburgh: I’ve been writing emails to a bunch of landlord and landladies that I found on craigslist, but most people want to rent out their rooms for a 12 months lease, minimum, and 9 months is not acceptable.

Others just want me to send a check from a distance, rather than making an appointment to look at the place. Riiight. I am going to give you money just like that.

The last group posts quite appealing ads with descriptions of how their apartment is, what the room to be rented is like, how conveniently it’s located, etc etc, and once you reach the end of the ad, it say “females only”. Noooo…

In spite of these little problems, I am looking forward to go to Pittsburgh soon. I’m sure it’ll be fun.

If there’s one word that can summarize US Visa applications, it’s fees…

Today I already had the pleasure to pay three of them:

• SEVIS fee (= a database entry in the student exchange database), USD 100.-
• Visa appointment scheduling fee, USD 10.-
• Visa application fee, EUR 89.08 which is about USD 140.-

So before the application form is filed, you are already spending 250 Dollars in fees (not to mention the cost of driving to the embassy in Frankfurt). What eases the pain a little is the good euro-to-dollar exchange rate at the moment.

But of course unlike last time I don’t seem to be required to prove my proficiency in English so that saves me another few hundred dollars. Looks like it’s my lucky day.

Awesome: Later this year, I will spend a few months doing research and writing my masters thesis as a grad student in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It took a few months to get a handful of question marks out of the way, but now I am quite confident that it will work out just fine.

A lot of people may have heard the name Carnegie Mellon before, but for those who haven’t, CMU is a private university with a good computer science program. According to Wikipedia, the college is pretty decently ranked and was “named one of the “New Ivies” by the magazine Newsweek in 2006″.

Having been to the American East Coast only once before (on vacation to New York City), I am excited to see what the differences and similarities are between life there and what I experienced in Oregon and California. Oh, and if you happen to know Pittsburgh and around and would like to suggest something I certainly shouldn’t miss out on when I’m there, please drop me a line