Monday at 9 PM I arrived by train at the Sentralstasjon in rainy Trondheim. Quite fast I managed to find the bus to Moholt Studentby, where I found my key in a locker by entering a PINcode. I only needed to cross the street and within one hour after arrival I was in my square room of 10 square meters. A simple room, but suitable for living for 5 months. I will share the large kitchen and bathroom with 3 other housemates. Those housemates I did not meet yet this first evening; based on the products in bathroom I expected male housemates. This expectation was confirmed the day after, I have a Nepalese neighbour and two Norwegian guys are living on the other side of the central kitchen.

The next morning I went on my way to the main campus of the university. This takes about 20 minutes walking down hill, I needed to pay attention because of all the huge heaps of melting snow and ice on the side of the road. The views make this even more challenging as they are very worth looking at. At the picture you can see the huge building in which I will be working the coming months in the down left corner.

In Kjemiblok 3 (Chemieblok 3) I met prof. Martin Hohmann, who introduced me to the Department of Biotechnology and several possible projects, several staff members and most importantly, all kind of projects. After several hours of wandering through the enormous complex of building, I returned satisfied, uphill, towards my room. I was offered several nice projects and I would be informed on Wednesday about my project of preference.
Wednesday morning they told me that I can start coming Monday on the project ‘Xyls/Pm promoter/regulator system in Corynebacterium glutamicum', so in short again working on bacteria. I will tell more about this topic in a later blog.

So I still ahd a few days of to get settled in Trondheim in a relaxed way. In the meantime I joined an innebandy men training (Norwegian for floorball/unihockey), visited Ikea and discovered the city, both on foot and by my half year buscard.

The first impressions of Trondheim are very nice. The weather may be worse than in the Netherlands, at least based on the spring messages I receive from the Netherlands. Here regular rain and sometimes snow showers. Wednesday morning I woke up with a white view on the nearby student flats, though the thin layer of fresh snow melted fast.