Xmas

Yay !

It's Christmas eve , here in Slovenia. This also marks begging of a short ( 1 week ) holiday period with no classes and more importantly no lab reports ;).
It would be great if i could go skiing, but there is still no snow around here. Actually we had about 2 cm of it for about 12 hours, before it melted :(.
Luckily the temperatures are around zero for the better part of the day, so artificial snow has gone into massive production. Actually two skiing grounds have opened already, but they are very much overcrowded + i don't feel like driving to Austria right now.

Oh, one important thing is happening down here.
in a week's time ( 1. jan. 07) , 5 years after Euro's debut, we are the 13th country to start using Euro currency. By being the first of the bunch of 10 new EU members, this is counted as a huge success. Our financial minister even got a prise for the best EU financial minister of the year 2006 for it .

Anyways, there's been lots of hype about it these days, and it's getting bigger. The exchange ration is 239,64 Slovenian tollars ( SIT ) for 1 Euro (€). There has also been big debate whether should the currency be called Euro ( international ) or Evro localized. Some people thought writing Euro with u is yet another sign of Slovene language going down. In the end an agreement was reached and so we are going to write it Euro in all official documents, but the term Evro is allowed otherwise.

We are going to have 2 weeks of both currencies around and from 14th January it's gonna be Euro only. The most annying thing will be the coins, which nobody gave a damn about, since the highest value usually found in circulation was about 24 cents. Now it's going to be 2 €, which is quite an increase. We are getting custom back designs of Slovene coins, which left many people unhappy, but i think it's cool. It's also going to be funny calculating all those prices from one currency to the other.

Anyways, these days we are being constantly bombarded with all types of advertisements about it, and it's slowly getting annoying.

Today, Google finally managed to convince me to switch to a new Blogger. Not that many new features, but they surely are nice. I don't have to wait for that stupid publishing sign anymore. - finally.

Anyways have a nice Christmas, and enjoy some days of relaxation and comfort ;)