Hobbies

I got my first racing bike when I was around 14, and I promised myself that one day I'd ride up the Gotthard Pass in Switzerland. At 16, I cycled from Bonn to Switzerland with my brother and added an extra day to climb the pass.

During my master's, I switched to a gravel bike after a car accident, and I've been riding gravel ever since. Over the years I've done several multi-day trips, like Vilnius to Tallinn and Lüneburg to Copenhagen. Now that I live in Copenhagen, I get to enjoy it even more.

It started on a holiday in Italy, when I was ill and watching a dance school perform on the beach promenade. One of the dancers couldn't walk normally whenever Latin music played — his feet just started to move to the rhythm. I thought: I need to have that problem too.

That was more than ten years ago. Most of my time has gone into Latin and standard ballroom dancing at a dance school, including some tournament training, though I've only competed in one small tournament.

At DTU I started Argentine tango. It's on pause for now, because I'm looking for a partner at a similar level who wants to keep learning and pushing each other, without going to tournament level.

When I was finishing school, I considered becoming a forester. Then I did a week's internship with my mum's cousin and realised how slow forestry is: around 40 years for a single tree, sometimes spanning generations. I'm too impatient for that.

My interest in the forest turned into a hunting licence in 2019. I hunted a lot at the beginning and throughout my bachelor's, when I lived close to a hunting area. Since moving to Denmark I hunt less, and I need a Danish hunting licence before I can hunt here.

I don't have a German fishing licence, so before moving to Copenhagen I mainly fished on holidays in Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland, where you can fish for free or buy a cheap day licence. My biggest catch back then was a fifty-five centimeter pike and a thirty-two centimeter perch — nothing to brag about, but it kept me hooked.

Since moving to Copenhagen in September 2025 I've fished mainly around the northern end of the channel. Caught a few small fish and quite a few herrings — nothing special. But June 2026 changed that. On the second of June I caught my first salmon in a river on the west coast of Denmark, around ninety centimeters long. That same week I went to the south end of the channel in Copenhagen and caught my first horn hack — a long, thin, shiny fish I'd never caught before. Fishing in Denmark is great value, the annual licence costs around thirty-two euros.

I started swimming regularly in lakes and the sea in February 2025. Work and the move to Denmark cut into it, so on Sunday, 4 January 2026, I started a new streak: a swim every weekend — on Sunday if possible, otherwise Saturday or Monday.

At the start the water was freezing and the sea was partly frozen. I'm aiming to keep the streak going all year, and maybe beyond.

The first time I went seriously after the aurora was the Helsinki to Rovaniemi van trip — five days, two thousand kilometres, the whole journey planned around catching the lights in Finnish Lapland. We tracked forecasts the entire way. The clouds never cooperated, and we left without seeing a single shimmer.

After that I got serious about learning how this actually works. The aurora isn't random. It follows patterns, and if you understand them, you can stack the odds instead of just showing up and hoping.

// the science

The aurora appears when charged particles from the sun, carried by the solar wind, hit gases in Earth's upper atmosphere. How strong it gets depends mostly on the magnetic field the solar wind brings along: when that field points south, it links up with Earth's own field and lets far more energy in. The sun runs on an eleven-year cycle, and we're now heading out of a solar maximum. 2024 and 2025 produced some of the strongest auroras in decades — in May 2024 they were seen as far south as Germany and even Italy.

// three data channels

Before any attempt I check three things: the solar wind (Bt and Bz), the cloud forecast, and live webcams.

Bt and Bz are measured by satellites about 1.5 million km towards the sun, so they show what will reach Earth in the next 30 to 60 minutes. Bt is the total strength of the solar wind's magnetic field — how much energy is available. Bz is the part pointing north or south, and it decides whether that energy gets in. From Copenhagen I need Bt high and Bz strongly negative (south), ideally almost the mirror image of Bt — and it has to stay there for a while, not just dip for a few minutes. I also keep an eye on wind speed and density in the last hours before dark. A coronal mass ejection, a big burst of plasma from the sun, takes one to three days to get here, but when it arrives the readings can flip within minutes.

Cloud cover is the real enemy. Bt can be above 30 with Bz deep in the south, and you'll still see nothing if there's cloud between you and the sky.

Webcams close to me, or even south of me, are the final check: if they show it, it's time to go outside now. They're very helpful, but they're also the last signal to arrive — by the time you see it on a webcam, the display may already be fading again.

I use several forecast layers instead of one weather app, and I'm willing to drop everything and drive — knowing that maybe one attempt in three actually pays off.

I attempted my sailing licence and got solid practical experience on the water, but never finished the theory exam — other commitments got in the way and I never followed up. I'm confident in my ability to sail and just need to brush up on the rules to complete it properly one day. What I love about sailing is the challenge of working with something you can't control — using the wind to your advantage rather than fighting it. It's also one of the most sustainable ways to move on water. I want to do more of it in the future, ideally on sailing trips with friends.

I have high ambitions for this one — I want to get good enough to have my own gear and just head out independently along Copenhagen's waterfront whenever I feel like it. Watch this space.

The first proper DIY project I ever built, during my apprenticeship when I first got experience with welding and metalworking. The idea was to build a chamber that you could pump up with air using a regular bike pump, fill with flour, and then release — the flour cloud would pass through a flame and ignite in a big burst. My vision was a sustainable alternative to traditional fireworks for New Year's Eve. I built it, it worked but not perfectly, and I still have it. Had to pause the project because of safety regulations around explosives — not the kind of thing you want the police asking questions about. But as a first experience of designing and building a complete system from scratch, it was a huge moment for me.

Started this project just before moving to Lüneburg for my bachelor's, during corona when practical experience was hard to come by. Saw a video on YouTube of someone building their own CNC machine and thought, I can do that. So I bought the materials — mostly metal and some wood — and got to work. The finished machine measured about 120 × 120 × 60 cm, with a working area of 60 × 60 × 20 cm — a challenge to store in my thirteen square meter room. My solution was a raised sleeping bed with the machine on wheels underneath — I could roll it out when I needed it. Later I moved it to a garage and kept building.

I had a few test runs but the accuracy wasn't quite there. I rebuilt the wooden parts to make it stiffer and stronger, replacing most of the wooden boards. Then I got the chance to connect it to a uni class where I could use a proper old NC machine for the precision work — getting approval from my lecturer took some convincing, but I got there, and the final product was something he was genuinely impressed by. After that I upgraded the electric motors, but that's where things got complicated — I ended up with an electrical issue that fried some components. The machine is still sitting there waiting. After my master's I plan to sort the electrics and get it running properly again.

A silly idea that turned out brilliantly. At home I had a small paddling pool, only about thirty centimeters deep. I got hold of an old radiator — one of those heavy metal blocks with pipes running through it — put it on an open fire, connected it to a pump with hoses running into the pool, and circulated the water through the heated block. It worked incredibly well. The water got so hot we actually had to reduce the fire. We used it five or six times. One evening the neighbours spotted the fire and called the police, who came round to check on us. We explained we were just sitting in our garden jacuzzi. Nothing to worry about.

Hydroponics is a modern way of growing plants without soil, using significantly less water and allowing highly controlled growing conditions. I first got interested in it through a uni class and wanted to understand it properly and eventually have my own setup at home. For the class I built a prototype, fully 3D printed in ABS. Later I built a more sustainable version using ABS mixed with fifty percent wood dust — a material normally used in design applications to give plastic a more wooden feel. I used this for the printed components and connected four wooden boards to a pipe to form the main tower structure. It ran and grew some lettuce but had some electrical issues that stopped it going further. The project has followed me ever since — I believe hydroponics is one of the most promising ways to produce food sustainably, reducing land use and water consumption. As of now I'm setting one up at home again.

A seminar project during my bachelor's with a group of five people. The idea — which I helped come up with — was to build a small biogas plant, collect organic waste, and measure how much gas we could produce and burn. We didn't get far enough to complete the experiment properly; we ran out of time and weren't in the right season for it. But getting into that topic planted a seed. It's part of what drew me towards biofuels and bioprocess engineering as my specialisation in my master's, and the project came up in a job interview in summer 2025 that I think helped me stand out.

My mum gave me a green thumb. I like growing my own food, from tomatoes and salad to raspberries and more.

During my bachelor's, I built a raised bed from a small pallet and leftover wood I found. It was simple, but it fed me a good number of meals. If I ever have a garden, I'm looking forward to doing it again.