Lisbon, once more..

I cooked this wonderful Turkey meat curry

I realized, I didn't blog about my Erasmus Mundus adventures for a long time. This becomes the first post of the new year on my personal life in Lisboa. In fact, I had many interesting updates, where I didn't have time to sit and write them down. I came back to Lisbon on the 30th of December, after an eventful journey around the Nordic countries, using flight, cruise, trains, and trams. The new year celebrations in Lisbon reminded me the new year of 2013, as this was the second new year I had in Lisbon commercial square. I have started to work on my thesis, from INESC-ID, developing the distributed and concurrent cloud simulator. In the mean time, I enjoyed the second winter event of EMDC in Evora, Portugal.

Working from a cafe!

After a productive day at InescID, I was at a cafe next to SEF, metro station Parque. I opened my laptop and continued developing the next generation cloud simulator, whilst sipping the coffee. The gentleman at the cashier asked me something in Portuguese. I thought he was saying, "are you crazy or what?". I said, "sorry?" He asked me again in English, "Do you need the Internet connection?" AAAAAND BOOM.. I AM IN TEH INTERWEBS.. And the cafe has a much stronger internet than my room in the apartment. Long live the cafe, and the gentleman who gave me the access to the wifi, without even me asking. Probably you may see me around metro station Parque more often..

物是人非

..and this strawberry milk shake.. :D

These days I often go to the "Community Canteen" of Instituto Superior Técnico Alameda to have a meal for 2.40 Euro, for either lunch or dinner. I realized, I miss the moments I had with my friends in Lisboa.. (Xiao's small talks, Qi Qi's questions, Zell's drawings, Orçun's slow-paced eating (which is slower than mine), discussing Romanian music with Tamás, Dipesh's vegetables, and Pushparaj's lunch box full of chillies.. :D) Lisbon is full of memories for me. I saw a few familiar faces in the Canteen. But apart from that, I am mostly alone in the canteen. Memories define a place. For me, Lisbon is full of memories. I guess, there is a memory - location - people mapping. I will definitely miss the time I spent in Stockholm with the friends, when I go to Stockholm one day in the future. Without you guys around, Lisbon is not the same. Qi Qi says, this feeling is called 物是人非 in Chinese. Hope all of you guys have started your thesis in different corners of Europe..

EMDC Winter Event 2014 - Evora

I had the opportunity to join the EMDC Winter Event 2014 Evora, 12th - 14th of February, 2014, representing the EMDC batch 2012. Though the EMDC Winter Event 2013 Nuria was the real winter event in a ski resort, full of snow, we still were able to have a good time in Evora. It was more like a spring event with a comforting weather. Luckily it didn't rain while we were walking along the lanes of the Evora town. I received the exciting news about the EMJD-DC (Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Distributed Computing) selection during the winter event, which made me even happier during the event.
 
There were informative presentations from the PhD students of EMJD-DC, describing their work, and also from the professors of IST, UPC, and KTH on research opportunities from the respective research labs. Manos from EMDC batch 2011 and I shared our experience with EMDC, with the youngest batch of EMDC - batch 2013. We also displayed the video from our batch showing the memories of Erasmus life with EMDC in Portugal, Spain, and Sweden, after our small presentation (which was adopted from the previous year's presentation, and is given above for your reference). Below you can enjoy that legendary video, which was made by Qi Qi, the cool guy who never failed to document all the moments of our life with Erasmus Mundus. Special guest appearance of the professors throughout the video is a bonus, I guess. I like the video shot before AVExe exam. I still remember that day. huahuahua..