Balkans in the summer, once more!

Finally, this summer, I managed to take one country off my top-20 list to visit. :) It is Romania. I was selected to EMDC and DMKM for my masters (that started 5 years ago in 2012 August Falls semester). DMKM (data mining and knowledge management) Erasmus Mundus masters had a mobility of Lyon, France -> Bucharest, Romania. Eventually, I chose EMDC and I am very happy about my decision. However, ever since, I had the desire to visit Romania. I made it a reality after 5 years. In the mean time, I had also become a huge fan of Romanian music. So it was an exciting trip. Summer in Timisoara was great!

This is also my second time to visit Balkans. I visited Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia in 2015 while I did my short-term scientific mission as part of my PhD (EMJD-DC) in the summer. It was nice to be back to the Eastern Europe, once again in the sunny summer!

Year 2012 - a year of changes

Opposite to IST, Alameda, Lisbon

Time has gone pretty fast. When I was selected to follow the Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing (EMDC) in the first half of this year, going to Lisbon seems to be far away. But sorry for repeating the phrase again - time has gone pretty fast. I was selected to DMKM (Erasmus Mundus Master Course in Data Mining and Knowledge Management) as well, where the first year will be at University of Lyon Lumière Lyon 2 in France and the second at University Polithenica of Bucharest in Romania. Distributed Computing and Data Mining both are my research interests. Considering the advantages of both the courses, finally I decided to follow EMDC. I quickly accepted the offer for EMDC, and started working on that.

Getting the Portugal study visa of course needed a considerable effort. It also made me travel twice to New Delhi. I utilized my first trip to New Delhi in summer as a sight-seeing tour in New Delhi. It was a great experience, including the negotiations with the three-wheeler drivers. The second trip made me float. I was even worried whether my travel documents got wet by the heavy showers, on my way to the Portugal Embassy in Chanakyapuri. Thanks to God, my bag was strong enough not to let the water in.

I was working at WSO2 for the last 2 years, and it was my job since I graduated. Interestingly I was an intern too at WSO2. It was a great learning experience, as my first job. For some unknown reason, the Emirates decided to send me in the business class, though I had bought a ticket for the economic class. That gave me a positive feeling (Feeling lucky.. :D)

Lisbon seems pretty cool, and started to settle down here. Along with these changes, Llovizna too is facing a few changes (may I say, improvements?) I foresee, the completely new set of blog posts dominating the blog, along with my traditional mixture of technical and personal posts. I see a few posts on my experience on studying abroad, and related tours. Hope that will make Llovizna sexier. ;) To match with this, I have enabled the Google ads into my blog, as I feel they give provide some advertisements that are related and useful to the readers. For example, I could see the advertisements of the European scholarship programs in the blog post that mentions about the European Study visa. Hope the overall reader experience is made more positive.

I hope the upcoming days will be more exciting, as the course is starting on the 17th of September. I will keep the readers updated on this. Tenha um bom dia!