Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Funchal - Madeira

I finally obtained a new position a few weeks ago as a research scientist at the university of Madeira. I flew to Funchal last Thursday (Oct 14) and was picked up by a Dutch colleague :-)

I checked into the students' residence from which it's a 10 minute walk to the main bus hub where I can catch a bus to the university. It's only a 15 minute bus ride but there are many hills here and the roads are anything but straight. Quite a change from the straight roads in Pittsburgh! With the obvious exception of Beechwood Blvd ha.

So far I've gotten an office and they've already added name tags outside the door so no more running into cleaning ladies who are surprised to see a new guy in a nameless office lol.
Also got a fiscal number, the equivalent of a SSN in the US and opened a bank account. My bank card is a temporary one which will get replaced soon. There's no money on the Portugese account yet so it's all good. I bought a new cell phone on Saturday, a Nokia 5230 with lots of cool features that I'm currently not using haha. Right now just calling and texting is fine but I might want to update to use some of those cool features in the future.

The main agenda point right now is finding an apartment. Quite a challenge since the language barrier is a serious issue. One real estate agent thought I was American because of my accent :-)
But no worries, I have this student residence room booked until Nov 1 so I've got some time to find a nice place to live.

Not much work yet since I'm busy getting settled in but I've met several colleagues and it seems the Madeira Information Technologies Institute (www.m-iti.org) is a pretty international place with people from 28 different countries.

I'm scheduled to give an introduction talk on Friday. Should be interesting to see how people will respond to my American ways of presenting and the content of the talk. I've pretty much finished the slides but I might make some changes depending on if I get a better sense of what will appeal to people here. I should meet some more colleagues this week since several were at a meeting on the Portugese mainland last week.

I'll definitely have to take a Portugese language course (or two!) to really fit in here. It's kinda funny when you're so used to being able to converse in English pretty much everywhere I've been.

Oh, here's a pic of the view from the rooftop on the floor where my room is. Not bad eh? ;-)
 

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