This is almost my last day of being in Brazil but it is really hard for me to leave here and come back to Miami. I learned a lot of things, made a lot of friends, and started interesting researches here. In last three weeks, I’ve edited one paper and finished the other one and also we start to work on the other topic on software engineering.  I’ve visited many places in Rio de Janeiro and enjoyed the food and coffee of Brazil. Brazilian people are so kind and friendly and you can start conversation with all Brazilians (if they know English). There are many places you can visit but you need to have friends here to learn how you can reach. I can say they have really good public transportation, and you can use boats, buses and subway to reach to everyplace, but the problem is the language and in most places it is only Portuguese which is a little bit annoying.

Beside the people and country, I really enjoyed working at the university, everything and everyone is friendly and also, you have free coffee. My advisor, Professor Clua and his students are really friendly and they invited me to many places. Last day, I and Professor Clua went to sailing and it was first time of me to be in the ocean, I really enjoyed the trip over the ocean and I am very thankful to him to help me to enjoy my time and doing strong research in Brazil.

I am pretty sure that I will return to Brazil to visit other places, I really enjoyed the trip and find many friends, but three weeks isn’t enough to visit everywhere and know the whole country.

This week was amazing; I’ve just visited Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf.  Christ status is on the top of the tallest mountain of Rio and it is possible to see the whole city from there. But Sugar Loaf is beautiful for another reason. It has a great view over a lake, ocean and the city and also it is a wonderful place for rock climbers. In this week I need to finish a paper before 15^th of this month, so I just attach some pictures from my trip to Rio. I will add more information by next week.

I am pretty sure this trip will be one of the most important experiences of my life.  Brazil is really beautiful country with kind and friendly people and of course delicious foods.

After arriving to Niteroi, Professor Clua picked me up from Rio airport and he brought me to my current place in Niteroi. My place is quite close to the university (5 – 10 minutes’ walk). After that we went to the place near university for lunch and it was my first delicious meal in Brazil. They do have an amazing system for their restaurants, you must go there and pick a plate and put whatever you want in the plate (rice, meat, salad and …) then you should pay according to the weight of your food.

From the day after it, I just started my work in the university but in the weekend I go to Rio by using a boat which takes 20 – 30 minutes to reach Rio. And I don’t need to say Rio is one of the most beautiful places of the world with a lot of places for visiting including lot of catholic churches and beautiful beaches. For first week I’ve just visited some art museums and beaches which you can see some pictures from it.

The other important thing about Brazil is their people; they are really kind and friendly. I’ve got many friends in last week and they helped me a lot and have shown a lot of places to me.  

Last week was like other weeks, I need to wrap up everything and finish my project here. So I spent a lot of time on lab and tried to install open virtual switch on ESX hypervisors. For this reason, I needed to install 2 hypervisors and make a physical connection among them, after that I used a windows machine to manage these hypervisors. After installing OS on VMs, I had difficulties to give internet access to these VMs but after several hours of working, I just used my laptop as a bridge and passed firewalls.

I was working really hard and I got tired. On Saturday, I just slept for 12 hours for recovery. 

What I really miss about Raleigh is the great nature of North Carolina. This place is best for camping and enjoys jungles.

In last week, I was working hard to make a final note on possible changes in VCL code to get a confirmation from people who are working on VCL at NCSU before leaving. So I spent like 10-12 hours per day on working, but the problem was the lack of coffee. I work at NCSU engineering building and unfortunately there is just one coffee store around this building which closes at 3 pm. So it was hard for me to work after 6 pm and I was so sleepy.

On Friday, I had a meeting with Doctor Vouk and Doctor Wright about my project and he told me to do some experiment on tunneling side and configure a network topology manually. So, last two days I was working on this side and tried to make a connection among these virtual machines. I hope to finish experiments by end of this week and start coding at first days of the next week.

Thought I'd something more to say...

Admittedly I was sorely tempted to just end my blog there, but I think I'd get yelled at. Plus that only would've been funny to me and maybe one other person (let me put it this way, if you don't get why that would be funny, that joke wasn't meant for you).

So this is my last day in Barcelona. Again. Hence this entry is a day early (tomorrow I get to travel for 10 hours, yay). I'm not particularly sentimental about it this time, partly because of an active effort on my part and partly because I know this won't be my last time here. Well, I have a strong feeling about it anyway. And even if it is my last time here by myself, I'm at peace with it. My one regret in that scenario would be not taking my husband here, but he's got a bunch of places he wants to show me in Europe as well so we'll probably just add Barcelona onto that trip. But as far as my own personal experience of Barcelona, I've had it. I've enjoyed it. And barring actually living here for some reason I don't need to experience much more. Plus I'm too excited about this coming week. I get to see my husband again, we get to see Roger Waters perform The Wall on Tuesday, and then Thursday we get our own little mini-vacation. Plus I get to do tons of writing and paperwork! Whee!

So in no particular order, here are some things I will (and will not) miss about Barcelona.

I will miss...

-The food (making sure to get myself some paella later)

-The architecture, mainly the unusualness

-Being so close to the water

-The weather (I'll be going from "pleasent summer warm" to "triple digits hot")

-The MTG, and by extension being surrounded by MIR geeks (not that I mind being surrounded by normal geeks either)

-Being so close to mountains

I will not miss...

-The general lack of air conditioning

-Not hearing my own language

-Being able to constantly hear all my neighbors

-Being away from everyone I care about 

-Google automatically giving me results in Spanish

-Teenagers being way more disgusting with their PDA 

So that last bit of reminiscing/kvetching out of the way, I say farewell. To those of you that I'm actually friends with, if I don't talk to you today I will talk to you once I'm stateside. To those of you that I don't know who randomly read this, I hope you enjoyed reading.

Hasta luego! 

Most of the time I was working on my project from my place. Sometimes I go to university to do some experiments in the network lab.

There are not many people in the university and most of the time; I am alone in the middle of engineering building. But there is one small café around this building which has some good foods and also there are some people over there.  

In last week I just go out for watching football game. It was Europe championships and my favorite team is Italy which has arrived to the final game. For the final game, I and some of my friends went to the Irish pub in Glenwood Avenue. Most of the bars and clubs of Raleigh are located in this avenue. If you come to Raleigh, I would suggest you to go and visit this avenue.

Well Folks, this journey is coming quickly to a close and it is the last weekend before the submission deadline for the conference we are submitting our work to ( http://www.icmla-conference.org/icmla12/ ). 5 weeks seemed to really fly by, so just really trying to finalize the publication and wrap up our final experiments so we may include the results. We only took some short walks around the town this weekend, sipped some espressos, watching all the tourists do "touristie" things, but no lengthy, exciting tours as time is pretty short.

I just wanted to take this last part (in my last blog for this trip) to thank everyone involved in our collaboration, both 'home-side' and 'Parisien', for my experience here, for including me in activities normally not meant for 'outsiders' and trying to make me feel comfortable and at home (plus you can't beat having an office space with a view of the Eiffel tower!). I really appreciate everything, even those times when it may have seemed as though I did not (as I'm sure you now understand that, for me, work is the first priority and 'fun stuff' comes somewhere thereafter, iff time permits). I think that this trip really added new perspective to my character and helped me grow both as an individual and student, and for this I am extremely grateful!

Maybe the next 'European Vacation Collaboration' will be more along the lines of that Chevy Chase movie, doing the Moonwalk out of that trendy shop, sporting some new duds and stuck driving in a roundabout saying 'look kids, its Big Ben and Parliament', but as for now, with only three full days remaining before my departure, and a pocket full of new experience, its on with the work...

Until the next time...Merci Beaucoup! Au revoir et bon voyage! <- wow Osman, I learned some French! 

This next week will be my last week in Barcelona. Honestly, as much as I still love it here I'm pretty ready to be home. I miss my husband, my family and friends, and genrally just the life I have back home. Apparently 6 weeks is my "I wanna go home" cracking-up point.

Work-wise, most of the actual data analysis I have to do (training classifiers, clustering data) will have to wait until I get home and have access to more powerful computers than my laptop. That means this week and next week are all about writing for my proposal. I'm still planing to propose later August, so I'll have time once I get back to do all the data analysis stuff.

Yesterday I saw something else I had been meaning to see while I was here: Olympic Stadium. I guess this means this is the second Olympic location I've ever been to (the first being Atlanta, GA during the 96 games). Considering its been a decade since the Barcelona games I suppose its appropriate I get to see the stadium now. My first observation (aside from "holy crap, there's a lot of tourists around here") was that the building seemed older than I expected. I found out once I got in and started reading the signs posted around the stadium that it had actually been built in 1927 for the 1929 Exposition, and would have hosted the 1936 People's Olympiad were it not for the Spanish Civil War.

Below are the more siginifcant pictures I took.

The rest of the pictures from my time in Europe this summer can be seen here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100815250897488.2731 

Sunday, what a big day. No, not in the eventful way (well maybe), but in the roads are starting to become filled up with carnival rides and vendor stops. When I say big, I mean the whole town. Everywhere I go, there are hordes of trucks and trailers arriving for the upcoming festival. This is completely different from what I am used to in the states which is a parking lot filled up with a carnival or a farmer's field outside of town. Here, the festival is integrated. I didn't know there could be so many rides in one town. In addition, I believe I have seen the larges transportable ferris wheel in the world. I mean, six stories or so? Huge I tell you.

So, when in, well Darmstadt... my advisor and I finished up and ventured out to catch the 2nd half of the Germany vs Italy match. Wow, even in the rain, the public monitors had considerable crowds around them. These are die hard fans (I bet they were all Cub fans in a previous life). Unfortunately, Germany lost which had everyone head for home. However, this exodus cause a nice benefit for those non-sport fans. No lines at the Crepe vender. MMMMM - Nutella and Banana. So good. I think I might have another today.