Coimbra, Portugal

Last weekend I attended the annual preparatory meeting of the Master's semester abroad program that my boss and I coordinate. This year it took place in Coimbra, Portugal. At first Coimbra was cloudy (although still quite nice, to be honest)

But the weather improved notably.

The city is about 2 hours away from Lisbon, and had a quaint sort of University town charm.

I didn't get a lot of time to walk around, but the free time I did have was nice. I really like the small alleys of the ancient city center

University of Coimbra is the 7th oldest university in Europe and has some pretty impressive architecture

I also managed to accidentally order this giant puff pastry thing with my broken portuguese. It was still pretty fun to eat. 

My last day I only had a few hours, so I woke up early and walked to this familiar looking bridge...

It was a pretty nice weekend that also included a colloquium of sorts where all of the participants of the organizational meeting also presented their research, myself included. Now, I'm back in Lugano and there's a LOT to do, but I feel fairly energized by the positive experience and feedback. I head to Uppsala in 5 days so I thought I'd post this before I get too much of a backlog. Thanks for reading :)

New Year, New...Year.

My last post was last year! Crazy.

Some things have happened. I went to NYC (again) and then visited the fam-bam for 3 weeks. I got another tattoo, ate a whole lot of food, tried to relax, had a TERRIBLE trip back to Lugano (seriously over 24 hours of travelling) and then tried to get my circadian rhythm back on track. It's still a work in progress.

I really hoped that my trip back to the U.S. would give me some energy and clarity, allowing me to get back to the grind and attack my dissertation with renewed vigor. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case this first week back...

I have two trips coming up; the first is to Coimbra, Portugal and the second is to Uppsala, Sweden. I'll be taking care of administrative stuff for the master's program my boss and I coordinate in Coimbra, and attending a week-long seminar on discourse theory in Uppsala. Those are things to look forward to. I'm also going to be giving a presentation on my research (?) in Coimbra after the administrative meeting, so hopefully my next update will have nice pictures and a more positive vibe.