Research fellows at the University of Bergen are encouraged to spend from three to six months abroad to get in touch with another research group and work in a different environment. During the MoDELS 2010 conference in Oslo, me and my supervisor discussed the possibility of my exchange stay with Juan de Lara and Eshter Guerra from the Autonomous University of Madrid. The idea of staying some months in the south of Europe after three years in the North was very appealing for me, and Juan and Esther seemed very positive as well. Eventually the idea became a plan and I came to Madrid in February.

I lived in the very centre of Madrid, which happens to be the very centre of Spain as well. My flat was located 200 meters away from the so-called Kilometre zero, the ancient starting point of all the measurements in Spain. I loved the atmosphere of the city centre, incredibly lively and dynamic… I even loved the noise that you hear in the bars… Yes, the noise of people speaking and toasting and laughing and enjoying life, something that reminded me a bit of Italy and that I missed so much in Norway, where people are usually scared of speaking too loud or too much.

Juan and Esther have been very kind with with me. They helped me with the accommodation and the transportation, provided me an office and a workstation, introduced me to the campus and the city. It has been a rewarding experience to work with them, both scientifically and personally, and I sincerely hope that we will continue the cooperation in the future.

But my stay in Madrid would have not been the same without the people I met there. Thanks to Serena, I got in touch with a group of people from Italy, France and Spain. It was a pleasure to meet Federica, Antonino, Mathilde, Vani, Ysa, Clara and Jose. But above all, it was fantastic to meet Lucia, Teresa and Daniele; lovely people, who treated me like a close friend since the first day we met. I wish most of Italians were people like them, I would consider to move back to Italy.

Countries visited

Italy
France
Norway
Spain
Russia
Germany
Estonia
United Kingdom
Switzerland
Hungary
Denmark
Latvia
Moldova
Cyprus
Ukraine
Finland

Mountains climbed

Fløyen (400m)
Ulriken (640m)
Rundemanen (560m)
Sandviksfjellet (417m)
Lyderhorn (396m)
Damsgårdsfjellet (350m)
Løvstakken (477m)
Corno grande (2912m)
Preikestolen (604m)
Kjerag (1110m)

Airlines taken

Klm
SAS
Iberia
Ryanair
Sterling (now Cimber)
S7
Aeroflot
Lufthansa
Estonian Air
Alitalia
Norwegian
Vueling
AirBaltic

Laptops owned

Sony Vaio PCG-FX801
Toshiba Satellite A100-703
ASUS Eee PC 1101HA
Dell Latitude E6500

Mobiles owned

Nokia 5110
Nokia 6110
Nokia 7110
SonyEriccsson Z1010
Siemens MT50
Siemens C55
SonyEricsson K610i
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Camera owned

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P72
Canon EOS 350D
Olympus μ 1030 SW

Cars owned

Skoda Fabia 1.9TDI (1999 ed.)

Motorcycles owned

Yamaha FZR-600

There are actually many other things I could write down, but all in all I have been lucky to have had so many opportunities. I am curious to see how these lists will look like in ten years time…

First schedule:

flight LH 4065 from Florence (18:50) to Frankfurt (20:30), connected with
flight LH 3128 from Frankfurt (21:25) to Bergen (23:20)

The first flight was cancelled. I was rescheduled for the next day and sent to a Hilton hotel.

Second schedule:

flight LH 4067 from Florence (06:35) to Frankfurt (08:15), connected with
flight LH 3126 from Frankfurt (09:05) to Bergen (11:00)

The first flight was delayed 45 minutes. I missed the connection and was rescheduled for some hours later.

Third schedule:

flight LH 3132 from Frankfurt (11:30) to Oslo (13:20), connected with
flight SK 269 from Oslo (14:25) to Bergen (15:15)

The first flight was delayed 45 minutes. I missed the connection and was rescheduled for some hours later.

Fourth and last schedule:

flight SK 273 from Oslo (15:50) to Bergen (16:40)

In the end, I came back to Bergen 17 hours and 20 minutes later than originally planned, with the burden of three check-ins (two in Florence, one in Oslo) and four security checks (two in Florence, one in Frankfurt, one in Oslo).

Lufthansa, “There’s no better way to fly”… Are we really sure?

The hike was too long even for Sports Tracker, which crashed after 8 hours. This means that I only have incomplete and maybe corrupted data of my hike. The firm developing this software will for sure hear from me…

Special thanks to Synnøve, who shared with me all the editions. Without her, I would have never managed this result.

Update 6 June 2010

It looks like the Sports Tracker data of my hike is not corrupted. It is only incomplete since I started the tracking again only half-hour after Sports Tracker crashed.

Screenshots:

As far as I am concerned, I just wanted to have a trip to an east European country, eventually an ex USSR country. The idea was to go to a country which was culturally, architecturally, geographically and economically speaking very different to what I am used to. After several discussions with Diego about which country to visit, Moldova caught our curiosity… And there we went.

I have to admit that I knew really little about this country before to go, and two things impressed me the most there. The first is, unfortunately, the poverty. The time seems to have stopped in the Nineties there. The average monthly salary in Moldova is around 2500 MDL (151 EUR) while in Norway is 30000 NOK (3533 EUR). Of course, life is cheaper in Moldova than in Norway, but even normalising the salary to the cost of life the difference remains huge.

The other thing that left me puzzled is the lack of linguistic and cultural identity. Native Moldovans belong to the Romanian ethnic group. The official language in Moldova is Romanian, although natives speak a Moldavian dialect which is not so different from the original Romanian. However, Russians and Ukrainians form a large ethnic group in Moldova. Russian is then the default second language at all levels of education, and everyone in the country can speak it fluently. Oddly enough, local Russians refuse to speak Romanian and oblige native Moldovans to speak Russian. Walking around Chişinău I heard more conversations in Russian rather than Romanian, which is quite sad. Maybe this is a superficial analysis of the integration problems, but what kind of cultural identity is this?

I learned a lot from this “very original” trip… especially to give value to the things I am lucky to have in my life. Being at home with all the comforts seems like a luxury now… I hope I will always remember about it.

As always I travelled together with Adrian and this time I had to share the hotel room with him since my travelling budget for 2009 has been in red since July… Fortunately Adrian is not employed at the University of Bergen but at the Bergen University College, and it seems that funding is less problematic there.

The conference was very well organised and covered very many topics of computer science. We had the presentations of our two abstracts almost at the end of the conference and we spent a lot of time modifying the slides rather than listening to the talks, but everything went fine in the end.

During my stay I had the chance to test my skills in Scandinavian languages with some local. Just for the records, written Danish and Norwegian (in the bokmål variant) are rather similar, so similar that reading Danish is not a problem for me… but the spoken counterparts are definitely very different. Spoken Danish sounds to me like a continuous stream of (guttural) sounds, with no chances to understand when a word stops and when the next starts. I hope that no one will take it personally if I say that it seems like Danes do not make any effort to pronounce words clearly.

But there is even more… Danish has a rather weird number system. The tens from fifty on are not based on the number 10, as is the case in most European languages (French being another outstanding exception). This strange system combines two archaic ways of counting: 20-based instead of 10-based and fossilized expressions for two and a half, three and a half and four and a half. This is the result:

After this experience, I think that these Norwegian comedians are not so far from reality.

All the stereotypes about Swiss precision and efficiency were destroyed in one go on the way back to Zurich. We were supposed to take the train from Lucerne at 2:30, but probably too many people shared with us the same plan. The result was kilometric queues on the ticket machines and people packed in trains like in India. The train we took did not even arrive to Zurich and despite the promises of the railways personnel there, no further train came before one hour. In the end, tired of waiting, we took a taxi back to the city.

Well, despite this “original” start, the conference went very well. Zurich is lovely and welcomed us with a great warm summer weather. The ETH, which hosted the conference, is located on top of a hill with a nice view over the city. The event was well organised and composed by several co-located conferences and workshops. Adrian made a brilliant presentation of our last work and many asked questions about it. I feel like the goals of our participation to the conference have been all fulfilled. Food was also great; to eat once more authentic Fondue and Rösti was a pleasure.

I left Zurich by train on Saturday, and my destination was not Bergen but Tortoreto, my home town in Italy. The trip home was a sort of odyssey. The train I took in Milan had broken air conditioning system and I had to stay inside it for 5 hours with no chance to open the windows… And if this was not enough, the catering services of the Italian railways had a strike the very same day, i.e. it was not even possible to buy water! You can imagine what this lead to, I will not spend time describing it. Italy is somehow always able to remind me that the choice to move away was the right one.

Special thanks goes to “min kjære” Synnøve, who shared with me in both editions, plus Antonio and Mikal who joined us this year.

During March I had two trips. The first was in Marburg, a little town about one hour train north of Frankfurt, Germany. This trip was not due to a conference, but because I needed to work together with my colleague Adrian – who was spending three months as visitor research at the University of Marburg – on an paper which we had to submit for a journal publication. Marburg is a delicious university town, it reminds me a bit L’Aquila, at least the L’Aquila I am familiar with. I have been staying one week in a king sized room of a guest house, with furnitures from the beginning of the 20th century and a bathroom that was probably bigger than the room I have in Bergen. No, I did not have money to waste in my travelling budget, on the contrary I tried to spare… This was actually the cheapest solution available since Marburg was hosting a big conference on Medicine exactly that week and all the hotels were fully booked. We managed to get finished with the paper and to submit it. But fortunately it was not only work, we have also been able to enjoy German beer and food. I enjoyed so much a couple of “auflauf” (casserole) I tried. I learned also something curious: many of the public toilets in Marburg has special sink specifically designed to… puke. A local PhD student commented with “We have strong drinking traditions in Germany…”. Amazing!

The second trip was to York, as always together with Adrian, to attend the FASE 2009 conference, part of ETAPS. Here I presented our last published paper. I was not so stressed in the end, and everything went smoothly. I am very satisfied by the presentation, and receiving compliments from colleagues and other researcher was a great reward. The very same evening after the presentation we had a “gala dinner”, which was actually delicious, and of course we continued the celebrations in the pubs of the city centre. The ale beers from the local breweries helped me to forget about the research carried on in the last months… The city of York was somehow fascinating, also because of its history. Founded by Romans in the year 71 and captured by the Vikings in 866, it shares a lot with the history of both my home country and the country where I live now.

I hope to be able to upload pictures from both trips soon!

The NWPT’08 conference took place in a an historical building in the old city. The articles presented at the conference were quite theoretical, and I have to admit that I did not understand many of them, but this is probably (hopefully? ) normal when people are coming from very different areas of research. I finally had my first presentation as well. We had indeed two extended abstracts accepted in the workshop, and I presented the one titled “A category-theoretical Approach to the Formalisation of Version Control in MDE”. Despite the initial twitter, I have to say that the presentation was smooth and I am really satisfied with it.

I had the chance to go a bit around the old city of Tallinn during the weekend, and it is lovely. There is a lot of history everywhere, and sometimes it seems to be back in time. However, despite the old-fashion look, Tallinn is really ahead in time for what concerns Internet. Yes, because Internet is available for free everywhere through wifi access. Note that with “for free” I do not mean that you can steal the connection from some unwary network owner, but that it is provided by the public administration. Estonian people I met seemed very helpful and friendly, and most of them were able to speak English fluently. Last but not least, the food we tasted in the restaurants was definitely very good. At the end, it was a very nice experience, except for a last detail…

The journey back to Bergen was a sort of odyssey. We had a connected flight to Bergen, with stop over at Copenhagen. The day that we were supposed to leave, we woke up in the middle of an extreme snow storm. Our flight was not cancelled, so we had to reach the airport at 16:30, with expected departure at 18:00. The taxi driver had even problems to come to the airport because of the loads of snow all over the streets. The situation looked not promising at all, but they were keeping our flight delayed. After waiting many hours at the gate with no precise information, the flight was declared cancelled at 00:00. The airline could not provide us an hotel, since they had to handle so many cancellation during the day. After having our flight rescheduled for the day after, we had to come back to our hotel, where they had fortunately two rooms available for the night. But the story does not end here… We had exactly the same schedule for the day after, but the luck was not with us. The flight took off at 21:00 instead of 18:00, and we obviously lost the connection in Copenhagen. We hoped that they could reschedule us to take the last flight from Copenhagen to Bergen at 22:45, but guess what? It was cancelled due to another snow storm in Stockholm… So another night abroad, this time in a Radisson SAS hotel at least. After more than two days of journey, finally we landed in Bergen the morning after…

Next post will be probably from Italy, I am going home for Christmas vacation finally…