(super) Road Trip!

Hi there everyone! I'm back! I was hoping to do my laundry tonight but apparently somebody moved in the apartment next to the laundry room, so it's closed. Tant pis, I don't feel like going back to the lab anyway (yes, I'm fed up with my thesis) so I'll revive my blog, which has been kinda quiet for the past few months.

For a good reason! I've been to Brazil on vacation, a summer school, Germany on work, Italy for fun and now working like crazy! Not so much time to write..

So, I was obliged to go to Germany by car to get my precious PC over to the DLR for seting up the final demonstrator for the final review meeting of the european consorcium, the AccuRobAs. I left around 10:20 on a beautiful sunday (the 11/10) and arrived at Munich (close to Pasing station) at my hotel around 22:30. A nice trip, no surprises, was a little worried that my credit card would not work in Switzerland but it did. Beautiful paysage in the French alps, near Grenoble!






Switzerland was boring as always and I couldn't go so fast on the Autobahn cause I was running out of fuel! so most of the time I spent looking 4 a gas station. Not so much fun (I did 180 km/h once on a longer stretch but that was it). Once again proud of my little Brava (champagne)




And yes, I did have to work very very hard in Germany. I don't often say this, cause I think it sounds stupid when sobody says that he or she had to work his ass off (in my opinion, that's lazy talk). But it was the beggining of the (still ongoing) most stressfull period of my life. I've been pretty much having all stress symptoms I could ever detect: aftas, alergies, loss of hair, my eye's jumpin, cannot sleep, anxiety, etc... But they had good beer! And I had quite a few..

Weissbier

Finally, the demonstrator worked at the last minute and it was a big (HUUUUUUUGE) relief. I had to switch between 4 acquisition boards to make it work. Damned, it was stressful..

Job done, I headed south to Bologna (yep, trenitalia on strike and I had to go pick up Sara -- merde alors)... After a rather weird crossing over to Italy (weird mountain/death roads in Austria) I picked Sara up and headed to Deiva Marina, in the Cinque Terre national park!

Here it is:

And that place is super cool! While the rest of Europe was under heavy rains, I was enjoying a beautiful sun and very pleasent temperature. This place is really amazing, it's definetly worth checking out! Here are some pics

Overall, I drove around 2500 km !! Not bad!!!

On monday, I headed back to Montpellier (was glad to be back home) and to work! Not really :P I had to go sailing of course! I took a weekend to go sailing on a proper boat around the Montpellier bay. Was not so much fun though.. Much less sportive than the Catamaran and the weather didn't help (we spent saturday docked at Sète and that wasn't much fun).. It was, however, an interesting experience and now I know that if I have to go back to Brazil by boat, I'm probably going to die :P

Here are some videos that I've uploaded to my youtube account:





e esse video é o mais engraçado.. O lobo dos mares ensinando a gente com toda sua didatica (fais ce que je te dis, je m'en fous comment tu l'as fait, fais-le et c'est tout!)



And that's not all! I still did very very short laps with a lamborguini Superleggera, like this one here:


But i drove it like this :P



So.. that's how it ends, the story of my second semester at Montpellier.. Between some Salsa lessons and the thesis, that's life "south-of-france" style..




R