Welcome in Edinburgh

Hi guys, it is a time to write my first blog post.

At the beginning I would like to mention Barcelona, because there was the start of our adventure. But only few words – there are enough posts about it.

I arrived to Barcelona a day earlier, which means that I had an opportunity to walk through the city (just because there was another programme for next few days). Barcelona is a city with nice architecture, many tourists and beautiful weather. But the real value of the nice weather we noticed in Edinburgh 😀

One week in Barcelona was just furiously quick! It was a gathering of 20 people from different fields of study, different parts of Europe but we were really great crew. At the end it was hard to say goodbye, which nobody expected.

This post should be mostly about Edinburgh, which is our hometown for the next two moths. Edinburgh didn’t prepare pleasant welcome – When we arrived there was an iron-gray sky and the temperature was around 20 degrees lower then in Barcelona. From the airport we moved to our apartment, which looks nice – each of us has a private room with bathroom. There is also a kitchen which we share with one more person – nowadays there is very kind lady from Italy, which came to Edinburgh to improve her English.

The next day we started to explore the surroundings. I was awake pretty early, so I went outside to run and “find” the sea (here is a bike route and it leads directly to the seaside). Afterwards, when everybody woke up we went to the nearby botanic gardens (we didn’t want to go anywhere faraway). It is hard to believe how easily you can spend half of a day in one “park” with many various plants (and squirrels).

The next day we finally went to the university. Here was smiling Catherine waiting for us with her warm welcome. She gave us the complete information about  the university, city, and everything we may possibly need. We had a look at office, met our mentors and had a introduction to projects. Now my real summer of HPC starts 🙂

Just a little bit more about our office. It looks that we have the largest office in the building. There are desks for 11 people, but in the office you may meet only us and Greg (friendly guy!). Our office has everything you can imagine you might need – whiteboard, enough space for football, great view and a list of cattle 😉

The view from our apartment.

The list of cows.