Working, Swimming, Eating

I thought I'd put a bit about what I do day-to-day right now. It can mostly be summed up with working, swimming, and eating.

Working - I usually wake up and start my day by going with Francois, Laurent, and Brice to get espresso. Then it's off to team meetings and classes - the first session is 9:15am to 12:45pm and the second is 2:30pm to 5:15pm. I'm on the Spaceports team project, and in the business and commercial team. We discuss the direction of the team and the work that needs to be done. This week we started doing some research, and I'm looking into the business models of existing spaceports. Today, I was the moderator for the meeting, so I made the agenda and ran the meeting. This job cycles through a pretty long list of volunteers, so it's the last time I'll do it.

Swimming - I've continued to go to the pool pretty much everyday - I try to do 2-3km each day. Lots of other people go, too, and I've become the resident swim coach - teaching people drills and pushing them to complete sets. It's been a lot of fun. The other day I was the only one there and was able to do an uninterrupted one-hour swim - just jumped in and started swimming and didn't stop for an hour - it was very relaxing. It's been a while since I've had the time (or energy) to do that.

Eating - I stopped eating dinner at the student residence, partly because people have been finding bugs in their food (gross!), and partly because I want to get out and see the city anyway. A few nights this week I ended up going to restaurants with the French students - Laurent, Francois and Brice - which is amazing because they're really picky about food and tend to choose really good restaurants. On Monday we went to a Spanish tapas place near La Rambla, and had Pan con tomate, patatas bravas, mushrooms, chorizo sausage, mini-squid, calamari, and all sorts of things. I thought it was pretty good, though the French guys told me later that it wasn't (it was their first time there).

On Tuesday we went to a place they had been before and really liked. It's in a castle and is pretty fancy. We had some cava to start, and their pan con tomate comes with fresh tomatoes that you cut yourself. My main dish was duck with pear, which was very good, and served with red wine. We finished the evening with some creme catalan, port, and espresso.

On Thursday, we went to a tapas place near Placa Catalonia, which had excellent food - there was a dish with spinach I really enjoyed. Tapas is so perfect for being able to try lots of different food.