Spanish sun that didn't end so fun...

Sooo ya you're right, I'm not the best, at keeping this updated but that just leaves you with more to learn about right? Builds suspense? Am I spinning this in a positive light well enough? Well, either way, I guess I'll get on with the updating :). 

Last time I left you was a couple weeks ago heading into a new work week. Work is still going really well! And in fact I now have a few pictures of the office for some visualization help.

view from my desk to the door (kitchen area in other room past open door)

 area to the left of my desk

Work lately has included me writing some more highlights about events (that I didn't attend) for the website ata-sec.org by using the agendas of the events and pictures. The articles that are first in the circulating reel are mine up until the last one about the Council Meeting (which I actually did attend). 
I also have been spending a lot of time trying to get our other site up and running called Mediterranean Debates which is a Forum for youth to discuss security issues of the Mediterranean region. I have been doing everything from aesthetics of the site to content and uploading documents. This has required a lot of research but also code writing and web design that is quite honestly extremely beyond my skill set haha and I have needed to fake it till I made it for sure. Let's just say thank god for online help chat forums...because yes, there were a few days where the site went to the dogs and was utterly unopenable and unreadable...my bad. Anyhoo...in the end, I now know some cool things about writing code, designing websites, and even creating widgets. For which every time I modified the site my boss liked the idea of widgets and would say "Good! Now what elssseee can we doo? Let's get creative. What about you make something for a live web cam of a view of somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean???" I was like....uh.....you're dreaming....(way overestimated what I was doing haha). I think it's no surprise for you to learn no such widget is on the site. But I still recommend checking it out here! I am also working on promoting it and drafted a bunch of letters to send out to our partners and even went a bit extra and made my boss a pretty newsletter to attach. 

Despite the somewhat difficult work (which I much prefer to feeling like I'm not doing anything) I was able to take an impulse trip to Palma de Mallorca, Spain! (a small beach island off the coast of Spain that Ryanair flies to for very cheap :) ) We even got a two bed private hostel with private bathroom and balcony, wifi, breakfast, and turndown service for 15 euro per night...also 30 meters from the beach. Not sure how we pulled that off but I don't ask questions when it's something beautifully in our favor ha. The trip was great! We were overdue for a bit of sun since it's been record-low temperatures in Brussels and five of us in the program spent the weekend enjoying the beach, the young crowd and cheap food (yet great-had some of the best cooked tilapia I've ever had (2 fillets) with 2 sides for 8$) and found it hard to think about heading back to the daily grind on that Sunday. Here are some pictures!

Excited about to head out!!

Our environment each day

view from our room-note the very close water

 cool sandcastle-see the little green lights built in?

sunset :) 

Waiting for bus back...which we flagged down but it didn't stop...we took a cab.

(L-R: Grant, me, Kelly, Matt, Sophie)

not ready to leave yet :(

Weird I know, but seriously had to include. Look at the price of this piece of meat sold in the duty free part of the airport...why??

Also, kind of weird, but Mallorca was an extreme hot spot for German tourists. When I say a lot of Germans, I mean a lot of Germans. Old, young, all sorts. They also love to chant at all hours of the day and have their beers starting at 10 AM and don't stop. At night they congregate on a certain road that has multiple German bars and they flood the streets. It's somewhat overwhelming. There were so few English speaking people there that when people talked to us and asked us where we were from, they made us repeat ourselves and asked what we were doing here. I guess we found the secret European destination or something. 

So some of you I know already know how the travel back went...but I'll give a bit of a description either way. We were arriving back late (about 10PM Sunday) and all of us were done travelling...and of course there's metro track work going on. So, at a certain point, we needed to get off the train and use a bus connection service to get back to the part of the metro that was working and get the rest of the way home. In the process of this, I had my wallet out to do the ticket transferring stuff. When getting on the bus, I carelessly and temporarily put my wallet in the side water bottle pocket of my backpack to free a hand to pick something up. Within the next three minutes I felt someone bump me when the bus was stopped, and my wallet was gone along with the culprit...sounds pretty bad right? Right. But I've decided it could have really been much worse. My passport is safe, I still had my metro card so I could get to work, had minimal cash in there since we were coming back from travelling, and was able to cancel all my cards. Certainly not ideal though. So that has pretty much categorized my week (moneyless and dependent on friends) but I have made it work and how lovely it is to have nice parents who will ship replacement cards :) . 

Last night (Thursday) Kelly, Matt and I spent a bit of time in the Place Luxembourg area that we went to before when I said Parliament was having a youth event, remember? It's a go-to for young professionals after work on Thursdays so we went for a beer and hung out a bit. Today, we went to the train station to head up north to the shore to see a the beach (it's cold but a nice area), but did not realize how expensive the train ticket would be so we ended up hanging around the Grand Place-a beautiful day for it actually! No huge plans for the rest of the weekend, we'll see how it goes! May go to the place that's supposed to have the best fries in the city tomorrow-fries are sold at stands and fill the same social event category as ice cream in America. They come with all different sauces and are sold in a paper cone and you eat it with a tiny plastic fork. I tried a friend's with curry sauce-very good.

Well, as Porky would say, that's all folks.