I'll be home soon

It's the last day of July, and in less than 24 hours I'll be taking off from Frankfurt and heading back to Toronto. I'm quite sad to be leaving this beautiful experience behind, but at the same time, quite ready to come back. Being in limbo for the past month here in Crete - living out of suitcases, not being able to cook food at home, and not being able to settle into a place as it's just a hotel room has been quite taxing, thus the desire to come back to a "home" and settle in somewhere. At the same time, these past months have been so different from any kind of life I've experienced before. Having gained so much new knowledge - with robotics, with computer vision, with Germans, with Greeks, with adapting, with being a foreigner with many things; having experienced so many new things, events, flavours, sights and sounds; and sharing it all with someone so dear to me, has been an experience I will cherish forever.

Tallying up the results from the poll, it seems that "Things Learned" came in at number one - and so it shall be. For the next little while I shall write about all the things I've learned in my last 5 months abroad. I hope I don't bore you too much, as I'll be discussing machine learning, mobile robotics, computer vision, ROS, OpenCV, C++ and many, many more nerdy things that I've learned... you asked for it. :-P

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Auf Wiedersehen

Wow. Last time I blogged here was over two months ago, and yet it feels like just yesterday I was waiting in anticipation for Tina's arrival.

Since then school got progressively busier and busier - assignments got harder and harder - and free time seemed to have disappeared completely. Any opportunity we had for a free evening was spent exploring, going out for dinners or catching up on homework. Every weekend was spent travelling and experiencing Europe to the fullest extent possible. So much so, that I have spent many hours stressing out about not having enough time to do the one thing I came here to do - study; but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to explore and travel and experience Europe, especially with Christina by my side.

So, let me reflect on what has happened since my last post. So many experiences were crammed in the last two months, it's hard to imagine it all really happened. First weekend after Tina's arrival we visited Köln, and checked out an underground anarchist party at Odonien. The next weekend we went to Berlin to check out the history, the fashion and the club scene. The weekend after that we went to München and Schwangau to check out the Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein castles. The week after that Tina was at a conference in London, so I caught up with her on the weekend and we checked out London's history, architecture, food, fashion and the DnB scene. The last weekend in June we went to a massive three-day rock concert called Rock am Ring at the Nürburgring. And the weekend after that, we squeezed in one more trip to a castle in Colmberg, where we stayed for a night, to get a first-hand experience of living in a German castle.

Meanwhile, school was getting busier and busier. I was trying to squeeze in homework whenever I could - in the mornings, in the evenings... on a plane, or on a train... in the sun, or in the rain... it was always such a pain. On top of everything, once July rolled around, I started another summer school course in Data Mining, which rendered my free time completely nonexistent. Summer school ran every day from 9am to 6pm, which left me completely burnt out and exhausted. My courses in Learning and Adaptivity and Mobile Robots were wrapping up, and exams were just around the corner. Between studying for exams, I was working on a project for the summer school course, which turned out to be quite fun (for anyone curious, I can give more insight, but basically we used some algorithms to determine the reading ease of tweets and charted them across time). Also, at least once a week during July there were summer events happening at the school, which was pretty much the only thing that kept us sane and entertained.

Last week in Bonn was exhausting. I had a presentation for the summer school project on Tuesday, an oral exam on Wednesday (which I've never done before), a written one on Thursday, and we were leaving Friday morning. Between all that I had to take care of running around to wrap up all the paperwork in Bonn - closing accounts, registrations and wrapping up with the dorm. It was all happening so fast, I hardly had a second to sit down and process what was going on. On Thursday we went out with our friends from Bonn as a farewell thing and got pretty drunk, so leaving on Friday morning was a bit difficult.

Once all our stuff was packed up, all my things taken down from the walls, all the furniture rearranged back into it's original configuration, it hit me - I'm leaving Bonn. I haven't really had any time to process what was going on, so when it happened, it hit me really hard - I'm gonna miss it... A LOT! I left the keys in the room, and as I shut the door behind me for the last time, I felt tears in my eyes. I had an amazing time in Germany - an experience like no other - and having to close that chapter of my life so soon after it began was incredibly sad. Although, come to think of it, I would have been sadder if I had stayed longer, because I grew attached. I fell in love with a different world - a different life - a different... everything, and having to say 'good bye' to it all was very difficult. Traveling around as a tourist, you come and go from places, and even though you love them, you're never really attached in any sort of way. But having spent four months there - having made a home and friends, having shared experiences, having learned and experienced so much... it was painful having to disassemble it all, pack it all up, and leave. I'm generally a social person, but it still takes me some time to find people I really gel with, and having found a group of really cool guys and gals, having broken the barrier (for the second time in my life) of being a foreigner, and made friends with some really amazing people, was making it that much harder to leave Bonn. Deep down inside I know I'll be back, as there is still so much to see in Germany - in Berlin, and Bavaria, and many other places that we didn't get to, but having built something for myself in this new, unfamiliar place, and having to pack it all up was a very new experience for me - and a very sad one.

Even the weekend of our leaving Bonn was an exceptionally busy one. On Friday we took a train to Frankfurt and flew into Amsterdam. Arriving in the early evening, we literally just had enough time to walk around downtown for a bit, and enjoy a meal and some dessert. On Saturday we were going to a party I've been looking forward to checking out for ages - Sensation White. Since the party started in the evening, we had a bit of time during the day to once again check out downtown, and even meet up with an old friend from Canada. Seeing a familiar face in a totally unfamiliar land was a refreshing change, and a very welcome one. We had a few drinks together, and afterwards headed off to our respective parties. Sensation was unbelievable, but came to an end much too soon, as at 6am we had to book out of the party, and back to the hotel to grab our things and be at the airport for 7. Then - Amsterdam to Frankfurt, and a few hours later Frankfurt to Heraklion, Creete, where we are now.

And so I'm setting up homebase here for the next month while taking a course in Computer Vision at the Foundation for Research & Technology - Hellas (FORTH). It's a totally different vibe here than in Bonn. Everything is much more relaxed, much more laid back, and obviously, the weather here is non-stop sun. Every day after school we go to the beach for a swim, and to just bum around on the beach. Every evening we indulge in a 3-hour dinner (as I said, everything here is veeery laid back… sometimes to a fault), and during the day, when it's way too hot to be outside, while everyone on the island has a siesta, I do some research and coding in OpenCV. That's the new thing I'm learning here in the realm of Computer Vision. So far, I've learned how to read images, check histograms, and compare them with each other, which allowed me to parse out a picture of us from Sensation into little blocks, compare the histograms of those little blocks to every single picture we took at the party, to find one that matches best, and build a picture out of those smaller images. It's not much, but it's research!!

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