February Wrap Up

February was a busy but excellent month for me, especially as it ended with a trip to Portugal! Officially I was there for research reasons, meeting some other researchers in Coimbra and Porto, touring some labs and trying to figure out if there would be any opportunities for collaborating in the future. And while I'm still not sure if I'll be able to get to work in Portugal during my PhD, I met some great people and realized that until now I have never seen a well-equipped soils lab! It was so good to meet some Soil Scientists and hear about the work they're doing, and it's made me think a bit more about what I want to do afterwards. We'll see...

Of course I managed to fit in a bit of being a tourist as well, and the last two days of my trip were in a town called Guimaraes (North Central Portugal), and they were meeting free and just for fun. All three of the cities were great, but I think my favourite was Porto.

I'm still enough of a North American to get overly excited by the novelty of going anywhere in Europe (even within the UK). The sight of a 'Porto' stamp in my passport made me inordinately excited. And another highlight - getting to use my very rusty high school French! The taxi driver and hotel receptionist in Guimaraes had no English, so we spoke in French instead, and I was actually able to carry on a whole conversation! It was such a great feeling to have a second language to fall back on - I will never again bemoan my French classes, even if it is Quebec French and not France French. It's still usable! 

So now I'm back in Swansea and trying to sort out the rest of my year...working in Portugal, writing up by December, what to do afterwards...it all seems to be building up right now and it's all still a massive question mark. I'm ok with that, and not too stressed, but I'm beyond curious to see what happens!