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A Monday. Got up early. Bought a Spartan breakfast (water and bread). Off we go to the uni! Work! Get shit done! Meet people! "Hoy está cerrado!". I stand before closed doors, next to me a wildly gesticulating and almost shouting security guard crossing his hands. Yeah, right. Today was a red-letter day! Ah, my forgetfulness followed me all the way to Panama! At least I got up early. So I took the chance to explore the neighbourhood a little as long as the sun was shining.

When I came back to the flat the keys were not quite fitting the lock. I couldn't open the outside door. Luckily the old lady living next to my room walked by and talked to me in English through the bars of the door. Great first impression you left there, Dom. At least we have something to talk about now: My inability to open a simple door. Jokes aside, we had a good talk and turns out her English is pretty well. She lived in the states for some years with her husband and as soon as she got her pension she left for Panama. Some other neighbours also passed by: from Venezuela, Mexico and Chile. Few of them speak English, but my Spanish is at least good enough to share some basic information about myself and ask the same of the others to get to know them a little. They seemed to appreciate me trying to learn their language.

While yesterday I felt a little down, today gave me the impression that it may not as bad here after all. Earlier that day I had a small chat with a Couchsurfer from Mexico City living in Panama City: Nathiely. We decided to meet up at 13:00 at the nearby mall with her Peruvian friend Vanessa. There we went for some sushi and had an amazing conversation! We could've gone on talking for hours and hours. For evening I already had plans however. Brigitte, some friends of her and I went to a 4D cinema to watch the new Avengers movie. With moving seats and spray water! I've never been to anything like this before! It was an impressive experience and a level of immersion I have not experienced before.

Now tomorrow I'll go to work for real! I'm burning to know what the project really is about, what I'll be doing for the coming months and how it'll work. The technical description on the acceptance note was very vague. But it required skills in computer networks, Hadoop/ HDFS, the Snort IDS and R for statistical analysis. Also some Linux knowledge and Python skills. I fulfill all these requirements and I'm so looking forward to working with all these technologies on a single project!