Today, I took a day trip to the Normandy beaches. The tour visited Omaha Beach, the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach, the D-Day museum at Arromanches (Gold Beach), and Juneau Beach.

This post has taken me a long time to write because I wanted to do justice to the topic, and capture some of my thoughts and emotions from the day.

Today was my first day in Paris! I decided to move to a hotel because I didn’t feel totally safe at the hostel I was staying at. I normally don’t care too much about my sleeping accommodations and can sleep anywhere, but just something about the vibe didn’t sit right with me. I was a bit concerned about leaving my things at the hostel, even locked up. Maybe it was just that my expectations were skewed by the great hostel in Lisbon… Regardless, I’m not on that tight of a travel budget, so I spent the first part of the morning moving to the new hotel (the citizenM).

Today was my last day in Lisbon. I spent the morning on a walking tour of the city and then flew to Paris.

Touring Lisbon

The tour was gratuity based, and it was really good. The guide’s name was Hugo and he was very engaging and informative. He took us around a bunch of places in Alfama, and he pointed out interesting things that I wouldn’t have noticed on my own.

Due to staying up way too late last night in Alfama, today was a day for relaxing. I woke up just before noon, and a few people that I’d hung out with at various points over the past few days (and who had also been out late last night partying) were planning to go to a beach in Cascais, a town a bit west of Lisbon.

Today, I went to the Alfama district and toured the Castelo de São Jorge. Then, in the evening, I went out with some people from the hostel to the streets where there were celebrations for the Feast of Saint Anthony which is the largest festival in Lisbon.

After a small breakfast at the hostel, I started walking over towards the Castelo de São Jorge in the Alfama district which is the old quarter of Lisbon. My goal was to eventually get to the castle, but I wanted to enjoy walking through the old quarter on my way, so I went at a very leisurely pace. The streets were beautiful, and in some areas, people were already setting up decorations for the celebration that night.

After the week of the work retreat, I am staying in Europe for another week (until next Sunday). The first four days are going to be in Lisbon, and then I’m heading to Paris for a few days before flying home.

I caught a ride from the retreat venue to the Lisbon in one of the taxis so that I wouldn’t have to pay as much for a taxi to the hostel that I was staying at.

I spent the first week of my trip at a Beeper company retreat in Ericeira, Portugal: a town about an hour northwest of Lisbon. We were staying at an event venue called Alma do Paço. The goal of all of the work retreats is to allow the team to have a week of focused collaboration. We tried to take advantage of having all of the teams together by working on some cross-team projects. We also try to have whole-team meetings such as retrospectives, planning and brainstorming discussions, and other meetings. The retreats are also our main opportunity to meet coworkers in-person and are great times to build relationships. I find that meeting people in person is extremely helpful for making the online interactions feel personal.

Today I ventured across the Atlantic for the first time since 2019. The reason: a work retreat in Ericeira, Portugal, a small town about 40 minutes from Lisbon. My flight path was from DEN -> IAD (Washington Dulles) -> LIS.

Both flights were uneventful, though slightly turbulent at times. The service from Denver to Dulles left at 15:30, and I had a red-eye flight leaving around 22:20 out of Dulles. The gate process at Dulles was highly inefficient, and it took way too long to board and get everyone’s carry-on bags onboard. They had this facial recognition system that had about a 50% success rate, and the gate agents still took and verified everyone’s passport and boarding pass, so I don’t really get why they had it. The only nice thing about the process was that it was so slow at the gate that it made the trickle of people on the jet-bridge and getting onto the plane so low that it was chill getting on the plane. We ended up leaving about 20 minutes late, but luckily the jet stream helped us out and we arrived in Lisbon about 20 minutes earlier than expected.

For the last five years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition (HSPC) modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about the 2019, 2020, and 2021 competitions on this blog. This year, I wrote three of the problems and helped Colin Siles with organizing the competition.

For the first time since the 2019 competition, this year’s HSPC featured in-person teams. There was also a remote option to increase the reach of the competition. Like the past two competitions, we allowed contestants to access the internet. The problems from every year are new and written by Mines students and some Mines alum specifically for the competition.

A couple weeks ago, my company had our week-long 2022 Q1 work retreat in Playa del Carmen, Mexico (about an hour south of Cancun). As with the previous work trip, the purpose of the retreat was for us to get to work together in person and to bond as a team. I got to see many of the people who were in Montreal again, and got to meet some of the new team members who have joined the company since September.