The everyday life of living and working in Madrid

A DAY IN OUR LIFE 

I thought I would quickly describe a day in the life of the Findlaters as we settle into a working life in Madrid.

Mornings usually start at 06:15 with many alarms, and where Kyran makes me breakfast and I get ready for work. 

At 07:00-07:15 the journey to work begins - I carpool with my aunty as I live with her and we work at the same place! How convenient.

Kyran stays home and works in his crazy lab that he has set up, making inventions for his brother and father.

Traffic into Madrid at this hour is horrendous and you should keep in mind that it is summer here at the moment so that is traffic even before the sun hits the horizon.   
However the traffic does not affect us much as they have a transit/bus lane that anyone with two or more passengers came use, to this saves us a lot of time. Just like we had in Brisbane for a while!

Tia and I are usually the first in the office we start work at 08:00 but we usually end up getting there 15 minutes early, this is the time Tia uses to make herself amazing salad or toasted breakfasts. As I have breakfast before I leave for work I take this time to start reading my emails. 

I am a Case Co-ordinator with Best Doctors in their Madrid office. My job is the administration and coordination of cases for the UK, including Ireland. 

I finish work at 17:00 hours sometimes Tia stayed back till 17:00 hours so I go in the car with her on lots of adventures. Otherwise Tia usually leaves earlier then me so I catch the bus home. 

Here I would like to note how good the public transport system is here. For the rest of the world it is probably average but for me coming from Brisbane, Australia, it is amazing!
A train comes every 6 minutes at the latest, and buses to the suburbs every 10 to 15 minutes, and the transition from train to bus is seamless. 

On Afternoons when I go on adventures with Tia it is usually to do visits as she is a doctor. After the visits we usually go home but by running around the country with her on visits I get to see more of Madrid and the greater area.

Mean while at home Kyran is supposedly inventing his heart out, with intermittent breaks down to the local shop to practice his Spanish on some poor unsuspecting shop attendant, asking for random things like a can of corn or hairspray (turns out they call it lacquer!).

The sun does not set in summer here till close to 21:00 hours meaning that at 17:00 when I finish work I usually have another 4 hours of sunlight, this is something that I LOVE about Spain (in the summer). You see families playing with their children in the parks after work rather then working families coming home for supper and putting the kids to bed because the sun is already down.

Thanks for reading! Make sure you check out the other two blogs I posted today, about our visit to a massive park and Donkey Land.

Parks in Madrid

On our Journey

The photo below I thought I would include as this place came as quite a shock to us. We could smell this place before we could see it. Its seems to be a gypsy/homeless camp that has been created in the ruins of a demolished construction site in the center of Madrid.We did not observe the human population however there was a huge cat population to the right of this photo (you cant see them, but it is like a carpet of cats! <3).
 

Casa de Campo 

The Casa de Campo "Country House" is the largest urban park situated west of central Madrid. It was formerly a royal hunting estate. Its area is more than 1,750 hectares.

An amusement park, and the Madrid Zoo are located inside the park.

In 1936–39, during the Spanish Civil War, the front lines of the Siege of Madrid ran through the Casa de Campo, where the Republicans had halted a nationalist offensive in November 1936.

We went there with the idea of hiring bikes and traversing this massive park that way - however when we arrived there was a huge bike race on throughout the park so we strolled along the edge of the park which was as large as they can get, and really quite dry (see photo below).

 

 We did however find a huge climbing pyramid thing and stopped there for a rest.

 

The rest of the journey that was taken can be seen in map below.

 


 
The image to the right is the Faro de Moncloa (Lighthouse of Moncloa) is a 100-metre high transmission tower with an observation deck at the Plaza De Moncloa. 

In the upper viewing deck, there was a restaurant for awhile.

It was built in 1992. The tower has been closed to the public since 2005.




















The image to the left is of a gum tree or a "eucalyptus" which as you would all know are native to Australia. 

Here comes your lessons in Ecology!


As with most plants they exist in their environment with a natural enemy, be it a beetle or a mite. 


In Australia eucalyptus exist with their natural enemy which controls and affects their growth and distribution.


Overseas where eucalyptus exist without their natural enemy they are a bushier tree and have significantly denser foliage.


If you would like to know more about the eucalyptus and their natural enemies abroad click this link. 



The photos that follow are all photos that were taken in the Parque del Oeste (The west park). Kyran reckons there are bullet holes in the pillar he leans against!


 

Later on our walk to the Casa de Campo we encountered this amazing view...

also there's a castle in the background...

Well that's one of three blogs that I have posted this weekend so don't forget to check out the rest!

***

 

Burrolandia aka DONKEY LAND!!

This weekend we visited Burrolandia (yes, donkey land)! Our Aunty Argi visited to drop off some food and stuff, and said she was going shopping and to visit Burrolandia for the afternoon. So we hitched a ride with her! It was lots of fun, and there were many cute animals to pat. Burrolandia is a mostly donkey-based zoo-like establishment that encourages the protection of and educating people about donkeys.

Burrolandia is a great attraction for families from all around Madrid, and it was quite busy today! Our Aunty's husband Caesar is their 'vet' and she actually first met him at Burrolandia - they came together with their mutual love for donkeys haha.

The main yard area has random donkeys, pigs, goats, cats and dogs running around. Here are some pictures below!

 

This place is reminiscent of a Mexican junkyard, with lots of really cool old machines and wagons and memorabilia of decades past. The local Burros were cute! There was a random horse or two as well, and some kind of Mule/cross-breed mutant. 

Baby Burro! A Burrito! This little white one shown above was really cute, and had a fluffy hair-do.
The one shown below was rolling around in the dirt, having a good old time.

 
Mercedes couldn't help but pose with multiple animals, holding back her hippy urge to save them all and let them run wild. Some cute baby goats and an insanely fat mamma goat.

 

 Shown above is a deer! It was an orphan, and ended up at the Burrolandia 'zoo'. She does not behave nicely with children so she is put in with all the chickens and people are not normally allowed in there. An ultra-aggressive male goat was in there too! 

Old stuff everywhere, something we are used to from Mercedes' Nan and Pop's crazy collection of collectable curios. We got to see a magical chicken that lays magical blue(-ish) eggs!! Picture below, with a white one for comparison, and also the blue egg in amongst a bunch of other white eggs.

The day was entertaining, with Kyran finding lots of cuddly cats to pat and Merc getting a good dose of animals to play with, we left exhausted and ready for bed! The people were really nice, and it seemed the "customers" were all happy and were having a great time. The kids loved the donkey rides and having a ride on the donkey cart/wagon thing. 

You can check out more about Burrolandia on their website, http://www.amiburro.es/  but make sure to pass it through Google Translate or have Google Chrome to auto-translate all Spanish Pages into English automatically for you :)

This is only one of the blogs for this weekend, don't forget to check the other ones!

Adios!

Kyran's Adventures in Milan

Milan, Italy and the European Embedded Design in Education and Research Conference 2014

A strictly "Kyran" Blog experience!

This blog is brought to you directly and exclusively by me, Ky ran! I will be vaguely talking about my adventures in Milan, Italy, in my usual wishy-washy way. I went alone, and the following is my story! Behold!

I first give my thanks to David Morales and Prof. Vinod Chandran for the opportunity to be involved with the technical paper which lead me to go to Italy in the first place, to attend this interesting conference in their stead.

I left Madrid on the plane on Wednesday afternoon, September 10, full of dread with limited phone battery and lack of Italian speakingz skillz. There are basically zero photos of my trip to Italy due to this issue, however I have one thing to say - Italians are crazy drivers! I had with me a huge tube with the A0 size poster rolled up in it (which was difficult to get printed in Spain!).

I landed at the Malpensa airport in Milan (one of three, I believe) and took the express train to the city - it was about 9pm at this time, and I was not in the mood for hours of transit by train and bus to the hotel which google forewarned me about. I took a taxi. Thus my "Italians are crazy drivers" comment earlier was my experience from this haha.

My hotel was a dodgy 2-star place called Hotel Bristol. It was about 2km from the conference venue. Below are some pictures from the 4th floor (damn stairs!!). It was pleasant weather, and two of the nights I was there were rainy, even with a bit of lightning far off to the north. The breakfast at the hotel was disgusting - these weird pre-packaged croissants with either jam or chocolate in the middle... and crackers - yep that's it!!! So unhealthy it's not funny.

Random streets in Italy - all nice and green.

This is my random selfie[s] while walking to the conference venue - a gentle breeze and lots of leaves falling off the trees. Was a nice walk, and not too hot!

 

Cosmo Hotel Palace

There it is! The walk was not too long at all! And thankfully on the first day, I did not need to take my ungainly giant poster container.  The photos directly below to the left and right are from the bar (yeah, totally went straight to the bar!) and show parts of the lobby of the Cosmo Hotel Palace (CHP).

 The hotel itself was nice I guess, the staff were friendly enough and there was a never-ended supply of croissants and fruit juice! The next few pics are just some random pictures taken from demonstrations and posters that I saw as I mingled and attended the presentations which ran in multiple sessions in multiple rooms through the two days of the conference.

The pic with the red table to the left is some form of image processing demo. Below that is another image processing demo where the processor finds the outlines of things (fast gradient change) and does some filtering and blurring, and then adds the outline layer back in to give supposedly better vision for people who are going blind due to macular degeneration.

Toys as tools! This poster describes a design-and-build challenge for uni students to build a mobile vehicle robot thingy, and do some basic challenges. They get bonus marks for creativity!

The poster room is like a giant dungeon, below all the lecture halls for the oral presentations. Here is where the afternoon tea and biscuits are served too. It's all so civil! Imagine that right now, people in Iraq are being slaughtered by ISIS solders.. such a shame.

More robots! This is the Yrobot platform, with a new top piece called "AudioCom" where the robots ACTUALLY TALK TO EACHOTHER!!! In an audible fashion. There has been research done on this kind of thing before, in fact [one of] my ex-supervisor's partner Ruth Schultz did some work at UQ on this topic, a news article is here for those interested in audio-communication for robots.

This is the accompanying poster...

Demon Toilet Of Doom + 3

 

I call this the demon toilet, because it's alive, and evil. Oh and it's obviously magical, so that's the +3 modifier [D&D joke..]. The evil red eye above where the "button" is. The "button" by the way is locked, and you must suffer the demon toilet's strange behaviour. First, when it spots you entering the toilet cubicle, it immediately begins it's watery laughter. A constant, never-ending stream. As long as you are in the damn cubicle. 

The worst part is while you are sitting on it, it's splashing you, laughing with it's beady little infrared eyeball. If you lean forward or whatnot, it assumes you are done and DOES A FULL FLUSH! NOOO! This is the most inconvenient robot demon toilet i've ever encountered.  I had many battles with this bastard thing during the conference unfortunately.

Here is the poster! On the friday morning I took the poster tube with me on my walk to the conference.

Was a few people who were into the same interests/field as this electric brushless DC motor drive paper. The inventor of instaSPIN was there, doing tutorials on the system that he designed in collaboration with Texas Instruments. There was at least one other poster and one oral presentation on the same general topic, as well as researchers in general who were involved heavily in this field. Overall there was a positive response to the work done and shown in the poster! The few more interesting questions I dutifuly forwarded on to David as they may help him in future work. Below is a picture of me with the poster!

On the first night, they held the banquet. I got invaded by multiple offers of meat-like substances, and it took them a while to work out what vegetarian meant. Below is a picture of some of the hand-shaking-and-award-presenting that occurred. You can see Prof. John Soraghan from the Scottish University of Strathclyde and the Texas Instruments global marketing manager dude (I am sure his first name is Steve, I shook his hand etc at the bar.. whoops). 

 

On the last day, I went out on the streets and stumbled upon a genuine street market! There was lots of cheap random stuff for sale, I walked around the stalls a lot but didn't actually buy anything. I killed some time and went back to the hotel and checked out, ready for my long and arduous (turned out to be almost 7-8 hours in total) adventure back to Madrid, back to my lonely wife!

First I checked the metro map in the hotel, it showed me where to go - turns out this map is super out-dated but it still worked, the general direction was the same :).

Terrible lighting conditions in the subway! Even Spain has a better lighting in their tunnels.

Not sure about Italian plumbing, you'll have to ask the Mario Brothers for that. This, however, is SHIT electrical wiring! That is how they powered the tap "ON" sensors in the airport departure gate lounge area!

And to finish it all off, the usual hilarious shitfight at the boarding gates trying even just to get out to the plane, let alone get into it.

 

In summary, I had a great time, met lots of great people, and got some free stuff (Beaglebone Black, weird wireless sensor tab thingo, and a Piccolo C2000 dev board) too.

I think conferences like these are good for networking, and it's possible that I have a lead for my next move - TO GERMANY! Otherwise, TO CANADA! or... TO ANY OTHER PLACE IN EUROPE!! WOO!

Thanks for reading if you got this far, you need a medal or something. Have a weird picture or two for good measure.

John Rambo Approves the above message