Week 2 (Late) Review

VCE Vblock System

OK, so I was lazy enough last Friday not to update you all in what's been happening with me in the last few days.

It was a very fast going week, with a lot of new stuff going on (nothing new here) and a very pleasant experience at work with the official Orientation happening for two days - Wednesday and Thursday.

So, basically, it was like this:

Wednesday

1. I got to go to work at 9 am, instead of 8.30 am as usual, to a very tastefully decorated meeting room where I was able to meet some of the other colleagues, some of them coming from locations as far as Dubai.
2. We were all presented with a breakfast worth of a king and then we had several presentations about all the departments and the expansion of the company. Very nice. Especially because then they took us for lunch in the canteen, very well provided by a company called BiteSize.
3. Still not enough, we came back for another hour and then they shipped us home (for some, hotel) by taxi to get ready for dinner here. Once again, simply excellent. Then a few drinks and shipped home to rest for the day. 

Thursday

1. Starting at 9 am once again and once again delicious breakfast
2. Case study and presentation about company products
3. Again, astonishing lunch by the above. Really good stuff in mini sizes. I'm in love with it.
4. Then, leave at to 2 pm. Rest is good.

Unofficially then the day was over, but the group decided to get together and take "the foreigners" (here, laugh. Everybody knows I'm a foreigner myself, but who cares?) out for a couple of drinks.

We went here (as usual) and it was pretty nice.

Anyway, it wasn't that nice on Friday when I was dying of exhaustion. But my really nice manager let me go home at 2.30 pm. Thank you D!!

Anyway, to answer a question that was made to me by one of my besties (BTW J, did I mention how much I hate because you live in the sunshine? GRRR), my role is Technical Support Representative (TSR) for a product called Vblock. Now, J, just go online here and check it out, babe. It is complicated to explain in 3 lines or so. But I'll leave something here for the laugh, made by colleagues:

Hope you enjoy it people :)

I'm living my simplicity. Happy days.

Reflexion

The sun is shinning in Cork today, helping to improve the mood.

Life is changing. I can feel it in my boiling bloodstream, the positive feeling of change, of improvement, the sense of achievement that is raising with the new job that is almost starting and the upcoming trip back home.

It may look strange, but when I look back, just as little as a year and a half, I can see how my life as been so different before, the struggle that, even still existing, has turned into something so natural as breathing.

I miss Portugal, the blue sky, the green of our lands, the corn fields wide spread across my homeland.
I miss the smell of the sea and the sand, the rush of the people in the streets. Everybody always so busy, so concentrated in the daily self of the life that owns you, instead of the opposite.
The buildings that I re-discover now, every time I land back home, as if I was seeing their details for the first time.
The dreams I had when I was back there, of finding new roads for my soul abroad, discovering new land, new experiences, new cultures.

All of that is kept in a very dear part of me now, living memories that haunt me in my wakefulness, day dreams of a life shared between two hearths. The one I carry in my chest and the one I left back home, waiting for me to come back, hidden inside my family, my son's eyes, my mother's prayers.

But, then again, the sun is shinning in Cork today, I can feel the cold breeze from the river in my face and I know that the future will be bright.

Even when I complaint about this weather, most of the times grey, cold and rainy, is that breeze that keeps me going. That reminds me daily of what I've come here for. That brings me the laugh of my son from overseas and pushes me forward.

Some days, I get up in the morning with such an exhaustion attached to me that I can barely move. It's not (only) the body, the physical side of me. It's the exhaustion of the spirit, of an unbroken bond with everything I left back, and that will never be the same again.
The coffees with friends after work, in the cafe in the main square of my city. The stillness of the nights, listening to the cars driving down the highway next to my house. The hearth jumping if my brothers came home later that expected after a night out, the anxiety of knowing [that] they were safe and sound. The morning rush of everybody getting ready at the same time to go to work in the morning, swimming against the tide of a sea trying to suck hope from us. We never allowed it.
We kept our faith, we kept our strength  even in the worst moments, even when things seemed to be lost at the end of another day.

And now, time has almost come to go back. Ten months since I've last hold them in my arms, since I last woke up with my baby sleeping next to me, innocence and purity wide spread in his angel face.
Ten months since I last felt the warmth of the sunshine in my face, since I left slept in my bed, under my family's protection.

But life is good, everything is going to turn out OK. Life is, after all... Simple.