Dust is settling down in Spain!

The whole experience of coming over abroad and settle here was beautiful and very emotional. The experience can be seen in three different phases. I try to see an analogy between the situation with the sequence of the events when you first time go for a sky diving. The phase one, is the pre-processing step: It is the time until the day of the flight. I would call that part 'Excitement'. I was so happy and excited to come over and start my work because I was taking a very well deserved vacation of 3-4 weeks after finishing some tight deadlines like: Master's Thesis, Google Summer of Codes, PAN-2011 track participation etc. In the excitement you generally don't think the topic which in this case is to "go abroad", in more depth and knowingly you don't let any negative thought come about your adventure because you are just excited. You want to experience it and also you have to stand by your decision. It is same, when you have decided to go for sky diving and you enjoy your decision, thinking that what a great time you are going to have. Then comes the day of flight. On that day the situation seems real and apparently more real on the airport when you see your family bidding you the final goodbye. Remember, you are still in the excitement phase. As soon as you land, you find somebody to pick you up and you chit-chat for a while and then you go to the house. Rarely you find that you have reached the destination and your luggage has not! Yeah, exactly that happened to me and I was told that my luggage will not be available for two more days because on Tuesday Turkish Airlines does not have any flight to Valencia from Istanbul. Murphy's Law. Then you go to home and sleep tight because you are so tired of the journey and Jet-Lag. The very next day starts the phase called 'Nervousness'. You feel nervous because you are in a completely different environment. You see different people around, sometimes it happens they don't speak your language and even worse that they don't understand your language. Somehow the day is spent and gradually you see your over-ambition for the trip. As soon as you reach home back, you are all alone and you don't have internet and a phone to connect to your world. Now what you have is, a photo of your family and some letters from your girlfriend or wife. That's it, this is the night you are going to cry and repent the decision of coming over. All the negative thoughts which were forced underneath will come out. You somehow take hold of yourself and go asleep. This is the moment which is very crucial for one's stay abroad. It feels the same as when, you are in the airplane for sky diving and your other three friends have already dived and now its your turn. You have to deal with that crucial moment and yes it is crucial because you have always a choice of not to dive! I have seen many people returning to the home country in merely some weeks or a couple of months saying it was very bad there and they didn't like it at all. At that time I used to think why would someone do that. Now I realise, it comes under the phase of 'Nervousness'. Actually in the days of phase 2, if someone doesn't think much about going back and try to see the good things around, it would really help. I started crawling over all the plans I had made before coming over and was searching the reasons which really made me excited to come over. I suddenly noticed, doing that makes me comfortable and I liked that feeling. I notice the improvement in the mental comfort day by day and week on week. Now I really like it here. The dust has settled! Now I realise that I have time for all those things which I wanted to do like walking, cooking, spending lot of time on the research problem I am dealing with and much more. Yes I cook my dinner and weekends' lunch as well most of the times. You can see some of the photos here.



Now starts the third phase called 'Thrill'. The moment you dive, in some time you start enjoying your adventure and you are thrilled! Exactly same is the feeling when you convince yourself that I like it here. In this whole process of settlement, I rejoiced my confidence in self and it is an earned confidence and not the granted one because you see how beautifully you have tackled the situation. This experience is great and has taught me a lot for life!