Tagus Park

During our stay in Lisbon we visited a science and technology park named Tagus Park. Tagus Park has a wide variety of businesses, ranging from start-up businesses to the Portugal headquarters of Microsoft. During our tour of Microsoft we visited the language department, which is not translating between languages like I first thought, but working with computers to make them recognize language and be able to interact with the user. One example of this that they showed us was interactive email where you could take to the computer and tell them who you wished to send the email to and could even speak the content of the message to the computer. It was all new to us but they said that they have been using it in the Microsoft for years (although it is not yet on the market) and it is considered old to them now.

Later that night a group of us went out to a place in Lison known as "Bairro Alto". This translates to "High Bar". We soon learned why it was called that when we found ourselves climbing up probably 20 flights of stairs just to get to the top where the area of bars is. Once there though it was completely different from what we experience in the United States. People were drinking on the streets, dancing, and there were kids there who looked like they were 12. It was a lot of fun though and we went bar hopping at first and then found one bar we liked where I told the DJ that if he kept playing American music we would stay so we stayed there for the duration of the night. It was a fun night.

First Day

Most of us met at Logan Airport yesterday at 1:30 in order to catch our flight at 4:30 (which was delayed!) so we spent a lot of time waiting but the plane to Philadelphia was short. I can't say the same about the 7 hour flight to Portugal from there which felt more like a 14 hour one with three people crammed into one row right on top of each other. And add the fact of no sleep at all having occurred. But it was still exciting getting into Lisbon, Portugal this morning (their time 8 something AM while it was still 3 AM in MA). From the math you can see that it is a 5 hour difference so it's going to be hard adjusting!

We checked into the hotel this morning and had basically a free day to roam and get to know the city. Me and two other people in the group went out and took pictures and traveled on the metro by ourselves. We also went to a small Portuguese restaraunt on a side street to get authentic Portuguese food. We visited Campo Pequeno, a bull-fighting ring with a mall underneath it and walked around Marques de Pombal. All in all it was a good first day besides not having slept for over 36 hours.

Pre-Tour Studying - Wind Power in Portugal

While researching Portugal for our upcoming trip, I ran across an article online from the Renewable Energy World International Magazine.

The article can be found at this link: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/12/integrating-wind-power-in-portugal

The article gives the reader an overview of the employment of wind energy through the use of wind turbines in Portugal. Going along with their launch of a new energy policy, known as the "E4 Programme: Energy, Efficiency and Endogenous Energies", Portugal hopes to increase its wind energy capacity over the next couple of years in order to each their goal of 39% renewable energy production. The article goes on to explain the use of wind power as an energy source, and also states the negatives attached; One such negative is that wind energy can not be relied on in nature and "is essentially ruled by random meteorological changes, [resulting in] its ability to reach peak load requirements being the biggest problem for producers of wind energy". Despite its problems, Portugal is actively persuing the use of these wind turbines, and hopes to achieve an installed capacity of 5300 MW by 2012.