I'm back!

hey guys, i have been out of the blogging sphere for almost a year now and thanks to the inspirations and suggestions of William el nalgón Morejón and Aaron "putón" Ramirez i have decided to re start my blog.

I'll dedicate this post to updating what's happened with my life since I left for Hawaii last summer.

I arrived in Honolulu the 26 of June 2010, we spent that weekend watching the world cup (games were at 4am Hawaiian time) eating good food, and of course going to the beach a lot. I absolutely loved Hawaii and I would definitely live there if given te chance. Unfortunately I did not get to see anything outside the Honolulu/Waikiki area but from what I see and hear, the rest of the islands are even more amazing and more natural.

My favorite day in Hawaii was the day we celebrated my friend Robbie's 21st birthday in the beach. It was hilarious and probably one of the most fun days I have had in a while. (my S-230 folks have more to say on this but I'll leave it at that)

After the short stay in Hawaii, me and the rest of the S-230 gang headed off to board the beautiful SSV Robert C Seamans and thus begin our 4 week voyage to San Francisco on the 29th of June. The four weeks I spent at sea may have been the best 4 weeks of my life. I loved being in a totally different atmosphere than I am used to, and I absolutely loved the fact that I did not have to carry keys, a phone, an ipod, a wallet around. My trusty leatherman and a harness was everything I needed. I think I will be putting in posts about my adventure at sea because I definitely cannot do it justice with only one post so stayed tune to here about:

-Swimming in the middle of the pacific (with a 360 degree horizon)
-Seeing dolphins, sharks and sea lions.
-Living in a ship and adjusting to the ship schedule
-Navigating using the stars
-Seeing amazing stuff out at sea (midnight rainbow, bioluminescence etc)
-passing under the Golden Gate bridge on top of the foremast 30m high in the air.
-Awesome people I got to share this experience with
and more...

Also... here is a link for the best pictures of SEA Semester:
https://picasaweb.google.com/robermelendez/SEASemesterSummer201002?feat=directlink

After SEA Semester, i stayed a week in SF and hung out with my boy "the flying hawaiian" Julian Yuen, we had a great time, eating at In n Out for the first time (it was not that great as people claim it to be), we went to the California Academy of Science and saw an Albino crocodile and we had some good Chinese AND Salvadorean food (unbelievable but they make pupusas de arroz in SF, probably the best pupusas I have had outside El Salvador).

After SF I visited MIT for a couple of days and then back to El Salvador for two weeks to take care of some family stuff. And after all of this it was time for my junior year at MIT! Junior Year as a Mech. and Ocean Engineer is special because you finally start taking some OE subjects apart from the regular MechE subjects. So my fall 2010 semester was full of fluids, thermo and water. Overall it was a good semester but not the best, it definitely dragged on for way too long and one of the classes that I was looking forward to (2.016 Hydrodynamics) turned out to be not so good. However 2.005 was awesome and definitely made my semester enjoyable (please don't hate me Ade). 2.671 was a lot of work but I was glad to get it done in the fall plus I got to use a mini wind tunnel and play around with interferometers and dynamic analyzers for the labs. I also took this kinda cool class called: "People and Other Animals". The class is exactly what it sounds like, it focuses on the history of natural history or in other words the history of the interaction of people and animals. The class was small (12 ppl on a good day) and it was half grad, half undergrad it was discussion based which is why I liked it (you don't have to know me very well to know that I love talking and dislike writing). It is taught very well and the teacher is very nice and knowledgeable so I recommend it to anyone that is looking for a history elective.

Christmas came and eventually the spring semester came. I think Spring '11 has been the semester that I have looked forward the most to, mainly because I would be taking 2.017 (Design of Electromechanical Robotic Systems) and 2.14 (Analysis and Design of Feedback Control Systems) both turned out to be very good classes and had a hell of time going through them. I especially loved 2.14 and the way it was taught and this has inspired me to continue taking classes of this time (like 2.151 and 2.171 in the fall). This probably means that I'll turn out to be more of a control's engineer than an ocean engineer but that's really fine with me.

Then after the spring semester... I arrived HERE in Rotterdam to work on Protei! Ok, you might be saying "wtf, Roberto in the Netherlands? he does not go well with the dutch i must have read that last sentence wrong", but yep it turns out I am in the Netherlands for the whole summer (I'll be blogging about my adventures here too!) So far its been really fun and it has helped a lot that I have friends from my high school in El Salvador studying here (yes... another wtf moment). Another question you may have is "what the hell is Protei?" and here is the long answer:

https://sites.google.com/a/opensailing.net/protei/home

The short version is that I am here in Rotterdam to help develop an autonomous articulated awesome oil collecting sailboat that can be easily mass produced. You can keep an eye on the development of this project at the website above.

So yep... I think that is all that I have to say today to update you guys on my life! I'll be trying to post at least 4-5 posts every week with most of them being about my life in holland and life at SEA Semester with the rest dedicated to random cool stuff I want to share with you!

That's all for today but please keep visiting and checking up on the blog regularly!

-R