GRE marathon

The GRE marathon has ended!

It started last month when I had to travel to mainland in order to take the GRE and TOEFL exams during the carnival vacations.

The TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language) exam was done quickly but I didn't arrived on time to take the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and this began a marathon to complete the missing exam.

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Made a new appointment for the 4th of March but over that week we were extremely busy with a serie of tasks at my daytime work that took away any chance to take two or three days to visit the mainland and do things with time and quietness.

Instead of that - I had to travel all the way back to Lisbon at night to take this test first thing in the morning and then make a speedy return on the next flight home.

Arrived around 1h00 a.m. in local time to the city, found my way onto a friend's house and left this place to the exam location around 06h00 a.m.

I was a bit jumpy about the exam - wasn't yet sure on what to expect and this inquietness ended with chance to get any good hours of sleep during the night.

The exam location was far better than the previous place where I had done the TOEFL evaluation. The room was heated at environment temperature instead of a freezing cold, there were wc's and coffee houses in the nearby to take a good break and the overall exam was a bit easier and shorter than expected.

Too bad about the scores - lots of words and questions that I surely missed because I had never heard them. Guess that next time I'll get much serious into learning the meaning of as many "strange" words as possible.

Really hope that this is an experience to avoid repeating more times in the future as it certainly affects the capacity to get a better performance - the test had limit times to supply the answers and sometimes even the fingers were becoming so sluggish to write on the keyboard..

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Ended up my quick visit with a small promenade around the "Colombo" shopping - the only place where I still find refills for my oldish pen and also bought a "Mixed Croissant" and will offer it to my wife as gift - a local croissant that is packed with cheese and ham which is very popular around this place but is nowhere to be found in the azores.. ;)

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I also found the amazing power of google maps and it's hability to track down an address (even in portuguese). Thanks to this tool I won't be getting lost so often anymore..


-- Nuno Brito