Life

In this page you can learn about other passions of mine after robotics and programming, and the kind of things I really enjoy doing in my free time.

Freestyle Slalom

I have been rollerblading since I was around 10 years old. When I was 16 years old I discovered what freestyle slalom was and it became a very important thing in my life. Slalom is a modality of rollerblading where the skater is supposed to perform tricks and dance on a line of cones with music. It is a very technical demanding discipline and requires a lot of practice to learn the technical tricks, but also creativity to improvise or create new combinations of tricks at the rythm of the music. You can see a video here:

Back in Spain I used to teach people how to do slalom and also I used to go to competitions in a national level. Nowadays, this is a very important hobby for me an I practice weekly in Hyde Park when the weather allows me :-).

London has thankfully an amazing skating community and this is also one of the reasons why I decided to live here. We help each other to learn more and also there are events every week to skate around London with music. During the winter season, it is more difficult to skate outside, so I practice table tennis instead in a club where there are social jump ins.

Travelling and experiencing new cultures

When I was in my first years of university in Valencia I felt I needed to practice my English in real situations. This is why I started going to language exchanges that happen every Thursday evening in a pub paradoxically called Big Ben. Thanks to this I met a lot of people from different countries and really changed my life in Valencia. Now every time I go back to Valencia I try to go to this language exchange.

This exposure to different cultures made me thinking of having the experience of living abroad. I was fortunate to get an internship in Brussels (Belgium), which is a very diverse city from people from many different countries in Europe. Mostly because of the European Comission being there and there are many students and interns that come to this city. It was such an amazing experience that after the 6 months left me wanting more. So after that, I moved to London and find that is an endless city with loads of neighbourhoods to discover, events to go and people to get to know.

On top of this I try arrange trips every year to explore new countries. The most recent country I have visited is Iceland:

Reading

I might not have been a big reader in the past, but now reading is substituting the time I used to spend watching series before going to sleep. I think it all started with me reading in the tube. I love science fiction and also reading about physics. I am currently reading Remembrance of Earth’s Past triology (most commonly known by The Three-Body Problem) written by Liu Cixin. I belive this is the perfect combination between science fiction and physics and this is why I love it. I am about to finish the last book and I will probably feel empty after I finish it, but excited to find a start a new book!