What are you doing here?
Disclaimer: Like many Scottish people, I have a tendency to ramble, go on tangents, and take a very long time to reach my point. This blog posts that (and this will probably be the case with all of the subsequent ones). Scroll to Section 2 if you want to cut out the nonsense. First some pictures of the city Palazzo dei Normani A random window inside Steri (the university's main administration building) What are you doing here? This is a question I've been asked countless times since arriving in Italy and it's one that I'm still not completely comfortable answering. The question itself is one that can be asked in a number of ways: from people who are just looking for a way to make conversation and who don't really care about the answer; to people struggling to understand why someone would choose to come to southern Italy to pursue a PhD in engineering, it's hardly a typical choice. Most frequently, however, the person asking the