After a lot of planning, talking, organising and packing we left Amsterdam on the last day of September and arrived the next day in one of the five houses of the village of Figueroles. Having always lived in cities or suburbs the countryside comes as a pleasant shock. Especially the size of the garden is impressive: we can collect wood for the fire here and at times even have difficulty finding our children in it. Walking through it at night from the parked car to the front-door almost becomes an adventure. Yet we are about half an hours drive from Girona; a pleasant city with an impressively well-preserved medieval centre. We have even seen Giants parade through its narrow streets and witnessed the building of human castles.

The Universitat de Girona has an institute called ‘Servei de Sistemes d'Informació Geogràfica i Teledetecció’ (SIGTE) which is very similar to the SPINlab. So working here is in many ways comparable to what I do in Amsterdam, although lunch at 14.30 takes some time to get used to. SIGTE is a well-organised institute that works on a wide variety of GIS-related projects for the University, local governments and the EU. Many of the projects have a strong technical component in for example webmapping or 3D-visualisation. They have an impressive number of UNIGIS-students from all over the Spanish-speaking part of the world: I was lucky to share in the pie that celebrated the enrolment of more than 100 students in their new academic year. They occasionally organise specialised workshops, that this time were also open to students and staff-members of UNIGIS-Amsterdam. A fair share of the participants to the Geo-statistics workshop (November 28-29) was linked to our UNIGIS-site. See also the article in this newsletter by Jasper Dekkers.

The past months I was also able to expand my previous research on urban volume with in-depth statistical analyses and find time to work on chapters for an upcoming book and special issue on land-use simulation and my own dissertation. So both professionally and personally this has proven to be a very interesting and productive time.