Big, important decisions

I'm back, and I have a lot to do. The Spain trip has already merged itself into one big memory, so here I will offer some bullet points:

We had wine with lunch and dinner every day. Since I'm normally surrounded by beer drinkers, I felt very much at home.

My Spanish is not as bad as I had thought.

Paella is awesome, even when the shrimp still have their heads attached (It's smiling at me!).

I got to stay in a palace.

Red wine + coke = surprisingly not bad.

I went out almost every night; the last night, the bar we were at played Like A Prayer twice and it was awesome. I still haven't gotten the song out of my head.

On the "last day of school," my group was giving our presentation on Titan and I saw that Michael Madigan(!) was taking notes. I think that was the best part.

So, perhaps needless to say, I really enjoyed the trip. I got to meet the director of the Centro de Astrobiologia; he was really nice. And I started to think: maybe I'd like to live here for a while. Maybe I could do a postdoc at the CAB. They do science that I'm interested in, and I love the country. I'm not sure if I'll be able to live outside the US as easily in the future. So why not?

Well, there are a few issues:
1. I don't speak Spanish that well. I am 100% sure I would do fine just getting around, but doing science in another language might be too much to handle. Luckily, it seems that words like "astrobiologia" are pretty easy to translate...
2. I'm not sure that the CAB has the best possible credentials. But honestly, I have no idea, they might be very prestigious -- I need to see where they have published. But I thought about it, and I'm not even sure this is a big problem. I think the NASA Astrobiology Institute would be happy to see that I worked at the CAB. And I don't really care about anyone else. Of course, I want to have a job, and a good one, but I think being happy with your life is more important than making tons of money. And if Spain = happy, then that's what I should do.
3. I have no idea about funding. I have to look into it.

This isn't to say, of course, that I'm only going to look for jobs in Spain. I'll certainly be looking for positions in the States, too. There is one person at Harvard who I'm pretty interested in working for, but Harvard is really the opposite of Spain for me (I'd be very comfortable there, which I suppose isn't a bad thing either).

Granted it will be at least a year before I graduate, but it seems that M is really trying to get me out the door (maybe this makes me lucky?), and multiple people have told me that you should start talking to people about the possibility of working for them about a year in advance. So I think I'm going to try to crank this paper out, and then really get on it. But I'm thinking about it...

Does this mean I'm a grown-up?