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Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Interview with our student doing a practical training in CBTalebnts - Portugal 2019

1.- Describe the place where you have done
your practicals
I do the internships at a business center called Tagus Park. Within this center there are more than 300 companies with their own offices, in my case, I work at CBTalents, a company that mainly does international recruitment for clients such as Apple, Microsoft, etc. Although this is not his only area, since we can find things like the CBT Academy, where they offer free programming courses, and that when they are fulfilled, they give 100% confirmed work for those who completed the course.
To get to the business center everyday, I’m using a Lisboa Viva card, charged with the “Metropolitano(metropolitan)” service, which is 40€ a month and you can travel with all transports companies in all the 18 municipalities of Oeiras, this means if I want, i could grab all the trains,buses,metros and ferryboats I want, for just 40€ a month.


2.- Where were you living? How was the food?
I live in Porto Salvo, a town/city that is almost as close as possible to Tagus Park, though in the part that I live in there is no restaurants, It hasn’t prevented me from going to other places like Lisbon, for example, and eat there. The food works different in Spain: In Spain we are used to eat two dishes, the first and the second, whereas here this does not exist, there is only one dish, which is usually much larger than in Spain. As popular foods in Portugal we find: 
- Soups such as main foods (they are so eaten to the point that including fast food chains, for example ... McDonalds, make soups) 
- Seafood(Called “marisco” here.)
- Cake with cream as a dessert, which is commonly called Pastéis de Nata(this one is very typical in Portugal. And delicious! As a recommendation, whoever goes here, I recommend the place called Pastéis de Belém, which is always very filled with people, so you will have to deal with queues, but they are dedicated to making this dessert only, and you could eat them hot, not to mention that it is the most recognized place when talking about the Pastéis.)
- Boiled chestnuts (almost all of Lisbon are found on street food carts where people sell it, as a curiosity, this food seems to be inherited from the Galician people, since there is also boiled chestnuts in Galicia, and they’re also commonly eaten). 

What is also widely used in Portugal are applications such as Uber Eats(in the place I live these things don’t exist), which are used to order any type of food from any place you want, including restaurants, with so many options to choose from (there is Chinese food, Hindi ... and not only in the app, but also in the shopping centers, in which there are usually millions of food chains) I am sure that more than one person does not eat much Portuguese food due to this.

3.- Do you think you were well prepared for the task you
did at work?
Of course. Work is literally just things that I learned during the course and that they have helped me a lot to develop my work.


4.- Which cultural things you found more different
between Spain and Portugal?
As of curious cultural differences, two could stand out, the second one is not so cultural, but still interesting.

- People are very grateful, so if you do not say the famous "Obrigado" or “Bom dia / Boa tarde / Boa noite" when you start a conversation, I am 100% sure they will think you’re not educated. 
- The days here follow a somewhat peculiar order, for example, in English we have these days, and in Portugal: 

Monday : Segunda-feira
Tuesday : Terça-feira
Wednesday : Quarta-feira
Thursday : Quinta-feira
Friday : Sexta-feira
Saturday : Sabado 
Sunday : Domingo

As you can see it is quite an odd order. They start from monday with the term “segunda” which translates to second, and feira which is day. Then they follow the order: second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth until Saturday and Sunday, which have their own names, heredated from Spanish.

5.- Will you go back to Portugal?
Yes, I'll be back and I'm 100% sure of that. Portugal is a lovely place (maybe I liked it more because it was the first time I left Spain, too.) And therefore I think I'll be back, although I do not know if in the same zones or in the northern area.

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