First of the two most remarkable blackouts in my history was Moscow, May 2005. Me and my schoolmates were caught while role-skating on the Poklonnaya Hill - a WWII memorial park. After realization of the collapse came to our minds we spent an hour making two-station trip on a slow-mo metro, then about same time for another two-station route role-skating to the home of the one of our fellows living closest to the park. I remember annoying crowds of gloomy people on their pedestrian way home while we were sliding among them, delicious cold soup, mysteriously working wired radio inside all-blackened-out building. This all was pure joy and fun, this was an adventure!
The latter of the two caught us in Lisbon last week.
Right after I've finished my scheduled work calls and arranged on the visit to Portugal's tokamak ISTTOK at IPFN IST, suddenly, the lights went off in our rental apartment. In the beginning me and my Sis, we thought it was only our building's trouble. But as we were slowly striding along the streets of Lisbon towards Instituto Superior Técnico, no indoors or traffic lights were met, only disoriented people in the streets. Halfway there a news push notice came through, stating that merely the whole peninsula was affected. Well, we shrugged and could not do any better than continue our path towards the meeting point.
Although some citizens were in a slight shock, the majority of the people we met were chill, spending their time at the tables in bars and cafeterias (implying they had some analog cash on their hands - we did not, and the only working ATM we met had a very long queue in front), sunbathing on the grass (Lisbon has pretty much grass to touch outdoors - unlike Barcelona), spending their time with kids and pets (who were extremely happy to get extra attention). The traffic could manage itself without the lights and stayed mostly calm.
At the IST we were met by Rafael who is operating ISTTOK. In the grim silence of the pumps he made us a tour around the installation. ISTTOK is small but interesting: the Ohmic current drive is produced by reversible field of the central solenoid, so each pulse can contain tens of CS field periods (flips). It has Xe heavy ion probe among its diagnostics - in general, only smaller machines tend to have it. Its fast controller's schematics are made of FPGAs and programmed at IST.
The epoxy plates containing coils have a somewhat wooden color. And since radiation is negligible, instead of a separate control room ISTTOK has a "bridge" - a balcony with operator's seat and terminals, directly overlooking the tokamak. All that gives the installation a cozy look and feel.
Two days later, when the power was back online we saw actual plasma on ISTTOK, while Rafael was running cleaning discharges to get rid of residual impurities in the chamber.
^ at the top of São Jorge Castle, overlooking the city
^ these guys are the main attribute of nobility in the castle
The rest of our short getaway was also fun. We've been on the tour around St George Castle, where climbing the walls was quite scary for my fear of heights. We spent a whole day in the Museo do Azulejo, where my inner ceramist was happy to see magnificent artworks and a nicely done chemistry stand. We enjoyed fresh ocean air and variety of textures in the streets (and green! Lisbon feels much greener than cities in Spain).
^ one of my favorite azulejo patterns: diamond wall
^ at the azulejo chemistry exposition, I was astonished by the amount of lead that was used in the tiles production
^ at the exposition's very end one meets a genuine tiled panorama of the city of Lisbon, before the earthquake of the 1755
Lastly, we had a pair of watercolor-styled paintings engraved into our arms. Something we had been planning for a while, but the reason and choice are out of the scope of this page.
