Today is the Guanggun Festival, a man made shopping holiday invented by Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Alibaba, a major online shopping mall, breaks its own record again with $38 billion single day sales. It completed $1.17 billion sales within the first minute of the day opening. It’s not only an impressive achievement in marketing, but also a technical miracle for their servers and infrastructure. In comparison, the entire US online shopping made about one fifth in Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday combined.

My cultural shock in Braga was not on churches, but the vast number of retail businesses.

I have lived in many places in the US for over two decades. I have never seen such extensive retail presence in any of the cities I have been to.

My first stop in the US was Baton Rouge, LA, the capital city of Louisiana with more than 200 thousands. There are only one mall in the city. When they built a new mall, the old mall died of a natural cause of lack of foot traffic. My current city only has 70,000 people, but it has a much higher income level. Still, when a new mall was built, the old mall died. Actually, when the old mall was built in the early 70s to the west of the city, downtown business went away. I used to live in Chicago with the famous magnificent mile. The prosperity might be one mile long but only one block deep. Even in San Francisco or Berkeley where I recently worked, you don’t see business one block away from the main streets. In Braga, the entire city grid are filled with small retail stores.

Whenever I walked on the street, I always wondered how were these business supported and whether there had been as many stores in the past.

I guess possible explanations are: 1) population boom (with waves of immigrants from Brazil); 2) many residents walk to shopping instead of driving; 3) Online shopping hasn’t infiltrated Portugal.

At school, I sat in two PhD comprehensive exam preparations. It is a research proposal and research plan conducted at the end of the first year which I think too early in the stage. With the fast pace in technology renovation, it is hard to make detailed agenda for the third and fourth year in advance.

Everything is booming in Portugal and it seems the same in the higher ed sector. PhD students are supervised by junior researchers and Masters students supervised by PhD students. Some professors are extremely business with research projects while the rest are overwhelmed by heavy teaching duties.

Today is the Saint Martin’s Day. In Portugal, all school children would receive roasted chestnuts at lunch. In our SPEAK class, our instructors planned to take the class to a shopping tour the next time while we would have some castanhas.