αντιο σας

As I’m preparing to make my way to the airport to go back home, I have a moment to write about these past few days I’ve spent in Athens to visit my friends/colleagues Nikos and Ioannis.

I’ve enjoyed this very much — we have had several interesting discussions on joint research interests, from survival models in health economics (we’re now working on immuno-oncology drugs and issues related with the kind of data you normally get to model in this framework when doing economic evaluation) and its potential development with embedding variable/model selection within the estimation process; to modelling sports data (which is a long-standing passion of both Ioannis’ and mine).

I was curious to see what the city would look like — I haven’t been for over 20 years, so together with the recent crisis, I didn’t really know what to expect. I most likely have been well cocooned by the increadible hospitality of my hosts as well as by staying very close to the Acropolis, but I have to say I found Athens in better conditions than I thought. All in all, the city is clean (unlike others in countries supposedly in a better position…); and is actually rather cheap (certainly in comparison to London). And of course, it’s hot — I managed to bring some clouds with me, but it’s been very warm and lovely for the whole time. Which I needed to load on…