Greece
I was born an 80s child in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany and almost immediately sequestered to the much sunnier and warmer pastures (aka the concrete building jungle) of Athens, Greece at the age of 4 months. In typical German hippie teacher fashion, my parents proceeded to own a series of Volkswagen camping buses and fully made use of their extensive teacher holidays to drag me around every major camping ground in Greece, Turkey, Syria, etc.
The fondness of Greece and of its sea, people, food, language and way of life still sits rather deep, and we've been going back to the metropolis of Almiropotamos, Evia (pop. 200 in low season) pretty much every year.
Germany
Good things can't last forever, and after five years in the sun, I was dragged kicking and screaming back to my birthplace. Nothing much to report here: kindergarden, primary school, beginning of “Gymnasium”, the German equivalent of high school, where I suffered through several months of lovely Latin... ahem.
In Erlangen, it rains, you have to separate your garbage into 6 bags and people give you dirty looks if you just as much as walk up to your 60mpg car with the intention of actually driving somewhere and polluting the poor virgin rainforests of northern Bavaria... The place isn't really all that bad, but after seven years, it was time to get outta there.
The 'rents now live in lovely Bamberg, one of the prettiest cities in Germany and arguably the beer capital of the world, both per-capita consumption and brewery-count wise. It's a great place.
Costa Rica
For six years, I lived in the land of volcanoes, beaches & surfing, tropical rainforests, rastas, hotties and, of course, guaro. It's as home as home gets.
I went to the German school in San José, a thoroughly crazy place where you get to read Faust, Macbeth and Don Quijote in their original form, pick mangos off trees during lunchbreak (and eat them unripe with salt - it's the best!) and where the graduating class size for the German Abitur is 16 (!).
When not in school or on the beach (which is unfortunately quite a drive from the captial - cuando van a construir la maldita pista a Puntarenas, ah?), I acted in many plays, merengued with my mates, helped out in national parks, swam my lungs out with the mighty mighty Delfines del Humboldt, and got irrevocably addicted to sunshine, ceviche, fresco de cas and tres leches.
I miss that place...
Cambridge
I did my undergrad in England because of the weather, the girls and the food ;). More seriously, I read Computer Science at Cambridge, staying at Sir Winston's Party Paradise, aka. Churchill College.
A popular Cantab motto is: “work, sleep, social life - choose any two”, although “work hard, play hard” is a better fit. Nowhere else (well, except perhaps at the ‘other place’) can you see the libraries full of kids stressed to the bone before the yearly tripos exams only to catch them again two weeks later, drinking Moët out of the bottle in full black tie and singing “Living on a Prayer” at the top of their lungs. It's the land of bops & bumps, supervisions & Cindies, formal halls & balls, punting & the pav, cricket & class lists and it's out of this world.
I rowed (read: “crabbed”) strokeside in the trusty pink lady for the CCBC, panted and punched for the eeenvincible Churchill Waterpolo Club and was the international officer on Churchill's JCR committee.
Yale
Two things made me leave the alma mater: the weather and the lack of robots. Coming to New Haven didn't do too much about the former (substitute rain by snow), but doing a year of just research at Yale definitely remedied the latter. I worked in Scaz's awesome Social Robotics Lab.
It was great to be part of Yale for a year, where everything's “sort-of-like-Cambridge” but with a twist. I miss The Doodle, Ashley's, KoffeeToo?, and of course Sally's, which makes the greatest pizza in the world. It was also fun to watch those Harvard kiddies get served.
As a Yalie I was part of the Yale Ballroom Dance Team and competed in various east coast competitions in standard and latin. I spent a considerable chunk of my time on various floors of the amazing Payne-Whitney Gym. I also did Capoeira with Mestre Silva, something that I really want to pick up again sometime in the future (preferably of course in Bahia itself).
The love of robots then brought me to CMU and Pittsburgh, which is, well, ongoing...