currently floating in a sea of drupal modules and dreaming of winning the jackpot and building a spacious loft, with minimalist decoration and lots of windows. also, of doing some sort of masters in online journalism/documentary. and a website about quirky european roadtrip stops (why should americans have all the fun?!).

i daydream way too often.

yesterday, a french tourist asked us for some directions to a nearby hill. straightforward stuff, follow us, and on that road go straight ahead till you get to the top. and then, as i visualized the answer in my head… i couldn’t say a straight french sentence without sprinkling it with chinese. my french used to be pretty decent, but every time the man asked something, my first reply was in chinese, then i stopped, switched and tried to finish the sentence in french, much to his bewilderment (and my own!). i hope he found his way to that hill.

portuguese/english are the languages i use to think, but chinese is the closest thing to my “second language” these days: when i communicate with a non-english speaking foreigner, i instantly speak in chinese. it’s unconscious and… weird.

which is why i really need to find someone to practice this with, before i forget it all. any tips?

i don’t do a lot of posts where i complain, but the cats saga is taking its toll on us. our return tickets were long booked on british airways, but if we knew it’d be such a nightmare to ship the cats home, i think we’d have chosen a more pet-friendly airline. say, lufthansa, where your cats fly with you in the cabin, saving you half the trouble.

the service on ba has been appallingly clueless. first they don’t fly the cats in cabin - only cargo. that’s fine, i guess. so what do we need? we call london, we call lisbon, we call shanghai: nobody’s got a straight answer, always ending up forwarding us to somebody else. in shanghai, they forwarded us to the logistics person who is supposed to know these things, but doesn’t have the foggiest idea… first we’re told they can’t ship them to lisbon, to which we reply “but why, if the flights we are flying in have cargo service as well?”, then they suddenly can, then we need extra documents - documents which the entity supposed to issue says we don’t need…

what are these people doing?! so far, this has been the most stressful issue of the whole move. we don’t want to leave them behind, and we surely don’t want to take them to the airport and suddenly realize we’re missing a paper! how hard can it be to figure out these procedures and get a clean algorithm, step by step?!
this is all i want. kthxbye.

one of the happiest days of the year is the one i get to say my mom “see you tomorrow”, knowing that i will really see her the next day. :)

have a nice christmas everyone, and see you on the other side of the planet!

cartoon by steve benson.

if we wanted to take pictures of this hindu temple we had to pay a fee (on top of the entrance fee). i dislike extra fees, so i tucked the camera in my bag and only shot this one from the outside.

same thing in the hotel we stayed in hong kong last week. if you want to use the internet, you have to pay an extra fee. compared to the price we were paying for the room, the internet fee was so insignificant, why not just include it in the price? if this was a hostel or cheap hotel, i would understand. there? not so much.