news – meiadeleite.com

like vicki says, time really flies when you’re having fun. it’s been three years since i received the first postcard ever sent through postcrossing… and here we are now, three years and over a million postcards later, still going strong :)

this has been postcrossing‘s best year so far, i think. the project went through a heavy recoding to move it to the symfony framework, and a re-design at the same time. the re-coding made it easy for p. to introduce new features, which have been coming out steadily.
the over 55k-users’ community happily exchanges postcards and joins meetups around the world. oh, and on average, 2 postcards are being received each minute, somewhere in the planet. :D

this year, there was even a marriage celebrated between two people who met through postcrossing! how cool is that?

here’s hoping for another 3 years of growth, smiles and busy mailboxes!

ah, so many unfinished half-written posts that never made the frontpage of this blog…
we haven’t been lacking in adventures and errands to run… but they end up draining all our energy and force us to crash on the sofa whenever we arrive home.
the fact that we’ve moved here without a limit date to return gives us time to appreciate the city slowlier than usual. we don’t have to like it right away and smile so that we look good on the pictures. so we’ve been taking it easy and enjoying every little thing we stumble upon.

yesterday was rainy and cold outside. we reserved the day to reading hundreds of feeds, answering emails and resting our feet from the wedding frenzy on saturday. i was one of the bridesmaids on a traditional chinese wedding (our dear lulu and tommy’s wedding), which was a great experience and lesson on culture and traditions (more on that when i have my pictures). funny detail: 4 out of 5 bridesmaids had been in groningen (netherlands), studying. how small is the world?

also in the news, tomorrow i’ll start working here in shanghai. after two weeks of interviews, i’ve chosen a swedish company as my employer. they’re young, expanding and diversifying their product range, and they seemed like a good choice. besides, one of the bridesmaids has a swedish boyfriend and she explained how sweden is out and about to conquer the world through all the companies they own… we agree. a set of 3 sharp knives and a wok in ikea for less than 50 yuan (5 euros)? hell yeah!

bonus:
* durão barroso (a previous portuguese prime-minister) appears regularly on a spot on cctv9 (china’s english news channel) stating that china is a good oportunity for investment blablabla. we still laugh everytime he speaks, just because his voice sounds so familiar and nonetheless, so strange when he speaks in english…

* we found a place which sells b&w films (100 asa, 36 pictures) for 8 yuan (80 cents in europe).
just around the corner, a dvd stall sells copies of the latest movies for 5 yuan (50 cents) – considering a movie ticket in here can cost more than 10 to 20 times that, the alternative is quite attractive.