malaysia, as we found out, is a young and beautiful country, well versed in the arts of receiving people. it’s one of those countries that is filled with curious details, that you could probably explore in countless days.

we toured a bit of the countryside in terenggannu, on the bus to and from the airport. wooden colorful houses on stills filled with and exquisitely detailed architecture. colorful dressed women working around. lots of food stands, with all sorts of dried food (and also some smelly fish sausages). men flocking to mosques with their sons on the backseat of their old bikes. people drive on the left side of the road. “all meats are halal” said the sign on the sandwich shop. and then of course, the sea and the sky. an insanely green and blue country.

malaysia is mainly muslim, and you can see the influences everywhere, from the mosques to the veils covering the heads of women. and yet, describing malaysia as muslim is a poor simplification. it’s more of an intense asian melting pot. chinese and indian people are also well represented and it seemed to me that besides malay, everybody could speak either chinese or english, which was brilliant.

there were lots of details which we could not explain (orange nail polish on girls and boys?) and others that our “asian background” made a bit more clear, such as the empty beaches and the snorkeling fully clothed (veil included). asian people don’t fancy getting tanned - the whiter the better around here.

in the end, the friendliness sticks out and i feel like we could definitely end up living in kuala lumpur in the next few years. who knows?

the water was as warm and clear as promised. the sand was white and there were lots and lots of colorful fish swimming in amazing coral reefs. our week in redang island was short and sweet, but felt like a month away from shanghai.

malaysia caught me off guard in many aspects, but made such an impression on both of us that i can see us living in kuala lumpur in the future. what an exquisite mixture of people, architecture, colors, cultures, languages…

more on this soon. meanwhile, thank you to everybody who wrote or twittered me happy birthday! turning 26 on the beach and sharing the cake with impromptu friends pretty neat. :) and now, on to another brilliant year!

As viagens nunca são o que planeamos. As viagens nunca são viagens se as planearmos geometricamente e as cumprirmos como às ordens de um comandante de excursão. As viagens são olhares. E os olhares não se planeiam. As viagens são esquinas. Nunca sabemos o que está para lá. As viagens são dureza. E são leveza. A leveza mais leve do mundo.
As viagens não são longitude e latitude, meridianos e ângulos, perpendiculares e códigos postais. Isso é outra coisa. Isso são graus e traços a compasso e as fronteiras que o mundo tem.
As viagens são os pedaços de mundo, que se recolhem nos pontos inexactos e improváveis onde as pessoas se cruzam com as pessoas, deixando com elas qualquer coisa de nós, transportando nós qualquer coisa delas, em silêncios, em palavras, em gestos, em sorrisos, em coisas simples, indetermináveis, determinantes, parando em movimento, parando o movimento do comboio global e mecânico onde seguem os passageiros do quotidiano. As viagens são a alegria absoluta. E são desalento e desespero e imprevisibilidades e cansaço e força que se encontra. E saber que no dia seguinte não sabemos o caminho. E saber que há um recomeço de tudo, de tudo quanto está por ver, por saber, por experimentar, por conhecer. Viagem que é viagem só começa, nunca termina, entranha-se, adquire vida própria e, dentro, viaja. E, dentro, viaja muito depois de termos chegado.

As viagens somos nós. As viagens são sempre a nós, aos nossos confins, aos sítios de nós onde ainda não tínhamos estado. Quanto mais conhecemos do mundo, mais ele se torna maior. E nisso não existe maior grandeza.

da viagem pela américa do sul, na estação do calor. que venham muitas mais!

terrazo: views of mexico city is a photo exhibition by pablo lopez that was until recently on sasha wolf gallery, ny.

some samples of the photos are up on the exhibition website, and what a sight they are. the city seems to run immense through hills and valleys, evergrowing and yet strangely quiet and still, in the distance of these images.

via notcot, a long time ago.

when i failed to join the air force and had to choose another career, i picked informatics, journalism and astronomy, all in the same application form - that’s how clueless i was towards my future. in the end, informatics won, and 7 years later, here i am, still clueless but with an engineering degree! :)
every now and then, on the most improbable situations, the informatics/mathematics part comes in handy, like for instance (and ironically) when i have to fly.

here’s the formal definition of a common problem, known as packing. the next time your mom tells you to stop procrastinating on your packing duties, you can properly explain her how hard that is - and hopefully delay the task a little longer!

• you have n kinds of items, 1 through n. each item j has a value (sentimental or of importance) p_j and a weight w_j. the maximum weight one can carry in the suitcase is c, and according to british airways, c=23 kgs.
• the number of each kind of item in the suitcase, x_j, is restricted to zero or one (for simplicity purposes).
• mathematically the problem can be formulated as:
  maximize
  subject to

this is called a 0-1-knapsack problem, which is known to be a np-complete problem. np stands for non-deterministic polynomial time… and that translates into “very hard & time-consuming problem”.

another np-complete problem is called bin packing, which consists of neatly placing different volumes in as less bins as possible. no time-efficient solution has been discovered for these problems.

so there you go. combine the two and you have packing! :D

(and now, back to the suitcases…)

ps - images from wikipedia, more on the subject here.
ps2 - who was stephen cook?

“Ernesto Guevara: What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.”
from diarios de motocicleta.

if i hadn’t already felt the urge to travel to south america, i would surely get the itch after watching diarios de motocicleta: the story of young che guevara on his south-american continental roadtrip on a bike named la poderosa (”the mighty one”). the film photography is simple and stunning, eye-catching in its rawness.

besides, roadtrips fascinate me, as i am sure they do to many other travelers out there. my only stint at a roadtrip was a 3 or 4 days drive through colorado, utah and wyoming, over a year ago.
it was beautiful and liberating, and we plan to go back to the states and repeat it someday, with a twist: we shall visit an itinerary of odd-named places. it will certainly include highlights like potomac, normal, breakneck, chicken, gringo, frostproof, ding dong and most definitely choconut. no kidding!

above, our detour to visit a place called cisco. :)

we went to qiandao (literally, thousand islands) lake last weekend. it’s a man-made lake near hangzhou, that resulted from the construction of a hydroelectric station: when the water rose, +1000 “islands” were born, hence the name.

the landscape is impressive, if sad.
while the ferry hops between the different islands (curiously themed and mildly touristically explored), one has the feeling of floating between mountain tops, cirurgically cut with level lines.

(more photos, on flickr.)