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weeknotes 42/24

i confess i had no idea one could see so many famous works of art in madrid. the museums really are world class, with the kind of paintings everyone has seen on books at some point. picasso, dali, goya, caravaggio… it’s enough to give you stendhal syndrome :|

so our strategy has been to savor these in small bites after work, and not try to get to everything. we’ve seen bits of the reina sofia museum, the gallery of royal collections and the natural sciences museum, which is always a highlight. so many taxidermied birds and insects! :D and dinosaur bones!

we’ve also managed to rent some bikes and ride around the retiro park, to give the boy a rest from all the walking. he has been increasing his training to prepare for his next race and now has a case of shin splints… :/

foooood in spain

weeknotes, 41/24

madriiiiid! we’re visiting the spanish capital for a few days, and i love that we managed to get here without taking a flight… although it did take the whole day between buses and trains. but we made it!

we’re doing a home swap and staying in a small apartment in the vallecas neighborhood, which feels very “multikulti” and reminds us a lot of our old neighborhood in berlin. it’s missing tempelhof, but it has a hill from which you can see the whole city!

so far, we’ve wandered the city’s avenues to try to get a feeling for it, and also visited the retiro park, which feels huge.

and of course, we’ve been using any opportunity we get to fill our bellies with churros and chocolate! :D

next week: museums and culture!

weeknotes

weeknotes, 40/24

world postcard day week! the day passed without much of a hitch, just a lot of adrenaline, lots of chocolate cookies and many things to check on. i filmed my first reel on instagram, just a little video of of my bike ride to post postcards on all the old postboxes in town. it was quite a warm day, so not my brightest idea, but i survived!

and after all the excitement of the big day, we took off to sagres, for four days at the yearly birdwatching festival — something we look forward to all year. this year, we tried to enjoy other activities and workshops on topics we weren’t so familiar with. so we tried sea kayaking, field sketching, painting with pastels, identifying insects and moths, ringing birds and making maritime knots.

these were very full days, but also, a very much needed break, with amazing food, in a town that has become one of our favorite places in the country. on the last day, we had a walk with simon (a guide we met last year already) and saw lots of nice birds — including some wheatears, skylarks, red-billed choughs and some rareish eurasian dotterels, passing through on their way from siberia to africa. it was a beautiful way to wrap up the festival, and to decompress from a few (very long) months of work.

weeknotes

weeknotes, 39/24

a busy work week ahead of world postcard day, with a lot of things to get done… but also a lot of brain fog lately. :( it’s been hard to focus and push through.

last weekend, i listed a flower vase we didn’t like and a pair of shoes i had not used in years on a second hand website, and i sold them both this week! it felt great to declutter a tiny bit and get rid of stuff — it’s kind of an addictive feeling!

i started watching “crash landing on you”, a korean series that friends recommended. i finished reading the second volume of the thursday murder club series, which i still enjoy quite a bit. i also finished listening to “die with zero“, a book about how we should aim to die with as little money as possible (within reason), as to maximize our enjoyment of life. it’s an interesting premise, and one that i subscribe to in principle… but as usual with the genre, the book was needlessly long.

we’ve been eating all the food that my mom left on the freezer, taking out the tomato vines outside, using the swimming pool’s water to water stuff… we’re wrapping up the summer and getting ready for autumn adventures, which will start next week!

weeknotes

weeknotes, 38/24

a week of quietness, all to ourselves. i love having people around all summer, but i also love these buffer weeks — weeks of recharging and doing things at a slower, less intense pace, focusing on ourselves. weeks to read books and sit down to enjoy the mail that has been arriving.

the chinese classes started again this week. the group is a bunch of 20-something year old girls and me, plus the teacher who seems very nice. we’re repeating the same hsk5 book, but since i started already midway through the second semester last year, i still have a lot of stuff to catch up to. hope i can do the exam sometime next year… we’ll see. i hope we don’t reach the end of the year with just me in the class, like last year 😅

i convinced the boy to participate in the “corrida entre pontes” (a 10k race that crosses 2 bridges in tavira) and despite some grumbling about not being in shape, he did it! and of course he did brilliantly, at a speedy 4:12/km pace. afterwards we went for pizza + dessert, and admired these huge, magnificent trees in our neighborhood:

i’m planning to ask the association that owns that house if they’d be cool with me putting a little free library in their front garden. 😍