january was full of mundane, unhurried days — not a bad thing in our book.
we did lots of planning, worked, played, met up with friends and appreciated the peace and quiet of the beginning of the year… and also complained ad nauseam about the lack of heating in portuguese houses. *insert exasperated emoji*
so here’s something we stumbled some months ago which made us happy: regexcrossword.com is a geeky crossword puzzle made of regular expressions.
the idea is cleverly simple: find the character that fits both the patterns on the vertical and horizontal clues. they start with super easy crosswords on a tutorial of sorts, and then advance to more complicated concepts and grid-shapes which are trickier but just as much fun to figure out.
we’ve done all of them now, but if you’re up to a challenge or a way to brush up on those skills, give it a go! :)
walking around tavira on a blue sky day, stumbled on the igreja de são francisco.
other than images and videos, things have been a bit quiet around here. chinese studying took an intensive turn in the past few months, and i feels like there’s only space for one thing at a time in my head. still, life never stops moving forward, and in 2020, i want to make a bigger effort to document our challenges, discoveries, or the things that brought us joy.
high up on that list of things that brought me joy is this recent moment, in which i helped cousin francisco write the first postcard of his life.
he wrote it to his parents, while staying at my parents in porto. he’s in first grade and hasn’t learnt the whole alphabet yet, so every word had to be carefully chosen and practiced before being written down in his curly cursive. he glued the stamp carefully and went to mail it himself… and then a few days later called my parents, super excited to tell them it had arrived! his surprise and happiness were the delight of the whole family. :)
bonus: a few days later he called my parents again, this time extremely upset. he was crying and demanding to know whether isabel was really written with an i, when eduardo and emília were both written with e’s… his dad insisted it was with an i, but he just couldn’t believe it and no one would explain him why! poor child, suffering the joys of learning portuguese! :D
fresh roll, just back from the lab! 
i’ve taken so many photos of trees with the holga, but somehow, i’m still fascinated by them.
not a big fan of the huge shadows of nails and tape (???) that showed up all over this roll though, but haven’t quite figured out that mystery yet. any ideas?