dear readers,
if you ever get drunk with amaretto and beers by a crazy trio of girls, run away as fast as you can as soon as they grab a pair of scissors.
(you don’t know it yet, but you might end up with something hair-tattoed on the back of your head. no kidding*.)
having said so: merry xmas everyone!
ana
* just look at levi’s face as he realizes his fate in the shape of a xmas tree :)
hallo!
time flies and here we are, three months and something into it, drowning in work and dreaming of more countries, even further away, if possible.
we want to visit them all, to stay long enough, to meet many people…
there were some days of snow, some weeks ago, but then unfortunately, the weather got warmer again. bummer! i really like the feeling of waking up and there was snow falling outside… so nice!
d. is around for a couple of weeks – it’s always a pleasure to have friends, to show them the places we have discovered so far – even if we don’t have much time left for it. she came really on the perfect timing because she is studying to be a nurse and i’ve just made a pretty bad cut on one of my fingers, while cutting a piece of cheese. the cheese was so hard i had to put extra strenght on it and when it slipped it cut a bit of my nail and finger… ouch. it still hurts.
yesterday h. brought me a parcel there was on the mail for me… with lots of good stuff from friends (including 512mb of ram for my ibook, snowflakes sweets, an ilford film, a newspaper (it ain’t saturday without a newspaper…) and pictures and a postcard)… like a kid on xmas eve, i felt overwhelmed by so much goodness! i love love love you guys! my computer is now super fast and i can stop complaining about photoshop… thank you so much. and now, off to work again.
ps – postcrossing has now got a forum. check it out, if you’re into postcards and of course, postcrossing.
erasmus is a whole full-time job, i discovered. the shorter periods have proved to be much more intense and deadlines come really quick. which is good, in a way – two months and a half have past and i’ve already done 2 subjects. 4 to go now. the drawback is, of course, the little time one has left for the rest of the things. still, paulo & i, we’ve managed to set up the “tips” exhibit again, this time on the IWI (informatica and wiskunde = informatics and maths) canteen, here in groningen, on the zernike complex. if you don’t know it yet, you can come and see :)
also, me, levi, paulo and a couple of friends went to utrecht last weekend, because p. had been studying there and kind of missed the place. utrecht seems nice. we saw sinterklaas arriving from spain and giving cookies to kids, ate stroopwaffles and roamed around for the afternoon. i loved the gracht’s (the canals ?) with their sidewalks and hidden places under the streets – much unlike grrroningen ones.
i noticed people kind of look down on groningen and the northern part of the netherlands, “we’re” somewhat seen as “the farmers”. it’s true, the city surroundings are much more quiet and rural than in other bigger cities, i guess, but still, perfect for getting away of the city without having to go through the (ugly) suburban rush. i’m loving this city even more as i discover others. it’s just… different.
ps – can’t find the key to my bike/place, and i must have lost it yesterday during class. life here doesn’t make sense without a bike.
encontramo-nos no parque de estacionamento, de manhã, e esperamos uma pela outra, num acordo implícito e silencioso de companhia até à universidade, porque a meia hora de bicicleta faz-se mais rápido se houver alguém ao nosso lado…
ela desliga o leitor de mp3 para me dar atenção e continua a cantarolar “I’m so in love with yooooou, i’ll be forever bluuuuue”… e instintivamente continuei a música uns 50 metros, quando reparei que, efectivamente, tinha ao meu lado uma italiana a cantar música de um grupo português, em território holandês!
pronto, com o orgulho patriótico um bocadinho maior (que julgo que só se nota durante as competições desportivas e quando emigramos), ambas concordamos que o david fonseca é giro e prosseguimos viagem. :)
tenho pena de não ter ouvido ainda nada do cd novo dele, mas aqui neste recanto sem tv é mais complicado…
yesterday, in the afternoon, we went to see the world press photo exhibition in the martinikerk, which was great, as one would expect, and it did quite well its job of putting questions on people’s minds.
there’s always something standing out of the crowd which is different from person to person, and the set which caught my attention was this one by david burnett. i was fascinated by the depth of field of the images, at that distance. humans look like little toys… in theory i think i know one way to do it, but in practice, it’s much more difficult…
so we had coffee in the terrace of the v&d building and came home to cook the most international unplanned dinner so far. oh, and in the meantime, we invited people to write some phrases in our wall, like the numbers, hello, thank you, i love you, and so on, on their own language. :) you can imagine how much we laughed trying to pronouce it on russian, vietnamese or arabian and vice-versa…
