Category: in the netherlands

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in the netherlands

jelly good.

dear friends.
after six months here in portugal to wrap things up at the university, i am now, officially, an “engineer”. a pretty clueless one, career-wise, but i’m working on that bit. ideally, i would like to develop my designing skills, as i realize i still have a long way to go to get any good. i like information visualization and interface designing, but i want to explore a lot more before i choose what i really want to focus my attention on.

on a different (but related) subject, and since i’ve told it to my parents and most friends, i can give the rest of the internet the big news too: we’re moving to shanghai, me and p.
yes, shanghai. the biggest city in china, the 8th in the world, the “pearl of the orient”.
after my one year in the netherlands, and p’s 6+9 months in the netherlands and the usa, i think the “exploring bug” really got into us.
it just seems right. the right timing, the right city, the right person to hold my hand on the plane. and besides, if you don’t trust your intuition, what else do you have?

the details of the process of moving there include job hunting, a house, plane tickets and luggage allowance, visas and plenty other details that will keep us busy on the next few weeks. i’ll try to keep you posted. wish us luck! :)

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in the netherlands links and ideas

k ben r

sometimes it happens that one jumps from link to link until you find something that catches your attention. kapitaal, an animation by a dutch trio of designers was one of those, and it just made my day.
two seconds into it, i suddenly recognized my life and routine in the past year, all the typically dutch brands and sounds, the shops, the streets, the typography, the signs on walls, the train stations, every little detail of it, so familiar, so fresh, so close to my heart. i’m sure the idea of the authors wasn’t to strike me with a nostalgy attack and leave me close to tears…
hell, i miss that country.

so, watch it here, either for the animation itself or because you know what i’m talking about.

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in the netherlands

eyes on the walls.

on the follow-up of the previous post:

* i remember reading an(other) interview at lecool about amsterdam based artist laser 3.14 (pi), who writes sentences in containers and other temporary surfaces. i spotted a few phrases when i was there – he’s hard to miss if you get a bit away of the main streets. take a look at his huge gallery.

* which on second thoughts, remembers me of the “wall poems” in leiden.

hipolito, l’écrivain raté from amélie‘s movie should have gone to the netherlands. they would have understood him. :)

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in the netherlands links and ideas

led memories.

explanation: sometimes, wherever i am, i pop the ibook and open a stickie to write something. my stickies are filled with waiting hours, or post-insomniac considerations of places and situations. this is one of those, probably from mid-august, as i was looking back to mid-july.

“schipol is a special airport to me. it marks the first plane landing, the first night on a foreign country, the beggining of a year filled with surprises. but despite the personal attachments, it’s still a messy place, with sound warnings against smoking on forbidden places or biking inside the airport and people from everywhere specially teenage tourists eager to get stoned on the nearest coffeeshop. if you add a big strange meeting point, tiled in red and white squares with some pictures of formula one races (correct me if i’m wrong), lots of shops with tulips and clogs, a large amount of air hostesses dressing in blue, and miles to walk, you’ll get the picture.
a month ago i was sitting by the luggage belt, waiting for my stuff, when i noticed once again the vertical display on one of the staircase wells, with its green and red led’s displaying phrases, as the letters shifted from top to bottom or vice-versa. i’d seen it before, but not long enough to read any of it.

nevertheless, i expected something like “welcome to amsterdam” or “please beware of thieves, don’t let you luggage unguarded” or even a sort of quiz of the “did you know that…?” type.
no. the messages were weird, unrelated but equally disturbing, in a funny sense. i was surprised and for a moment thought of allucinations, or someone having fun messing with the system. one of those thoughts that crosses your mind when tiredness settles in and you think you’re starting to see things. one after another, they made me more and more curious, until i got the moleskine out and started scribbling them fast.

“the mouth is interesting because it’s one of those places where the dry outside moves towards the slippery inside”.

or “sometimes you have no other choice but to watch something gruesome occur yet don’t have the option of closing your eyes, because it happens fast and enters your memory.”

or “the rich knifing victim can flip and feel like the agressor if the thinks about previledge. he can also find the cut symbolic or prophetic”.

:|

leaves you thinking, right?
i didn’t know it yet, but that was exactly the point of artist jenny holzer, who developed some sort of text-art, to be printed or exhibited in public spaces.
more of her impressive work in washington, amsterdam (schipol) or paris.

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in portugal in the netherlands

it’s the little things

joão tordo, em entrevista à lecool desta semana. jornalista, nómada, escritor, descreve com uma eficácia extraordinária o que eu senti ao voltar. não é pedantismo, não é vaidade – mas julgo que é qualquer coisa que só se percebe quando se vive fora dos muros deste país. qualquer coisa que nos muda.
fica um excerto, o resto podem ler aqui.

– Tinhas saudades de Lisboa quando estavas lá?
Tinha saudades de algumas coisas, uma certa tranquilidade, que não se encontra no bulício diário de Londres, Brooklyn ou Manhattan. Mas temia o dia em que tivesse de regressar. Por acaso, foi isso mesmo que aconteceu, tive de regressar porque o meu visto de estudante tinha terminado e era obrigado a deixar os Estados Unidos. O que encontrei em Lisboa deixou-me por um lado contente e por outro apreensivo. Muitas coisas tinham mudado desde que eu partira, e pareceu-me uma cidade mais vibrante, mais internacional, mas muitas coisas eram o mesmo, uma repetição nauseante de tudo o que eu nunca gostei na minha adolescência e idade adulta. Se tinha saudades? Tinha, mas matei-as depressa.

– Quando voltaste, tomaste mais atenção a esta cidade?
Sim. Olho-a de outro ponto de vista, acho eu. Quem sempre viveu aqui não tem distância (não pode ter) e não tem medidas de comparação. Não é o mesmo ir viajar durante duas semanas ou estar noutro lugar durante dois anos. Não é o lugar que importa em si, é a ausência daquele que deixámos, a transformação de um espaço físico em memórias, nas quais as coisas se distorcem e amplificam. Fica-se com uma noção mais romântica dos sítios e, quando se regressa a eles, já não se perde essa magia. Por isso presto mais atenção aos pormenores, a uma esquina em particular, uma janela, uma rapariga a passar na rua.