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in china

the 3rd of september.

funny how life changes. 2 years ago this day, i was landing in the netherlands. 1 year ago, precisely, i was stepping out of a plane in denver, usa.

today i’m not landing anywhere, i’m already settled in shanghai, china. but i know there is more, much more to come.

taking part of the 101 things in 1001 days project made me realize that while making my list, i was outlining a future version of me, along with a certain path to get there.
these are the things that define me better, the objectives, the challenges and the dreams. actually writing them down, giving them a deadline and making them public made me more focused in making them happen (and i’m not one to be easily taken away by gtd speeches and methods).

some of the tasks are easy and have been long postponed, some are dreamy, some are eventually going to happen, some require a lot of planning and/or money. oh! and 2 of them have already been taken care of, only 99 left (to be done in 991 days) :)

what about you… do you have a list too?

Categories
foooood in china in the netherlands photography

stroopwaffles!

stroopwaffles

mimo, directamente da holanda, na forma de mini-stroopwaffles. perfeitas para o dia cinzento de hoje. obrigado cláudia, chegaram inteiras! :)

* bonuses: design*sponge guide to online shopping, made by bloggers: part 1 and part 2. filled with link goodness and lots of interesting suggestions for different kinds of gifts (artwork, lightning, ceramics, vintage, hidden gems, etc). worth a check.

Categories
in china

china’s “me” generation

Survey young, urban Chinese today, and you will find them drinking Starbucks, wearing Nikes and blogging obsessively. But you will detect little interest in demanding voting rights, let alone overthrowing the country’s communist rulers. “On their wish list,” says Hong Huang, a publisher of several lifestyle magazines, “a Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy.”

a very accurate portrait of today’s “Me generation” in China, the children of the one-child policy. its power and what it represents for the future of this country, on Time magazine.

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links and ideas

we cannot not change the world.


“We cannot not change the world. Isn’t that odd?

We are used to believing the opposite, that we cannot change the world, being the humble individuals we are. However, we either reinforce or change the way things are around us with every little thing we do. We establish and change the social world we live in every day. We call that social design.

We as people cannot escape acting in relation to other people. Even if we choose to live alone on a deserted island, that is design of our social reality. The social world is created as a result of the dynamics of all our individual actions.
We cannot not be social. We cannot not design. We cannot not change the world.”

from the social design site.

social design site is a place filled with projects that sparkle curiosity and deserve our attention, for one reason or another. they are catalogued as intriguing, web, cultural or art based, related to social philosophies, social experiment, systems for living or modern artifacts. they make us reflect on our surroundings, on the way people connect with each other and with the world.

and now, postcrossing is there too, side by side with names like treehugger, we are what we do, free hugs or miniature earth. and that makes me really proud. :)

Categories
in the netherlands links and ideas

down by the sea

“every year on the small dutch island ‘texel’ there is a poetry competition, the best two poems are carved into truck tyres (by hand) and the poems are then written in letterpress all over the beach during the summer…”

the image and text are from mestudio.info and you can check out the rest of the pictures there. the whole idea is so cool!
the last few days the sky has actually been pretty blue for most of the time, making me dream of nivea, a sunny beach and my tanned skin a bit salty by the end of the day.
probably, the nightmare of any chinese girl. eheh… speaking of seaside…

threadless has teamed with blik to transform a few of their winning designs into wall graphics. they are looking mighty good. i guess that’s the bad side of this life of rented houses – not much creativity ends up on the walls. maybe one day, we can buy a lighthouse in new zealand and use this pirate infested waters print on the bedroom. that would be neat!