Tag: groningen

Categories
in the netherlands

2 – and we’re back.

back in groningen, for at least another month.
feels great to be here again, finally. we arrived yesterday after a painful check-in at porto’s airport (including me unpacking ALL the contents of my overfiled backpack and not being able to put everything back in again), hours waiting at stansted airport (where we had tupperware dinner party, with our mom’s food and we watched an old lady going berserk), and hours on the train etc. but we were quite anxious to see everybody again, and it all payed off when we found the crew chatting on the second’s floor corridor. some things never change, indeed.
the temperature has dropped to a couple of negatives degrees now, but no snow on sight, just ice spread a little bit everywhere.
levi has started to wear his termotebes (really shielding portuguese (?) undershirts, from when we were kids) and i’ve settled for odlo warm shirts.

levi also went to his stomach doctor, which forbid him to drink alcohol and coffe and smoke. the poor boy is taking his revenge in chocolate (old picture to illustrate what i mean)… :)

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in the netherlands just life

part 1/813 – catching up.

2005.
it’s no time for looking back anymore, because 2006 is already here, but this year that went by was one of the best so far. blues and electronic concerts (and concert photography), working, quitting the job, a photo exhibit (twice!), moving to another country, the radio, all the people i now know (the ones i met this year and the ones that stayed close to the heart)…

as for 2006… we’ll see.
i was presented with the much wanted possibility of staying in the netherlands for another semester and doing a master thesis in groningen (which will give me the equivalent to an internship and not a master thesis, but i shall not begin to whine about the bologna treaty and how the portuguese are still not complying to it… another post, perhaps). problem is, i don’t want my parents to pay for it and i have no money myself (as a good student i am…)
so i guess i have a bit of a problem, hein? well, we’ll see how it goes. i guess i’ll find a way to sort it out somehow. (if you have any brilliant plans or proposals, ship them my way, s’il vous plaît! i’m quite available for html & design stuff or any other colaborations.)

but enough of that. as for life, i’ve been enjoying my time in portugal very much, being spoiled by all family members in every possible ways. i’ve spent the past week and a half roaming around celorico de basto, and porto, and now i’m in braga for a few days… finally i have some internet :)

had a couple of css and web standards related books for xmas presents, along with a japanese doll, a 512mb memory card, postcards, a dinner by the douro, one of ana ventura’s bookmarkers, a van gogh museum moleskine… speaking of which, i guess the whole 2-day trip to amsterdam prior to my arrival can itself be considered a huge xmas present.
i roamed around the city and got lost over and over again, until my feet refused to move and my head went strange from the lack of sleep. i absolutely loved it, despite all the tourists like me and all the others that were there just for the coffeeshops and red light streets.
amsterdam is gorgeous, cosmopolitan, urban without losing the sight of bricks and canals. and i must go back there for some more, some other time. 
specially now that i’ve noticed that my minolta tricked me and decided to ruin about 40% of the pictures i took there… something with the shutter i think, but it needs further investigation. now i’m just afraid to develop the rest of the films i shot when i was in gronigen. great.
(to be continued…)

Categories
in the netherlands photography

introduction

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.

Categories
in the netherlands photography

(un)plan

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…

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Categories
in the netherlands

vogelgriep

thanks to rtp taped emissions, we see the evening news from yesterday on our lunch break. feels a little bit more like home when we ear the sound of the beginning, and feels good to actually know more than publico’s front page news.

for instance, the parliament is still pretty empty. i can’t understand this. if that’s the deputee’s job, how dare they not show up? i mean, here we are, cycling half an hour in wind and rain to have a 2 hour class… what are they doing? why can’t they focus on it only?
and the bird flu? market people forbidden to sell live chicken, ducks, etc and the panic of those who have done nothing else all their life. or the dozen dead ducks who showed up dead in a beach in the center of the country and the general media histeria around it…

[ oh! as is wrote this (and was starting to change subject to other ways of knowledge), there was a short sketch on work over the internet and i saw ana, rosa and hilda there :) how nice! ]

anyway, as i was saying, we have been learning a lot more about other countries, which is turning this erasmus experience into something rewarding beyond words. ramadan, for instance, is now a word with a meaning. it means “holy” month, a month without eating or drinking during daylight (at all), a month for the introspection and meditation.
being here makes us search for the countries in the map and attach the stories to the places. romania, syria, vietnam, turkey… and even germany, italy or belgium. what did i know of these places before coming here? and what do i know now?

reading, researching, living in those places for a while, talking, listening, moving, starting it all over again. i think i have a plan. :)