This was meant to be a post to talk about my whereabouts lately and to say that I’m still alive. Well, kinda of. There isn’t much to talk about, really - just that I’m plain tired. Tired of the bunch of exams I’m supposed to do in a row, most of them leaving behind a feeling of not had learned much from it. But that’s more than enough about exams for this post.

My to-do list seems impossible to control at the moment so priorities have taken place. On the top, is to go home whenever I get a real break. It’s been more than a month I’m at Braga and I’m missing my parents and their eternal set of questions.
There’s an internship search I should be looking into and that I’m permanently postponing, a postcard project that I keep toying on my head, a few changes to this page that I want to implement and letters to write. There’s also a lot of sleeping to do - although useful now, I’m a bit apprehensive about my sleeping average time lately. This can’t be very healthy.
For the next month, there are plans for shooting my first photo session and a visit from Teo, the crazy caffeine-moved romanian girl I’ve met in the Netherlands.
More posting should take place soon, meanwhile, if you know anything about instant human cloning, time travelling or time stretching, please let me know.

I think what takes people to watch so voraciously all kinds of reality-shows is not just pure human curiosity. Either that, or let’s hope the saying above isn’t right. Everytime I hear about a new reality-show, I loose a bit more hope in mankind, but, like all problems, it’s a matter of proportion and perspective. So far, Portugal had it’s own instances of a big chunk of the bad reality-shows that came mostly from north-american TV stations. From big brother to survivor, everybody had the chance to taste several flavours of bad TV.

But when one (naïve, like me) thinks it can’t get any worse, someone comes up with a even more despicable idea for a reality show. Worse, audiences love it. On Fox TV, there are two examples (that I’m aware) of this freaky tv shows that gives me the creep. The first is the The swan, where a handful of women with low self-esteem mutate to… be prettier. For that, they submit themselves to all kind of things, from therapy to several plastic surgeries, on the attempt to carve on them someone’s beauty standard - of course this is done for their good, not for the public amusement.
Another even more creepy example, also on Fox TV (screened just a few days ago), is called Who’s your daddy? where a daughter given up for adoption as an infant attempts to guess the identity of her birth father among eight men presented to her, all claiming to be her father. If she points the right guy, then she goes home with 100K dollars. Oh, and with the birth father as well, I guess. And what if she fails? Then the money goes to the wrong option guy. Neat, uh? :-|
But hey, let’s be fair - it’s not always for the money. This last despicable example, was on ABC network on the 20/20 show, where five couples competed to win… a baby. Yes, they were trying to adopt a baby of a 16-year-old woman. How twisted can it get?

My son, if you watch this things and you don’t have anything better to do, I can strongly recommend you to read 1984 where you can learn where the ‘big brother’ concept came from, or to get a copy of this to have a peek on other people’s live while teasing your imagination, instead of being a couch mushroom.

PS: please, forgive the sarcasm on this post

It was August and all Europe was going through an extremely hot summer. Even so, from above, the country looked like it had a recent flooding - there was water all over it! The canals, the famous dutch canals, were everywhere, not allowing anyone to forget that a big part of the country was bellow sea level. Airport included. It’s name, Schiphol, meant ship hell (or ship hole) because 400 years ago, there was a bloody ship battle fought in the water above the airport region. And that’s where lil’P landed. In the airport, not the water.

Bikes, bikes, and… more bikes. Believe me, there isn’t enough bikes on this paragraph to describe how many bikes that bike country had on the bike paths, on bike parking lots and on bike shops. Specially on the bottom of the cities main canals.
Lil’P first contacts with the dutch bikes was not a very pacific thing. On the very first walks around, he quickly learned to pay more attention to his back while wondering on the streets: there were killer bikes on the loose, and any absent minded foreigner could easily turn into an hit-and-cycle victim. And the bikes were nothing like his old green bicycle that had two tiny wheels, being the front one, a even smaller wheel; the typical dutch bike was designed for the tallest people on the world, the dutch.
Everyone rode a bike. Everyone. Kids going to school, old ladies going shopping, mothers taken their children to the kindergarten, even the executive guy with suite and tie would ride a bike to go to work. How women drove their bikes with mini-skirts was a mistery to lil’P.
As it was the dominant mode of transportation, there were bike paths everywhere, and of course, bikes had their own stoplight signs where always growing swarms of bikers waited patently for the green. There was no way lil’P would wonder around on that country without a bike, so, he went shopping for one.

Technically, it was a female bike since it had no frame, but cycling it, was like driving a very thin harley due to it’s high steering fork. Didn’t had a bell, but had some nifty misterious breaks and gears hidden inside the axis that worked flawlessly. Fifty euros, the guy said. It seemed like a good price so lil’P took it. Driving the first ride home, was an adventure - after the first 100 meters, every pedal started to produce a loud crank noise that called everyone’s attention and every stop to fix it, only made it sound louder. Eventually, lil’P got home and after a few adjustments, that never annoyed him again. On the other hand, he found out that a bell was a very useful thing to have but he learned with the dutch that if yelled loud enough dling! dling! dling! it would have nearly the same effect and that way, he could avoid some crashes.

Lil’P was told that he should spend at least the same amount of money on locks as he would spend on the bike. And the reason was obvious around the city: right after the drug smuggling, there was the bike contraband. Anyone walking around the city center without a bike would quickly be approached by weird blokes wispering fiets koop, eh?. Sometimes, trying to sell the bikes they were riding, but usually, they just asked five minutes to get it.
One effective technique to prevent this, was to paint the bike in such horrible colors and patterns that no one would ever buy such a thing. Pretty effective, it seemed. Still, the locks were necessary. At least two of them. One for the main frame and another for the front wheel, to make sure the bike would still be complete when it was necessary.

(to be continued)