according to my mandarin teacher, destiny - or mine at least -, fits in a tiny little post-it. and it is easy to predict: my birth date and time, some page flipping on some mysterious book, and there it is, my faith on a piece of paper.

and of course, a big part of chinese people believe in all that, but who can blame them? americans invented the fortune cookie and the world still believes they are chinese, so in the end who’s the folk story believer?

0.50eur for a large flower bouquet. it’s easy to be a nice boyfriend in china.

we live in a 31st floor. on a good day, the elevator takes a full minute to get up here. but that’s when it doesn’t stop every other floor, so in average it takes a lot more than that. and of course, this goes at least twice a day.

it could be quite a waste of time, but then we have a view over shanghai skyline that makes up for all those lost minutes.

photo by her.

it’s 6am. the sun is out and about for one hour and outside it’s already 30°c. down in the park i can see a bunch of old timers doing tai chi or playing badminton. and on the streets, streams of bikes and scooters ride in every direction.

yesterday she said that sometimes it’s still hard to believe we are in china. sometimes it’s not. :)

despite we are both having mandarin classes, none of us dares yet to speak it: even the very basics take a long time to grasp; and, since in general chinese people don’t have any english skills at all, we haven’t been talking much with locals here.

having said that, i would like to announce that yesterday we were able to communicate with one chinese couple we met in the elevator. in dutch.

feels like 40° and it’s only june.

ding-dong, ding-dong. said the intercom for the first time since we moved in.

- hello?

- wai?

- hello?, i repeated.

- do you… speak… mandarin?

- ah, no.

- ah, are you from… ah… pu tao ya^*?

- hum?! erm, yes!

- i am police man. i want to see you.

i press the button to open the door downstairs and i raise an eyebrow while i put down the intercom. a police man? and he wants to see me? at 9.30pm? did i break any serious chinese law without being aware of?

18 floors after, he appears. very skinny and young, in a blue uniform, carrying a shy smile on his face and some papers on his hands. takes off his shoes at the doorstep despite our invitation to come in with them. his eyes always set on the papers.

- are you this?, he asks me pointing my name on the papers regarding the mandatory police registration i filled some days before.

- yes? is there any problem?

- no! no! no problem! i’m in charge of you, he explained.

- oh?

- can i see your passport? oh, and this number no work, pointing to my phone number on his papers.

we offered him a seat and a few quick questions later he jumps back into his shoes and leaves, even shyer than he arrived.

we closed the door and waited a few seconds for someone to come out and say ‘smile, you are in candid camera‘. or anything. but no.

so, now we have someone in charge of us.

* pu tao ya, is chinese for ‘portugal’

“Dá um mergulho no mar
Dá um mergulho sem olhar para trás
Dá um salto no ar
Só para veres do que és capaz

Arrisca mais uma vez
Nem que seja só por arriscar
Nunca se tem muito a perder
Dá um mergulho no mar

Há tantas coisas por fazer
E tantas por inventar
Dá um mergulho no mar

E tu vais ver
Tu vais jogar
Tu vais perder
Tu vais tentar
Mais uma vez
E tu vais ver
E tu vais rir
Tu vais ganhar

Tens pouco tempo para ser só teu
Não esperes nem deixes passar
Essa vontade que quer
Dar um mergulho no mar”

dá um mergulho no mar, xutos & pontapés

for those who don’t keep an eye on my synapse bar on the right side, i’ve been working on this last months on relocating to shanghai. after my abroad experiences in the netherlands and in the united states, the obvious step is… asia: my mom and i don’t exactly agree on this detail though.

holding hands with my special one, we’ll be flying this weekend to the largest chinese city. besides the new jobs, a cryptic language, new foods, new habits, a whole new culture waits for us. that and a city that has almost twice as much population as our home country.

perhaps because the cultural chock will be bigger than ever, this time there wont be an upper bound on the period i’ll be there. more importantly maybe, there is a lower one: 1-2 years. this should not only put things in the right perspective, but also be enough to properly evaluate this step and not make decisions on first impressions.

i’m going there to explore and to learn, to grow.

it’s so easy to classify something as strange. or odd. nothing is wrong with the act itself, but i’ve learned through time, that strange is most of the times, simply different. and that’s not the same. specially, when you are in a different country.

please don’t mistake me: i’m not about to explain the way the world works or anything. actually, the concept is very simple, i believe. but if it’s not obvious for you, bare with me a bit more.

from the couple of long term abroad experiences i had, it has become more clear to me that when one arrives to a different country he immediately goes through the this-is-strange phase. everything out of ordinary is strange. an uncommon habit, strange. an exotic food, strange. a weird bloke, strange. even the laws can be strange. it takes a while for one to realize that strange is frequently a strong and inadequate word. some never don’t.

go to a country with a closed mind, and everything will look strange, awkward if not offending. but if one does some effort to learn the why’s and how’s, the this-is-strange phase will slowly shift over the time to a this-is-different phase. and that’s when you can take the best out of that experience.

don’t mistake what i’m trying to explain with simply getting used to what is initially weird. it’s more than that actually. i believe that most of the times, it’s the tiny little bits of how a society works that explains it. all the unwritten rules, all the nuances that make a country more or less different than all the others, all the things that  the unwary tourist doesn’t know about. it takes time to fully understand a different society or culture and it’s something one can hardly learn only from books. you really have to see it from close and sometimes, live it yourself.

to sum up, there will always be goods, bads and different points of view in each society and it’s up to us to take the best out of that. i believe that by understanding those differences, one has the best opportunity to question himself about some false dogmas and prejudices in himself or around the world and to learn from that. i truly believe that this makes us better persons.

muito se tem dito em relação a este referendo. dito, discutido, gritado, mentido, ignorado, insultado, enfim: polémico quanto baste. nesta altura já todos vimos os vários pontos de vista possíveis - e até alguns impossíveis; alguns numa tentativa de esclarecer, outros tantos apenas baralhar. isto, de ambas as partes.

para mim, este voto é bastante óbvio: sim. sim, porque a mulher tem direito a uma decisão de consciência. sim, porque a mulher não é uma criminosa e deve ter condições quando precisar interromper a sua gravidez. e sim, porque abortos todos sabemos que haverão sempre, mas só uma das respostas pode prevenir mais mortes: e essa, é o sim.

some people use their 15 minutes of fame to change the world in a positive way. the kind that has the nerves to stand up and shout to those who are blind, making the world step forward in a better direction. even if that can be dangerous to their own life. wafa sultan is one of those persons which i can only admire.

others, just use their share of fame to spread their own mind numbness to others.

and you? how will you use your 15 minutes of fame when you’ve the chance?

snapshot of what i’m studying this days:

“Step 5. Routers exchange DBDs listing the LSAs in their LSD by RID and sequence number.
Step 6. Each router compares the DBD received to the contents of its LSDB. It then sends a LSR for missing or oudated LSAs. Each router responds to its neighbor’s LSR with a LSU. Each LSU receives an ACK.“

sigh. could be worse… right?

“I feel like if they could be easily explained in the space of an interview, then there’s no reason for them to be songs, you know? There’s a reason they’re confined by that particular creative space, it’s like they have to be songs, you can’t explain them that way.”

joanna newsom

here is how i try to describe her: get a mix of björk and kate bush voices, the sweetness of a lisa ekdahl and add an harp to the plot. yes, an harp - forget the orchestral and medieval sides of it: joanna newsom puts much more value into it creating a whole new music style with the blend of an harp and her voice.

at first, her voice makes you giggle, and it’s likely to raise an eyebrow. and then, you are simply addicted. at least that’s how it was with me back in 2004, when she released her first album milk-eye mender;and last week i was lucky to see her live, singing & playing songs from the upcoming new album ys, to be released this nov. 14th - it overcome all my expectations.

if you like alternative styles of music, please consider trying some tracks by her.

the other day i found a coffee shop in town that had a sign saying:

‘share the table - european seating’

now: i don’t know any coffee place in portugal where people share the table with strangers. moreover, i don’t think that it happens anywhere in europe for that matter - please let me know otherwise. so, i inquired a local about it and the explanation was a bit surprising; it seems that, for an average american - at least in this part of the country -, if you want something to look stylish or modern, you just have to add the ‘european’ component to it - people will immediately associate it with something that has to be cool. even if it’s just a label in the name.

anyway, seating apart, if you exclude the lousy espressos served sometimes in huge tea mugs with soup spoons, there is something i have to love on american coffee places: free wireless internet. i find it so useful, and luckly, there are a few of those in town where “working from home” has a new meaning. specially, with european seating.

this past week snowed two times. more than enough to bring up my kid smile.

i know i’ll miss this.

from all forms of keeping someone busy, a computer is probably one of the most successful ones. put together a internet connection and you can keep pretty much anyone who knows how to use a computer, entertained for a very, very long time; games, music, news, information about, well, anything basically, are just some of the possibilities.

having said that, i’ll add just another one to the list: email. why? well, because i’m addicted to it. now, one could say - but you created postcrossing, you can’t be addicted to email - not email! well, i am.

it’s nothing new really, but it got a lot more obvious to me today when i bumped into an article about email addiction. and… ok, it’s not like i’m worried about it or anything - i do believe email can be both a really neat work tool and also source of fun. oh, and no, i’m not in denial. or at least that’s what i think :)

so i thought of sharing some facts about my email to better picture my, cof, addiction, cof, and putted together some numbers about it. if i exclude my work email, my messages are distributed between 3 different accounts. between those, i sort my email into a total of 253 different folders. i rarely delete any email i receive - unless is spam of course -, so the consequence, is about 44k emails - 4 years worth of email to be precise.

do people write me a lot? well, not that much - it’s mostly mailing-lists i subscribe. if i get to read all those? well no, of course not - some mailing-lists i just skim through the messages subjects and that’s it. but, still, i did send all the 7000 emails archived on my sent folders so i’m bit prolific on that subject too i suppose.

but, maybe more important than the numbers, is actually the considerable amount of time i spend with it - thus the self-classification as addicted. i do spend a reasonable amount of my time every day reading, sorting or replying emails, when not just checking for the sake of it. and if i happen not to have access to it for a few days, i tend to get nervous and worried - some will say that’s normal, some will find it ridiculous.

either way, for all those that have put up with me and my email rant, here’s a useful link - a repository of all those emails that are forwarded ad infinitum from mailbox to mailbox: some funny, some interesting, some useful, some neither imho. but maybe it’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for to finally ignore that boring ex-coworker and still be on top of the latest and greatest forward-to-all-address-book-once-again email messages.

colorado is one of those places on earth where you can’t say, for instance, “it’s a sunny day“. you can’t, not the day part. because on a single day, it may rain, hail and even a flooding may ocorre. and still, it might be hot and sunny by the time you have to go out.

“if you don’t like the weather here, stick around, it will change” they say, and it couldn’t be more true. colorado is where being a weather man is about knowing a bit of black magic and where making plans for outdoor activities is a bit tricky.

nonetheless, i’m getting used to it; the everage summer day here is sunny and warm*, with temperatures rising up fast very early in the morning and followed with an ocasional thunderstorm by tea time which doesn’t stop having warm, but always dry, nights.

* meaning: hail, intense rain and floods can occur any time, in a just matter of minutes. really.

from all aspects i could stand out from my trip to san francisco, clearly the most relevant one was visiting chinatown. not the tall buildings with all the concrete and the mirrored windows. not the bay and it’s infamous golden gate bridge. not pier 39 with alcatraz closeby. not even the very sloppy streets that gives the city it’s strong character along with the victorian houses. nop, it was chinatown.

right in the middle of a crowded city a completely different one; like if the crosswalk had a teleportation property, and suddently, everything is different. different people, different stores with different articles, different restaurants, different culture, different music, even the smell was different. different.

- did you grep the cvs diff patch for the 7200 and the 3745’s sev4?

- yes, and for 1700’s too. now, the dns and tftp csc’s about ttl on vrf will make this pi ready for rpc and rcp/rsh pdu’s on all uut’s.

this is how (my) technical team meetings sounds like: as if someone was trying to start world war three by launching hundreds of acronyms over the table.

and poor of the guy who decides - god forbid - to expand one single acronym: he will have a whole room of raised eyebrows. like if he was speaking in some cryptic and incomprehensible language.

dois portugueses a viverem numa cidade americana de 100.000 habitantes durante 4 meses, sem nunca conseguir avistar qualquer outra alma lusitana; e o que vão encontrar depois de chegar ao aeroporto de são josé (california), logo no primeiro semáforo? um açoreano, de camisa cabas ao volante de um mustang amarelo e com vários símbolos do sporting pendurados no espelho retrovisor. é bem, é bem; e eu nem sequer sou do sporting.

mas ainda assim, há que admitir: tem muito mais charme ser 50% da população portuguesa de uma cidade.

a couple of days ago, during an airport check-in, i found out that yahoo travel had been kind enough to sell me two (e-)tickets for the price of one; that would be really cool, if they weren’t both for that same exact flight. anyway, it wasn’t a too serious mistake, until my flight companion (we booked together) found out that yahoo didn’t got any ticket under his name at all. he was not very fond of that.

and me neither, when the same exact thing happen to me on the return trip. hurray to e-tickets.

ps: san francisco was great though: more on that soon :)

mas que tinha eu na cabeça quando me lembrei de ir a um museu de arte contemporânea nos estados unidos? e ainda por cima, no colorado.

three months later and the line between strangeness and difference is finally thick. dryness and high altitude quickly turned to be trivial details and, instead, trying to understand the other sides of things became the real deal, as expected. with 6 months more to go here, life is finally going under my own pace, rather than dominated by the constrains of a just arrived foreign with no luggage or a place to call home to. after some initial hurdles, new goals are set, and i’m making my way to them.
having said that, i hope to continue posting on a regular basis again from now on. here are some bits and pieces to catch up.

• boulder has revealed itself as a cozy, beautiful, living city; in general, people are nice and friendly, and with a relaxed attitude. it’s completely away from the concrete madness, and makes the best out of it: it’s calm, full of green spaces and places to ride a bike or just for a stroll. people here keep repeating to me that boulder is not a good sample for the country, on a good way that is - i start to believe that.

• work has reached a new phase now: time to take a full breath and take the best out of the few months i’ve ahead; more than the present, my future depends a lot on how good i use my time here. must use my head on this one and not let the boat float it’s own way down the river.

• the postcrossing project has celebrated its first anniversary a few days ago. yep, 365 days of postcard sending and smile firestarter around the globe. but 365 is just one of numbers on this equation:
  • 2 times the bbc network mentioned the project;
  • 3 different servers;
  • 49 users believe their gender is ‘other’ than male or female;
  • 106 postcards were sent to me congratulating for the project anniversary;
  • 125 countries joined the project;
  • 2968 replied emails to users questions;
  • 10500 scanned postcards and displayed at the flickr gallery.
  • 11764 users are participating in the project;
  • 135000 posts in the forum;
  • 163073 postcards were successfully received;
  • 965121098 kms were travelled by postcards;

  needless to say that i’m still amazed how big this grew. how many times did i say this anyway? well, that’s just another number.