five years later, i’m still amazed with what postcrossing has become.

cast: postcrossers.
video by her.
music by mew.

when you think you’ve seen all postal goodness, you get this in the mail.

it’s one of world’s smallest letters, with a happy birthday postcrossing message from a member. it made my day.

i’m not hot in geography myself, and i get why slovenia gets mistaken with slovakia, similar name and all.

but with estonia? that’s over 1500km apart – it’s like confusing germany with greece, or netherlands and ukraine.

time never seems to be in the right amount to update this blog. still, she is doing a great job documenting our snowy days here in ljubljana.

a snowy day in ljubljana from ana campos on Vimeo.

there’s more at meiadeleite.com.

today i took my old canon for a walk. it’s been over 3 years since the last click.

i’m happy that it still works. i missed it.

today i woke up to this view.

“For the first time in history, across much of the world, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition. It is no more distinctive than being tall, fat or left-handed. Nobody raises an eyebrow at a Frenchman in Berlin, a Zimbabwean in London, a Russian in Paris, a Chinese in New York.

The desire of so many people, given the chance, to live in countries other than their own makes nonsense of a long-established consensus in politics and philosophy that the human animal is best off at home.

[…]

And yes, no doubt many people do feel most at ease with a home and a homeland. But what about the others, who find home oppressive and foreignness liberating? Theirs is a choice that gets both easier and more difficult to exercise with every passing year. Easier, because the globalisation of industry and education tramples national borders. More difficult, because there are ever fewer places left in this globalised world where you can go and feel utterly foreign when you get there. […]To get a strong sense of what it means to be foreign, you have to go to Africa, or the Middle East, or parts of Asia.[…]

[…]foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”.

[…]

Nowadays, you might rather say that the more you know of other countries, the more inclusive of all humanity your values will become. You educate yourself, beginning with anthropology.

Every foreigner of inquiring mind becomes a part-time anthropologist, wondering and smiling at the new social rituals of his adoptive country.[…]

[…]His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time.

[…]

But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.”

and freedom i choose. text by the economist.

christmas seems to mean different things for more and more people these days. nonetheless, whichever it’s the right meaning for you, have a merry merry christmas!

being back to portugal after 2 years of shanghai is sometimes, a bit like being on drugs. a sample:

– look, look! the sky, is so blue!
– wow! it’s really… blue!
– and so many different shades…
– and it’s like, a different kind of blue!

i missed portugal during summer time.

if you need to see to believe, here’s how shanghai looks from our 31^st floor:

and they do this for hours…