Some time ago, for some odd reason, I decided to reach my building rooftop. People are not supposed to go there so the passage is closed, but I didn’t see anything wrong about that (other than my own safety) so I’ve kept my intentions. At some point, it became a personal challenge and I was ready to learn lock picking, elevator mechanisms and whatever it was necessary to reach it. But, it turned out that there is a fairly easy way to reach it after all. So much the better for me.
Once up there, there are only two things to see: the building chimneys and the view around. Usually, I like to put them together. That is, to sit on top of a chimney and watch the view, if possible, at night with an hot drink between my hands. The seven floors might not be as impressive as the petronas towers, but it has a nice view over my university campus, and a big part of the city. At night, all those nearly-almost-there fading lights mix up with the moving ones from the cars forming a live city map. It’s quiet up there, so once in a while I go there to relax, to think, or just because I don’t have anything better to do.

The queues for surgeries in the Portuguese social health care services are known for being long. What I wasn’t aware of, was that this doesn’t apply only to surgeries.

Around June last year, my father asked for a psychiatrist consultation in his local hospital and was putted on hold. Unfortunately, in August he had a stroke and now he is part of what he was before. After several consultations on private doctors he managed to recover quite well, but never 100%. He was lucky though, it could had been much worse and we know that.
Why am I writing about this now? Because today he told me that on last January, he got a letter from the hospital, scheduling the requested consultation, for next April. He had already forgotten of it. Would a on time consultation change anything for him? I really can’t tell. Still, 9 months to get a psychiatry consultation that lasts a few moments is ridiculous. At least to me.
I’m tired of living on a country where this things are so common they are considered normal by some. Where some people still have to get up at 5am to try to be received by a doctor that has too many patients to attend to properly. Where some people got to the point of nicknaming their local hospital as the ‘butcher’. And mock about it. Where some people have too much suffering that could be avoided if there was a proper social health care service. Where the guys who are supposed to fix this are fighting and pouting about their sexual orientation while running to get to be prime-ministers.

Note to self: I can’t compensate 4 hours of sleep and an exam with 5 coffees.

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)

Did you got mad at your hair or what?! Not really. But that was the barber reaction, when I asked to shave my hair off. I wonder what he would say if he saw me a few hours before, when I had a huge beard covering the rest. You sure? I was.
After a few months letting my beard grow, I decided that this time of the year would be the best time to shave it. And why stick with the beard? The hair went off as well and now my head looks like a ball. :)
And what’s the people reaction? Oh well, it varies. From Oh my god! and a grin, to uncontrollable laugh… What seems to be common is the question: don’t you have cold? sure I do – now I look scarfs in a completely different way while I’m reinventing the headscarf concept. :D

Eighteen. Eighteen years is the amount of time I watched teachers pouring concepts into black or white boards. Along the way, I had the chance to meet a wide range of this specimens and even had close contact with some of them. The boring breed usually is the most easily forgotten, unless they were excruciatingly boring which gives them the power to teleport themselves into our summer nightmares. On the other hand, there is another variety of teachers that is extremely interesting to listen to: either because they really like the subject they are teaching about or because they are complete lunatics and like to speak about the more exquisite things one can think about. Nonetheless, they all have a very important effect on what we are and the least one can expect from them, is to give their best to teach.

Today I had my last university classes. Although there is no one around to celebrate it with, this is a very important day to me, as well was the week. Last wednesday I was the speaker on a meeting between my classmates and the set of teachers that is responsible for making everything work as it should during our 5 year graduation. Why me? Well, I’m not even a good speaker but someone had to do it, I was too tired of complaints and no action. Among several problems that we pinpointed, the hot topic was some of the lousy teachers that we had during the way. From a teacher that falls asleep during classes, presentations and even exams, to one that doesn’t even know very well what he is teaching about on classes, we said everything we thought about them. Will it have any real effect? Dunno, I hope so. But I sure needed to do this before saying goodbye – pedagogical quality is a feature that should be present on a teacher and that is not arguable for me.

So what doest the future hold for me now? Well, a project, a couple of assignments and 6 exams will keep be busy for the next 2 months. A six month internship is also required for me to graduate and plans are cooking for that. A master is not on my plans for the moment, but who knows? Life is long.

Her name was Katia. She was Italian and her portuguese was almost as bad as her english. When sometimes they ran out of reasonable ways to explain something, that was when strange analogies would come into play. That would either get the message through or make them laugh. Nonetheless, they managed to understand each other. One of lil’P first mistakes, was to tell her that is was very likely to keep raining for the next months. She wasn’t expecting that and it took the smile out of her face. But that was nothing, compared with her astonishment about the pastas served in the few italian restaurants she had found: ma che c’è? cosa è questo?. She wasn’t happy about that at all.
Lil’P was Katia’s erasmus mentor. He applied for being a mentor as soon as he first heard about it. He needed to have a close look on how was to be an erasmus student. To be on your own, away from the home country facing the daily problems, the joys, the spirit, the sacrifices. On his mind, someone on this condition ought to be crying for help. He couldn’t be more mistaken. Learning to face the problems alone was part of the erasmus package and it wasn’t a sacrifice at all – it was one of the main goals. Another good thing about being a mentor, was that he had the chance to get the answers to all sort of questions about the too far away countries that he couldn’t find anywhere else. It was more clear what different people really meant and that, was just too appealing to be ignored. Lil’P new dream was starting to form on his mind.
So one night, after an yoga class, he and C. sat down and chatted for two hours about her 9 month experience (no, she haven’t been pregnant, she had been an erasmus student). By the end, lil’P smile couldn’t be any bigger. He decided that night. He was going for it.
Plans started to go bigger and bigger. Picking the destiny was like picking an ice cream out of a menu of a brand you don’t know very well. Despite all of them being sweet, you still try to pick the one you think you’ll like the best, but you always end up with a big set of them anyway.
Lil’P needed a 2^nd opinion about the ice creams so he started to contact students from his university that were or had been studying abroad and poke the good and the bads about it. Eventually he started to trim down his ice cream list and it was time for lil’P to take the hardest step: to tell his parents about his intentions. At first, his parents didn’t knew anything about it. Despite all the hurdles he had to face on his own, it was hard for him to tell them about his decision to go to a too far away country. Sure, it wasn’t really too far away. Sure, it was only for 6 months. And sure, it was very important to him. But it was way too expensive for them.
So, what was the solution? A trade-off. Lil’P sold some his stuff like his scooter, the one that eventually replaced his green bicycle and was parked most of the time anyway. He also pruned his ice cream list and he finally decided which was the most yummy one. A place where everybody would be at least 25cm taller than him, and whose main language he didn’t knew a word of. It was perfect.
The green light from lil’P parents arrived only after he received the results of his application, but that didn’t stop him in the meanwhile. Besides all the fuss with the academic and bureaucratic details there were like a million things to take care of being one of them to buy plane tickets. It would be lil’P first plane ride.
In the last night, he almost didn’t sleep. His mind was wired to a different voltage already and all he could think were the next 6 months. From the inside, a plane didn’t looked that much. Just like a big BUS with wings attached to it, he thought. The take off was very early in the morning and when the pilot delayed it, even until then, lil’P was afraid his dream wouldn’t come true. The pilot claimed it was foggy in the destination – for lil’P, that could very well be part of some secret plan to finally call everything off and forbid him to reach too far away countries.
A couple of hours later he said on the speakers they were allowed to take off. The big BUS finally started to move to the runway. The moment the engines got full trust that’s when lil’P understood that that was no big BUS after all and that there was no going back. He was flying to his dream. Next stop: Utrecht, The Netherlands.

(to be continued)

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not so far away, there was this little kid with dark eyes and pink cheeks called lil’P. Lil’P lived with his parents in a small village where everybody was grown up, so most of his time was spent playing alone with his lego sets and making complex plans to build huts from old sheets, blankets and wood sticks. By then, his dream was to have a swing in his backyard.
Lil’P was told that the world was a big big place with lots of other countries with different people. When he asked how one goes to those countries, he got told that they were too far away. Dazzled with such answer, lil’P made extensive mental calculations about how long would he had to travel to reach too far away. Traveling, in lil’P case, was measured in riding time in the fastest transportation device he owned, his green bicycle. Soon he came to the understanding that those other countries ought to be really too far away ‘coz he got pretty convinced that if he tried to cycle there, there wasn’t even the smallest chance of being back on time for supper.
His parents weren’t much of travelers, not even on their own country. So lil’P grew up under the shadow of the too far away countries curse. He got older, got into school and got to understand better a few things by then. He learned that, for instance, where the too far away countries were, what the grown ups meant with different people, and that Santa Claus didn’t exist.
He soon realized that computers were his life. Anything that he came across related to those mysterious boxes received extra attention from him, it was vital information that he absorbed instantly. Having a computer was his new dream – he never got the swing.
He did get the computer, though. And some years later he got something that would change his life: an internet connection. Lil’P – who wasn’t that little by then – was wired to the world. Above all, he got connected to all those countries that suddenly weren’t too far away anymore. His bedroom now had two windows – one looking into a vineyard and another upon the world. Sure, it wasn’t the same thing as actually going there but it was enough to make him spend most of his time enraptured in tons of information available on his fingertips. And besides, he had realized long time ago that his green bicycle wasn’t going to do the job.
The first love lil’P had was for a song lyric – perhaps due to such uncommon fondness, and unlike anyone on his family, he wanted to go to the university. There was just too much to learn out there and he needed a bigger bootstrap than his parents had planned for him.
And so he did. The subject of study was obvious to him by then and it wasn’t hard to pick a university either. Living outside his parents home did scare him a bit at the beginning but it was just too exciting to be a real problem.
Not long after he joined the university he heard about this european program that allowed students to do exchange periods at universities in too far away countries. It even offered mobility grants. It was too good to be true. Or so he thought for a while.

(to be continued)