O pequeno post dos porquês # 2

Mas porque é que as pessoas fazem todas questão de se levantar com o metro em andamento quando param na estação terminal??

Viva a globalização!

Jantar comida indiana ao som de Frank Sinatra com uma manga mesmo ao lado... é qualidade de vida!

Japanese love

Taras... adoro viciar-me por dias que se tornam semanas, meses... Manga e anime parece que vieram para ficar.


Arigato gozaimasu, sancie-chan!

O pequeno post dos porquês # 1

Mas quem é que marca uma ecografia para as 16:24????

The Sesame Street Personality Test

You Are Ernie

Playful and childlike, you are everyone's favorite friend - even if your goofy antics get annoying at times. You are usually feeling: Amused - you are very easily entertained You are famous for: Always making people smile. From your silly songs to your wild pranks, you keep things fun. How you life your life: With ease. Life is only difficult when your friends won't play with you!

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Neither here nor there # 3

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and the inconvenience.

Bill Bryson

Neither here nor there # 2

I examined six or seven restaurants, mystified by the menus, wishing I knew the German for liver, pig's trotters and boiled eyeball, before chancing upon an establishment called the Restaurant de la Place at the top of the town. Now this is a nice surprise, I thought, and went straight in, figuring that at least I'd have some idea what I was ordering, but the name Restaurant de la Place was just a heartless joke. The menu here was in German, too.

It really is the most unattractive language for food-stuffs. If you want whipped cream on your coffee in much of the German-speaking world, you order it 'mit Schlag'. Now does that sound to you like a frothy and delicious pick-me-up, or does that sound like the sort of thing smokers bring up first thing in the morning? Here the menu was full of items that brought to mind the noises of a rutting pig: Knoblauchbrot, Schweinskostelett ihrer Wahl, Portion Schlagobers (and that was a dessert).

Bill Bryson

Neither here nor there # 1

One of the small marvels of my first trip to Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying cinema tickets. It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike - that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink - and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.

[...]

When I told friends in London that I was going to travel around Europe and write a book about it, they said, 'Oh, you must speak a lot of languages.'

'Why, no,' I would reply with a certain pride, 'only English,' and they would look at me as if I were crazy. But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

Neither here nor there, Bill Bryson

The scarlet letter # 1

Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It was due in part to all these causes, but still more to something else, that there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester's face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester's form, though majestic and statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester's bosom t make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or - and the outward semblance is the same - crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.

Do tempo...

Há algo neste mergulho às raízes e aos velhos tempos - muitos bem antes de mim - que faz sempre brotar em mim o desejo (embora fútil, temporário e nos antípodas do meu eu rotineiro) de saber, na cabeça e nos dedos, o que é ponto jugoslavo.

Despertar

6:45 - malditas gaivotas!

How to be good # 6

It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already. Janet's bedsit seemed enormous when I moved into it, enormous and quiet, but this book is so much bigger than that. And when I've finished it I will start another one, and that might be even bigger, and then another, and I will be able to keep extending my house until it becomes a mansion, full of rooms where they can't find me. And it's not just reading, either, but listening, hearing something other than my children's TV programmes and my husband's pious drone and the chatter chatter chatter in my head.

Nick Hornby

Já chegámos? Ainda falta muito?

1. Gamitas
2. Castelo Ventoso
3. Pousios
4. Fitos
5. Casas Velhas
6. Boião
7. Azilheira
8. Forninhos
9. Monte das pitas
10. Corte de Pereiro
11. Perna Seca
12. Vale Favas
13. Manteigas
14. Matosos
15. Gavião
16. Gavião de Baixo

Caso seja do interesse de alguém, estas são todas as terrinhas que aparecem assinaladas na IC1 entre o quilómetro 689 e o quilómetro 720. Viagens em família são uma seca.

Setembro ao sol

Finalmente férias