Yesterday, I had a moment of epiphany and remembered I have an impossible list. Took some time to clean it out. Now I also added a few fitness goals ❤️

I went to the throat doctor last year in the Netherlands. Only now I received the bill: for 15 minutes at the doctor and a tube on my nose, the hospital billed my insurance over 400€. I will be paying a bit less (360€ due to eigen risico), but what the hell?

Thank you! 😁

Today, I finished reading “The House in the Cerulean Sea” by TJ Klune and I was just want to say that it was beautifully constructed.

In the world portraited by this book, there are people with magical abilities. To some extent, some are not even human. To give this children “proper” education, and since most do not have known parents, they are given to special orphanages.

This book follows the life of Linus baker, an employee of the Department of Magical Youth, who is assigned on a mission to investigate a specific orphanage. This orphanage has very unique children living on it, and… more I will not say. I want my reviews to be spoilerless.

There is an LGTB aspect to some characters and the fact that the book does not fully focus on that and just treats it as something normal is amazing. A lot of LGBT books focus solely on the relationship and the fact that the couple is LGBT. Here, that does not happen. They exist, they are there and that’s… normal.

“Don’t you wish you were here?”

I just realized I may have just had my last university class ever. Or at least for the foreseeable future.

Today, I finished reading “O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis” (The Year of The Death of Ricardo Reis in English) by José Saramago, while on a train from Den Haag to Eindhoven, after visiting the Portuguese embassy.

Having read “Memorial do Convento” (Baltasar and Blimunda in English) by José Saramago in the past, his writing style was not unexpected. However, it has been a long time since I read so that made it harder than I expected. Saramago disregards normal punctuation rules and only uses commas and dots. There are a lot of other quirks here and there.

“O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis” is supposed to be one of his best works. For those who know him, Ricardo Reis is one of the many heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet. Therefore, I recommend you to have some background on him before reading this book.

This is a magical realism book, which I have been appreciating more and more over the time. This book follows the life of Ricardo Reis after the death of Fernando Pessoa. Magically, Fernando Pessoa is able to visit Ricardo Reis over the 9 months following his death to create a balance between the time that it takes to be born and the time it takes to die.

I will not talk more about the book. However, I must say I enjoyed it and, even though I wouldn’t read it again, I think that anyone that knows Fernando Pessoa and enjoys magical realism should read this book.

Congratulations!

Thank you!

Today I got my booster.

I also had my first graduation project related meeting. It’s quite nice to finally have some direction. Now I have about three weeks to come up with a good research question within the topic and search what’s done.

In the meanwhile, I already surpassed the 100th page of the book I am reading. I did not expect to be this fast, considering that this author is quite particular: he doesn’t adhere to regular punctuation laws! Only commas and periods, capital letter to indicate speech and very few paragraphs.

I will make it a goal for this year to regain the habit of reading frequently, which I mostly lost after high school. And I started today!

That’s been the entire month of December in the Netherlands. Is it also that bad in that side of the border? Here’s an interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGJseovT8ug

That was something that surprised me a lot when I moved 😂

abesbílico - an informal Portuguese word meaning “astonished”. It’s uncommon to hear it but I love it.

Quando é que a CML faz algo em relação aos milhares de prédios abandonados em Lisboa (8% em 2013)? Tantos edifícios que dariam habitação a milhares de pessoas. Noutros países europeus coisas destas não se veriam tão frequentemente.