Recently in February '21

One more month has passed. A year ago, I was starting my second semester of my final year of my Bachelors degree. Right before that, I had just been traveling across Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. At the time, we were a bit worried with Covid-19, but there were barely any identified cases in Europe. We didn’t even wear masks on the flights.

Who would say that, a year later, I would be writing this post from the Netherlands. This month marked, for me, an year of worries about Covid-19. Since the pandemic started - or slightly before it was actually considered a pandemic - I’ve never, ever, had physical classes. I haven’t seen many of my friends since then. Only a few. Now I’m in a different country, and the situation doesn’t look much better unfortunately.

Even though not everything looks as bright as I would love to, the number of new cases has been declining worldwide. That’s good. I hope that’s the results of the vaccination efforts. And if it isn’t, whatever is behind it, keep going.

Portugal has suffered quite a bit during the past month, but they managed to bring the cases down from 15k a day to around 2k a day in just under 2 weeks. That is very good. The Netherlands, on the other hand, has had everything closed since Christmas and we’re still around 5k cases daily, sometimes more, sometimes less, but the trend seems to show a bit of increasing.

The end of this road does not seem close. Nevertheless, we need to remain hopeful. I would love to be able to see some restrictions being lifted off, but I guess that’s not possible right away.

I feel sorry for me and for all the other international students that, even with a pandemic, decided to move to different countries, where they literally know no one. And the problem is that with the current situation, that didn’t change much. We still don’t know or interact with many others.

Enough about Covid. This past month also marked the transition between the second and third quartiles at my university. Unfortunately, I need to go for a resit of a course. It’s the first time it happens in such terms.

It’s not the first time I need to go to a resit. However, in Portugal, the resit is simply two or three weeks after the original exam. Here, the resits are at the same time of the other exams during the next quartile. So… I’m going to have 4 exams in the same week.

Definitely not what I wished for, but it’s 100% my responsibility and my fault. It made me sad initially, and I still am because it’s not the best situation. It isn’t the worse situation either. Could I have done better? Yes, definitely. It was a completely avoidable situation. Now there’s no way to go back.

Moving on to a different topic: weather. The last month featured days of really nice weather, hitting almost 20 C for many days. Parks were packed of people. Apparently, the Dutch love the sun, even with all the implemented restrictions.

More than that, I also started being more active and biking and walking more. I want to continue with such behavior from now on. It is horrible to be home for a year now. I miss getting up at 7:30am so I could be at uni at 8am to have classes, in loco. Sometimes I don’t feel I belong at TU/e. Will that ever change? Let’s see.

Well, I guess I’m finished with updates. Oh, no, there’s one more: I will not compromise myself 100% to biweekly newsletter posts. I have to work, I have to keep up with all the university work and I still want to have the bare minimum social life that I can have right now. It’s a game to balance. I have some more posts planned, I just didn’t have time to write them yet.