Writings

Welkom bij de vierde deel van deze serie: vergeet niet om in te checken. Vandaag ga ik een beetje hebben over mijn afgelopen cursus Nederlands, de toekomstige cursussen en mijn plannen, en ook over het proces om hoopelijk drietalig te worden.

February is complete. That means that around 16% of the year is also gone. Many things happened this month - I feel like I say this every month though. Let’s take a look at everything that happened, from some trips, to my Dutch language course ending.

Over the past days, my partner and I did a small trip to Vienna - and also Bratislava. This post is not going to be about the trip and the cities themselves, but about the transport to and from Vienna: the Nightjet. This was our first time trying out night trains, so it was quite a journey.

Welkom bij de derde deel van deze serie: vergeet niet om in te checken. Vandaag ga ik een beetje hebben over mijn nieuwe Nederlandse lessen, mijn kleine reis naar Brussel, en ook alle media in het Nederlands die ik de afgelopen maand heb geconsumeerd.

This past weekend I went to Brussels for FOSDEM with Sebastiaan, who has already written a bit about it. FOSDEM, if you don’t know, is the largest open source software conference in Europe - or in the world, not sure. This was not my first time attending, but it was positively chaotic as usual.

January was a very busy month, which I did not really expect. More importantly, it’s already gone. One twelfth of the year has already passed. How crazy is that? Let’s quickly dive into the latest events.

Some weeks ago, I sort of discovered this Grafana dashboard from a Hackerspace here in Eindhoven. Since then, I’ve been wanting to create such an “observability” dashboard for the microclimate inside my home, and also balcony. I already own quite a few temperature and air quality sensors, so it can’t be that hard - I thought.

A few days ago, I was navigating the web as normal. After some clicks here and there, I found myself on this page. I looked around and realized: it is a digital shoebox. I resonated with the author: I too keep around (shoe)boxes with the most random things. So I decided to also create my own digital shoebox.

At school, I participated a few times in the Youth Parliament. The Youth Parliament is an initiative of the Portuguese Parliament that gives a chance to young students to somehow get a feel of what politics involve. In the end, the measures that come out of this are actually debated by the real politicians in parliament.

Às vezes encontro com cada coisa entre os meus documentos. Aqui está um poema que escrevi a 23 de janeiro de 2013 sobre o mar.

Lembro-me de que, em 2013, li um livro do qual gostei imenso: Enquanto a Cidade Dorme de Álvaro Magalhães. Não me lembro precisamente porquê, mas a história fascinou-me. Como resumo, escrevi a 15 de setembro de 2013 este poema.

These are some quotes I used to have in the walls of my bedroom in 2016. Each quote occupied a full A4 page. At some point, I ended up removing them. Despite still enjoying them, the choice of having them in my bedroom’s walls is dubious.

The title of this post is just a question I added to my impossible list back in September 2022. It has been sitting there since. After making a little cleanup to the page today, I thought: I really want to develop this feeling a bit more, and explain it better, as well as how I feel in this moment regarding my plans for “living abroad”.