Why the wild things are

I hope you'll excuse my hand writing, I'm writing this in the train.

Yes, it's quite exciting, I know. I'm going on a trip with friends way up north. Well, not way up, we're still south of the Nordic Circle, but pretty north still. I've been told there's still 20cm of snow, which is frankly unforgiveable so close to May Day. But I digress.

This week I wanted to talk to you about dragons. Because it's been a few weeks and I've been thinking about them a lot.

Dragons are contradictory creatures. They can be incredibly dangerous, deadly really, easily they're deadly, but most of the tine they decide not to be. They just... chill out. Eat and sleep and hang. And I sometimes wonder why?

That seems a bit... biased, though because they are incredibly smart creatures. Smarter than some humans I know, hah! But you understand what I mean, right? Like they are like that for a reason. They can so why don't they? They do hunt in the wild after all.

And I suppose that's it in the end. Those are wild dragons. But the dragons at the palace are fed, they don't need to hunt. So they can just chill.

I suddenly realize this is a bit weird of a topic for me to write about, but... you know. I just find it interesting. So I wanted to share. Anyway.

I suppose that's all I wanted to say. Until next week, bye~

The food

I've been wanting to do a post about the food for a while now. And I guess I've been talking about food quite a bit. But still. I wanted to do one just for the food people eat here. So I decided to do a food-diary kind of thing. So during the last week starting on Sunday, I took a picture of all the things I ate. So I can tell you what it was. Well, almost all. I didn't take a picture of the fruits (because I have a whole separate post about those coming up... sometime in the future. Once it's done. Before I leave Brazil.), or all the bread or the breakfast tapiocas. But basically.
Sorry (I'm not actually sorry, I had a lot of fun doing it) it's such a long post, but at least it has a lot of pictures!

Sunday

You might remember (or not) from last week's post that I went to the market on Sunday. And I had breakfast there, because that's what people do there. (This is actually why I started on Sunday already and not on Monday. I wanted the market breakfast on the post.) I had a tapioca there, with tucumã (is a palm fruit) and Brazil nuts, and some goiaba (=guava) juice.
(Funny story about Brazil nuts. They have so many names in Portuguese: castanha-do-brasil, castanha-da-amazônia, castanha-do-acre, castanha-do-pará... And apparently the one people at least in this area use is castanha-do-pará. Pará is a state, the second largest in Brasil after Amazônas (the state that Manaus is in, and that is basically just loads and loads of rainforest), located between Amazônas and the Atlantic ocean. Anyway, one of the professors (originally British, I think, the professor) here kept calling them castanha-do-brasil during a class, at which point every time the entire class was like "castanha-do-pará!". Because you know, it would be stupid for people from Brazil to call the Brazil nuts. (House MD quotes, anyone?) And actually in Finnish we call them parapähkinä (=para nut) too, so it's not just the Brazilians who use the state and not the country in the name.)
Back to the food. The tapioca was great. It was also huge. The size options were small-meduim-large, and I was like, I guess I can do a medium, small sounds small. Yeah, a small would have been enough. I ate again at about four in the afternoon, and wasn't really very hungry yet even then. But I thought I should eat something.
This is what I ate. I should have taken a picture of it before adding the cream so you would actually see something. But it's essentially pyttipannu: some cassava (which in this form is basically like potato, except stickier and better), chicken, onion, tucumã that I bought at the market. And I had some cream I figured I should get rid of, so I poured that over all of it. Because cream makes everything a bit better, right?



Monday 

 Breakfast. A tapioca. I've gotten into the habit of eating one every morning. Saves time both in the store and in the morning if I don't have to waste time deciding what I want to eat. I usually just put cheese in it, but I got some tucumã and Brazil nuts from the market yesterday, so I put those in too. My guess is at this point is that this is what I will eat every morning this week. It was very good. (I folded it after taking a picture, but I thought this way you can see what's inside.)
If you're still confused about how to make a tapioca, let me clear that up. I made a (possibly) helpful graph of how to make them (a while back, which is why you're not seeing the tapioca I ate this morning):

How I make them, that is. Because there are other ways of making them. I could, for example put the goma (the flour) through a strainer. A sieve? I'm not entirely sure what that thing is called. But the point is to get the lumps off. I never bother. I just take a spatula or a spoon and break the lumps down to small enough. And anyway, the basics of making are the same: spread goma evenly on pan, heat until it sticks together to a panckae. Fill with anything. Eat. (Some people take the tapioca off the heat once it's stuck together and only add fillings after, but I want the cheese to melt in the thing, so I keep it on. You could also flip it and heat from the other side too. Or add some tiny seeds to the goma before spreading it out, so that they are in the tapioca itself. Or put a layer of goma, then the fillings, and some more goma on top to keep it all together, like you saw in the tapioca from the market.)

Ok, tapiocas out of the way (you probably won't see much of them for the rest of the post, unless I put in some really cool fillings some day), let's move on to lunch.
Most of the people here take lunch from home when they come to classes or work at INPA and heat it at the kitchen, but I ate at the restaurant on campus, because I hate coming up with what to cook. So it's easier to let someone else decide. And a meal there is about 10R$ (you pay by weight), which is what I'm used to paying for lunch back in Finland, so it's fine. And, for the purposes of this blog post, it makes more sense to show you food a Brazilian person made instead of what I made. Anyway, here you see, from top clockwise: some tomato-bell pepper-onion salad, which is everywhere, some farofa (the yellow thing), which is a kind of cassava flour, and also everywhere, rice, also everywhere, beans, also everywhere. Then there's a bit of spaghetti (there's actually more rice than spaghetti, but most of the rice is covered in beans), which is something there's always at places like this, for some reason, and finally some chicken.
They eat really weird parts of chicken here. By which I mean it's not actually weird, since they eat the whole chicken, which is a reasonable thing to do. I picked from the pots a drumstick and some fillet (I think), but there was also a bit with some ribs available, and last week I got a neck, which turned out to be very little meat and a lot of vertebrae. It also seems to be typical to just buy an entire ready-fried chicken here, since the places that sell those are all over the place.

Our lesson stretched a little (a lot) long, so I was home at about seven (an eleven-hour day, no biggy. Then I had to study some more.) So I basically just ate what ever (and everything) I had, meaning the rest of the cassava from the weekend (can you get cassava in Finland? The one you use like the potato, not cassava in all the other half a dozen forms they use here. Well, actually all the other forms too.), and the rest of a cabbage I had in the fridge. It didn't look like anything, so I don't have a picture of it. And some ice cream and cookies and fruit.

Tuesday

I'm not going to put up another picture of a tapioca for you, so I'm skipping directly to lunch.

This is a different place than where I ate yesterday (also more expensive, but I wanted to show you food from different places). The basics are pretty much the same. There's some rice, and some pasta, and some chicken and salad. And then there's some fried banana (the brown thing at the bottom), which is so good, but I think it's made from some sort of banana we don't get in Finland. I need to ask someone. The round baked thing in the middle had some cheese in it. All of it was really great.
And, since the place we were eating was also a bakery, I bought some bread rolls. They just look like wheat bread rolls, so I didn't take a picture of them.

Also a cake. Because these seem to be really typical cakes here. Maybe. At least I keep running to them all over the place. I've been wanting to buy a cake for a while now, but until now I haven't had the excuse. Now with this post I do. So I can show you the cake.
I stood there deciding if I want a cake that's half white half chocolate or one that's all white with nuts for quite a few minutes, but eventually ended up with the one with the nuts. Because apparently the nuts are a thing for me this week. I wish there had been some with both chocolate and nuts, that would have been the best. But there wasn't. (In case you're interested, that cake cost like a euro and a half. So that's not a price you would be able to get a cake at the bakery for in Finland. Even if it isn't a big cake.)
I also had some different cake and some passion fruit in class during the afternoon, because people keep bringing in food and sharing it with others. Mostly it's cookies though, the cake and the fruit were both rare occurrences.
On the way home there was this guy selling bananas at a street corner. There are a lot of people here selling fruit or snacks on the street. I have finally decided that the fruits I buy from them can't be poisoned or something, because if the street vendors sold bad fruit, no one would buy them, and that would mean there wouldn't be that many of them. So they must be ok.
Anyway, so I bought some bananas.

Some...
So I guess I know what I'll be eating for the rest of the week. Cake and bananas. But seriously, I seem to spend about half of my time thinking "man, I wish I had some bananas?", so now I decided to stop being ridiculous and buy some bananas, because they're super cheap and super good, and fruits are supposed to be good for you or whatever. So now I have bananas. I don't even think I'll have trouble eating all of them before they get too old. Not only because they're good, but because they're tiny. I've already eaten three just while writing today's bit.
So in the evening I just ate bread and fruit and cake. Because why wouldn't that be a good dinner. The cake was a lot fluffier than I was expecting. But it was really good.

Wednesday

The only difference in my breakfast compared to Monday and Tuesday is the fact that I added some salt. Because I still probably need some more salt. And a banana.

Lunch. Also basically the same as on earlier days (there is some rice under there too), except this time I had fish. Well, I had a bit of fish (the right-most bit in the picture), because that was all that was left when I was getting the food. So I took some chicken too. I don't know what fish it was, though, because I'm not really able to tell the difference between the local fishes, especially if they're in that form, a small piece fried. I would have wanted more of the fish to have a change from all the chicken, but the guy in front of me in the line took all but the little bit. So mostly more chicken.

In the evening I just ate more fruit and bread and cake. Because those are the things I have at home.
I took a picture of the bread, because I decided that I'll put the fruit on the bread. Simply because I can. There's some banana at the bottom, and some guava (pt. goiaba) on top. That's what the red stuff is. In case you people on Finland have no idea what guava looks like. I think you've probably heard the name, though, even if you don't know anything else about it. I had, at least.

Thursday

Ookay. Skipping over breakfast again, because that still hasn't changed. I doubt it will during my entire time here. I mean, even in Finland when I'm at home I've had the same muesli for breakfast almost every day for years. Because it's just easier.

Ok, for lunch I thought I'd walk a little, and went to this place that's actually all the way on the other side of a different campus that we're on. But it was worth it. You see here again the salad-rice-beans-spaghetti-farofa-combo. This time there was some kale in with the rice. It's really common here to have something in the rice, and actually just plain rice as the place on our campus has is quite rare, except obviously when people cook it themselves and just don't bother. It might be kale that's in it (they eat a lot of that here), or some tiny carrot cubes or onion or other vegetables, or some herbs, or beans. Or some tiny ham cubes. That's the most annoying thing people put in the rice, from the perspective of a person who doesn't eat mammals. The rice is a side, how about not making it so that some of us don't eat it? Anyway, I really like having something in the rice other than rice. It's a super-easy way of making it seem fancier.
Ok, the rest of the things. The dark brown thing at the bottom of the picture isn't meat, it's soy, very well seasoned, and fried with onion. I've eaten some soy only a couple of times during my time here, but both times I've been surprised at how good it is. And then, next to the soy, is a lasagna-kind of thing with chicken in the best form it could possibly be. It seems to me that it this country people either eat their chicken whole and grilled, or shredded, like in this case. I guess it's basically pulled chicken, except at least in Finland the pulled turkey that we get anywhere isn't really that good. Mostly because I don't like the way it's seasoned. Because somehow it always tastes the same no matter where I eat it. Also, the meat strands in the pulled turkey and pork in Finland are still quite long, and this chicken is in pieces that are a lot smaller. And the best thing is, you can do literally anything with it. Put it in a lasagna or with pasta or a pie, or pizza, on in a pancake, or a... pastry? (I guess pasteija or possibly a lihapiirakka in Finnish. And yes, I know lihapiirakka translates to meat pie, but all you Finnish people know the difference between a lihapiirakka in Finnish and a meat pie in English.) I've even had some meat balls here that were made out of shredded chicken, and they were excellent. Learning how to make some of it is on my definitely-do-before-leaving-list. Apparently it's very easy, though. You just throw some chicken in cubes into a pot with some water and spices and cook it until the chicken breaks apart. If you want to reduce time you can use a pressure kettle. But still, I want to learn to make it while I'm still here. Because I am not kidding about this, this is the best form or chicken I have ever run into.
Ok, moving on from the chicken. There's a tiny cube of some fish, and some fried bananas on the plate too. Because fried bananas are so good. All in all, an excellent meal, though I got a bit carried away with the chicken and the soy when piling the food on my plate and accidentally ate a little too much, but that's probably ok, since my dinner will once again be bread and fruit and cake.

Except it wasn't. (Yes, I wrote that earlier bit during the lunch break.) My food-day took an unexpected turn as the class ended for the day and it turned out that there is an organic food market practically right next to INPA every Thursday, and that some of the people from the course were going there. So I went with them. And there I had a (vegan) salgado, which is a ball of dough filled with something (in my case tucumã, because apparently tucumã is also the thing for this week) and deep-fried. It was eaten with some mayonnaise, but I didn't include that in the picture, because I wanted you to see the salgado properly instead of just mayonnaise. These are also things that are everywhere here, but I somehow haven't gotten around to try one yet.

I had some carambola juice with it. Which was new. I didn't think they made juice from carambola (it's the star-shaped fruit for anyone who doesn't know). But apparently they do.
And I had some of those banana chips (just one tube, not all the ones in the picture) I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before, some time in the very beginning. Probably in the post about the weird things. They are still great.
And one of the guys bought these mini-oranges, that could be just eaten directly with the skin and offered them to everyone to try, and wow are they weird. Because they taste exactly what you would imagine an orange tastes like with peels, except the whole thing is so small and there's so little peel that it's all good and doesn't taste simply like orange peel. But I am very, very confused about this fruit.

And in case you're confused about the fact that the fruit in the picture looks nothing like an orange, because it's not, well, orange, then I'm right there with you. But for some reason the oranges in this country are green and/or yellow. I haven't seen a single orange orange during my time here. I have no idea, don't ask. What I think makes it more confusing is that they, too, call them oranges. I mean laranjas, but that's also the color in also Portuguese. So yeah.
I did also eat some bread and fruit and cake in the evening after I got home, but only because they haven't gone bad yet, but I do need to keep eating them to make sure they will stay that way until they're all gone. And because they're good. Though in the end, I did feel like I probably ate a little too much today. But no can do.

Friday

Today I finally had some reasonable amount of fish at lunch. Once again I have no idea what that fish is, because the only couple of fish I'm able to name from around here are way, way bigger than this one. What you see on my plate there is the back half of it. I generally don't like eating fish that small, because small fish have small bones, and small bones means you have to pick through the food really carefully to find them before putting the thing in your mouth. (Yeah, I don't like food that includes things I'm not supposed to eat. Like bones. Or tendons. Or skin. Tendons and fish bones are the worst, because they're way too invisible until it's too late.) But after picking through the fish for a while I got all the bones out, and it was fine. Not super-good, but good enough.

And then I had this guava-flavoured pocket-cookie-thing for dessert. I've had those before. They're good. They're like the local equivalent of jaffa cakes, I think, except without the chocolate, and they're not as good.
I also bought (from the supermarket where I got the cookie from) some soda. They have this soda here that's flavoured like guaraná, which is a fruit that I'd never heard of before coming here, and I doubt at least you in Finland have heard of either. Here it's basically only used for making a soda, according to Wikipedia. Also according to me. I haven't seen it anywhere else except in the soda.

But it's good. And you can't get it in Europe. No, no wait, apparently you can get it in Portugal. But that's about as far in Europe as you can get form Finland, so that's not helpful at all. So now I'm drinking it here as long as I can. Although I think I prefer the lemon and orange sodas, but those you can get anywhere.
Anyway, I got the soda because there's a party tonight, because our two week course on community ecology finished today. Because apparently a course ending is reason enough to have a party. And the logic is everyone pays a bit and we get some collective snacks, and everyone brings their own drinks, which I guess for most people means beer or possibly wine or something, but I'm all "beer tastes terrible and is expensive so I'm gonna buy this two-liter bottle of soda for four reals instead, because it's good and cheap".
(I also bought it because I wanted to share it with you, because it's not a thing that exists in Finland. Also in case you're wondering, I got two liters of it, because the size options here are basically ~0.33 l, which is too small if I'm taking it with me to a party, and the 2 liters. So yeah.)

Here is the snacktable at the party. There were actually two cakes, but the other one didn't fit in the picture. And someone brought in some peanuts and banana chips after I had already taken the picture. The ball-things in the pizza-boxes are... I think they actually called them bolinhas, which literally means little balls. They're just some kind of dough with cheese or meat or something inside. There were some also with chicken, but those were more tear-drop than ball shaped and they're called coxinhas. Which is just a word for that kind of thing but tear-drop shaped and with chicken in it. Apparently the shape and the chicken always go together for some reason. And these were tiny versions of this, they're usually bigger. Streer-corner food. They were really good, which was terrible, because they're just small enough that you keep thinking "I'll have just one more", and them you end up eating way too many of them.

And then there was the pão de queijo. Literally meaning the bread of cheese. One of the people in the class made these there, so we had them fresh from the oven. This is a really typical thing in Brazil, though this is the first time during my trip I've had any. But Brazil in enormous, and I've been told there's huge variation in also the popularity of pão de queijo, and that if I was in maybe São Paulo or somewhere I would have been eating these every day. So it's popular here too, just less popular than in other places around the country. A thing that I did not expect was that instead of putting the cheese inside the thing like with the bolinhas, the cheese actually goes in the dough, so that it's quite literally a bread made of cheese, and some other things that make it more bread-y and less fried cheese. I'm definitely getting the recipe, although I was told that for them you need some kind of sour cassava flour (apparently different from both farofa and goma de tapioca), which I was told is a little hard to find even here. So I don't know. Anyone in Finland know if I can get it there?

Saturday

I didn't eat anything special all day. A tapioca in the morning. I made some tuna pasta in the afternoon for lunch, because I wanted something easy and familiar. I finished the cake and the bananas and almost all the guavas I had. And since most of those are things I've already talked about and tuna pasta isn't in any way Brazilian at all, but instead my go-to-food when I don't want to decide what to eat, I don't want to get into today's foods more than this. (I was planning on doing some brigadeiros, just to show you what they are, but after all the food at yesterday's party, I am not in the mood of chocolate balls. So I'll do that some other time.)
Instead what I want to tell you about as the last thing about the food is the tambaqui. I've already mentioned tambaqui a couple of times. It's a fish that lives in the Amazon. They eat it a lot here. Here's a picture of some grilled tambaqui I had a while back:

There you can see first of all the rice with beans (black-eyed! I'm only able to guess because of Bohnanza) and tomato-onion-salad in the bowls behind the fish. They were a part of the meal, as they are a part of pretty much all the meals. But you can also see the whole fish. It's less than a meter long, so it's not a small fish, but it's also not enormous. I mean, pirarucu, that also lives in the Amazon, is 2 meters and 100 kilos. So that's a big fish.
Tambaqui (fin. mustapaku) is a relative of the piranhas, but it is a vegetarian. Look at those teeth on the fish, they're amazing. You can't actually see them very well in that picture, you'll have to zoom. I thought I had taken a picture of just the teeth as I took these pictures of it, but apparently not. Either way, it has it has very vegetarian teeth. Which I find confusing on a fish, because I somehow imagine that fish either have sharp teeth for eating other fish, or they have no teeth. But I was wrong. This one has cow-teeth.

The reason I personally like tambaqui so much, aside from the fact that it tastes great (despite being a vegetarian, my understanding is that it's usually the big carnivorous fish that people find tasty), is the bones. Just look at the size of those bones! Yes, those are the bones of the fish in the picture above. The bones are huge, which means it is very, very easy to pick them out before eating. It's actually impossible to put one of those in your mouth without noticing, because it doesn't fit in your mouth. Unless you bend it. The point is that this is finally a fish whose bones I don't mind, because they're so big. Ok, it also has these more normal-size bones on the back-side of the spine that branch about half-way through. I've never seen branching fish bones before. But they're big too, because a fish this size would have big bones even if it didn't happen to have these enormous ribs. So it's all good.

I think this ended up being a pretty good overview of the food here. I want to add a few more random pointers, though.
1. People keep telling be Brazilians really love sugar. I noticed that on the lectures in the past couple of weeks. People really did have a lot of cookies and stuff with them. And that was pretty much everyone.
2. I also noticed on the lecture that the most common fruit people had with them (because they also had some fruit, not just cookies) was an apple. An apple. Of all the fruits that they have to choose from here, the one a lot of people seem to choose for a snack is an apple. It doesn't even grow here. Apples are European-latitude fruits. So why in the world do people keep eating apples here, all their native (or native to the tropics, at least) fruits are better. Not to say apples aren't good, but the tropicals are better. I guess apples are a handy fruit to eat on the go, though. But still.

3. This is what the local potatoes look like. What. why do those potatoes have all the wrinkles on them? What is happening? (Btw, they call it the sweet potato, to which I said yeah, that's not what sweet potato refers to in English. In English sweet potato is the orange thing, and then I showed them a picture, and they were like never seen before.) The potatoes here are really good, though. It took me a while to realise why that is. It's because all the potatoes are new potatoes. They don't ever have to eat the potatoes that have been sitting in the basement all winter, because it's never winter. And the new potatoes are good anywhere.

Ok, I think that's enough. Most of you have probably stopped reading by now, but no can do. I apparently had a lot to say about the food.

~matu

The finite existence of bubbles in this infinite universe

There's many things I like about the warming weather and one of them is bubbles. That sounds weird, I mean people blowing bubbles. Soap bubbles. They're so simple but so beautiful as they float gracefully further away in the sky. It always makes me so happy whenever there's bubbles anywhere, I just have to stop and watch them at least a while.

Which is why I'm so glad that Bubble Dude exists.

What do you mean you don't know who Bubble Dude is? Well... There's this guy I sometimes see when I'm going somewhere or coming back home, who just hangs out and blows bubbles to entertain kids and whoever else happens to be at the church plaza at the time. He has a basin full of soapy water, and a bunch of different sized loops of rope etc that he dips in the water and produces the most enormous bubbles I've seen in my life, ever. He also has a few thingamajigs that he can use to make a massive about of teeny tiny bubbles, just a swarm of baby bubbles that cling together in clumps and float all over the place. It's so fun to watch him do his thing, especially when there's a family with kids around!

Kids love bubbles. They're kind of like dogs in that regard; chasing after them and trying to catch them.

I talked last time about my quote-unquote Plot and I've been trying to think more about it in the past week. About where the story is going, so to speak, about what I hope to find at the end and how to get there. I know that stories don't actually end, not really, but there is an end to a, a chapter. A part. An arc. What is this ark of my Life about? I hope it helps me grow, whatever it is. And that it's fun.

I think that's the most important thing, isn't it? To have fun? That's why I like bubbles so much. Sure, they're fragile and temporary, but they're so much fun! And honestly, their fleeting nature is what makes you appreciate them even more, doesn't it? They're there now and that's why you have to enjoy them now.

There was something else, what was it..? Right, the Bubble Dude had a friend with him when I saw him today, which was nice! His friend seemed oddly familiar, that's why this was on my mind, but I couldn't quite place the face then and I've quite forgotten it by now. Oh well. Maybe I'll see them again at some point. Well, I know I'll see the Bubble Dude, but... you know.

That's all for now, I think. Until next week, bye~

Last week

So last week was not a good week. Let me tell you about it.
It actually started almost two weeks ago.
No, it started over a month ago. Well, kinda. My roommate (housemate?) got a job, in a different city. And from Manaus "a different city" practically means a four-digit distance away. Getting the job was good, but it also meant that she had to move, which meant that I had to move.
So a week ago on Sunday I moved. But I'll get back to that in a moment. First I want to go back the two weeks, where I was going to start.
So two weeks ago I had this course that was all about Amazonian ecosystems, and practically consisted of three day-field trips to see the different types of ecosystems. (I missed the Tuesday, because I was at the police. I think I said something about that in that post.) On Wednesday we went to this nature reserve that is owned(?) by INPA (the institute where I'm studying), that is on ground that never floods, aka terra firme. Because this is a place where they have a separate name for a forest that doesn't flood. Anyway, I think I said something about this. Or at least I put up some pictures from it last week (the black palm trees). What I didn't say is that while walking in the forest I picked up some ticks. And the ticks here are different from the ticks in Finland in that they are invisible. They're not invisible. They're just tiny. They look like tiny black dots, except instead of being sand or something they will suck your blood. They apparently just sit in a blob on the underside of a leaf, and when you brush against that leaf, the entire blob jumps at you and suddenly you have a so, so, so many ticks on you you can't see unless you know what you're looking for.
Anyway, the end result was that by Thursday evening I had maybe a hundred tick bites. At that point I asked my roommate about the red spots that kept appearing all over me, and she was like yeah, those are tick bites. Here, wash yourself with this soap to get rid of them.
But by then I already had maybe a hundred (literally, I'm not using hundred here as just a big number. I mean literally hundred) bites. And they're not things that go away in a day. So I spent all last week (and still) with a hundred very itchy tick bites. Allergy meds helped, though. Or maybe it's just the placebo effect. Doesn't really matter.

So that's the first reason why last week was not a good week.

Another reason started already over the weekend: my computer decided it won't work unless it's plugged in. I'm missing a screw from one of the back corners, which has been a problem for almost the whole time I've had this laptop. Now, however, the crack that results in the top and the bottom not being held together bu anything wouldn't close. Always before I've been able to push the sides together when closing the lid, but now, nope. So I suppose the battery came a bit loose or something, so that it didn't work. So the computer needed to be plugged in to work. This wouldn't be a huge problem, though annoying, but. *sigh* But the bits of the charger that go into the socket are slightly bent. Not enough for it to not work, but enough that every now and then even without touching anything the charger stops loading for a couple of seconds. Which is fine. Unless your computer shuts down the second it is unplugged.
So this resulted in my computer no only needed to be plugged in at all times when I wanted to use it, but it also kept suddenly shutting down without a warning about once an hour or so when the charger didn't load for two seconds. So that was... Yeah. No. I started wondering if I have to buy myself a new laptop from here. Because sitting in class trying to do some exercises on R (or anything else with the computer) is very, very annoying if the computer keeps randomly shutting down. Did teach me to save my work after every few lines of text, though.
Anyway, then a miracle happened, and on Tuesday Ithe crack between the top and the bottom of the computer had just shut on its own. I had it with me, in my backpack, and when I got home after the day it had simply been pushed back together by some unknowable force of the universe. I have no idea what happened, but I quickly taped the corner together (since I don't have a screw that I could put there to keep it together), and since then the computer has been able to function again without being plugged in. So I'm guessing the battery really was loose. And now it's fine. But a source of significant frustration in the beginning of the week.

That problem gone I was happy for about 10 hours. The next night at about half past four I woke up to a weird sound to find the lamp in my new room (I had moved on Sunday) dripping water. Water. Dripping from my lamp. Fantastic. So I put a towel under there and went back to sleep. In the morning at around seven when I woke it wasn't dripping anymore, but as I left for my classes of the day I left a towel under the lamp, just in case. And a good thing too, it was completely soaked when I got back in the evening. So I told my roommates about it, and they were like "yeah, we'll send a message to the landlord" and I was like "excellent, thank you".
That night I left a kettle under the leak, with the already soaked towel on the bottom to dampen the sound so it doesn't keep me awake. In the morning I had a kettleful of water. Though the towel was in there too, and it had already been very wet. So I emptied the kettle and left it there for the day, cursing the fact that I had time to live in this room for three days before a problem appeared.
I came back in the evening to find that not only did I have another half a kettle of water, I also had another leak coming directly through the ceiling, dripping water on my stuff (I don't have any stuff at exactly the middle of the room where the lamp is, so that's good). So I put down some more towels and told my roommates again, and they sent another message to the landlord saying that yeah, this really is a problem. And the landlord said someone's gonna come check it out the next day aka Friday.
No one did.
There was, however, another spot in the ceiling leaking. So my unbelievably helpful roommates sent another message, with pictures, to the landlord that this really is a problem. And I was evacuated to a room that happens to be empty at the moment. And the landlord said someone is gonna come check it out the next day. This time someone did. And this time someone really did. And fixed it. And I moved back to my room. So it's all good now. But yeah, I lived in a room with a leaking ceiling for half the week.

Ok. More things that made the week not great. The schedule of the course I'm in is tough. We start at 8:30 every morning, with a small test on the things of the previous day, then work until about noon. With one break in between. Then we have a lunch break until two. This seems like an overly long lunch break to me. No one needs two hours to eat lunch. People can bring their own lunch here, there's a kitchen they can use, or they can go to a lunch place to eat, where the price of the meal is determined by weight. I'm not sure I've said something about that before, but yeah. That's the system. Pay by weight. There's one place on campus, but on two days I went out with some of the people who were going to go eat outside campus to these places with much better food. But they were also more expensive. So I ended up paying 4-5 euros for lunch those days. Which is more than I want to pay regularly for lunch. (Add that to the list of things that weren't great this week. The food was great, though.) So mostly I stayed at the worse but cheaper restaurant on campus where I only pay 2-3 euros for lunch. And I think the food there is good enough.
Anyway. The class starts again at two, and goes on (with one break) until five. Or half past, if things happen to stretch. So I'm home at maybe six in the evening. That's a ten-hour day, from leaving the house to returning. And then I have to do some reading for the next day's class, and maybe finish off some exercises I didn't have time to do during the class. Though mostly I try to use the ridiculously long lunch break to catch up with those. But coming home at that time of the day and keeping studying is not easy for a person whose efficient time of the day is from about eight to about four. Reading scientific literature after six in the evening is close to impossible.
So yeah. And this is going to be my weeks until the end of July, apparently, because I have classes almost every week.
I think the worst part about this is that here each credit you get for a course should be worth 15 hours of work, and the courses are scheduled so that there's two days per credit. So about 7,5 hrs per day. Sounds reasonable. Except which part of what I just described sounded like I'm doing only 7,5 hours a day? The classes alone are eight and a half hours a day, with admittedly a very long lunch break. So yeah. In Finland I've never worked for a credit as many hours as the credits officially require work. Here I have to work more. That I think is the worst part. I feel like I've been lied to about the effort I have to put into this. I've been told that I need to spend about 7,5 hours a day on the work, and I've said yeah, that's fine, and now, in reality, it turns out that 7,5 hours a day means all day every day. Because I also had to spend (some) time over the weekend doing the exercises.
The upside is that the course itself is interesting, even if I don't exactly understand everything, because it's in Portuguese. But that's fine, because it's turns out that we were taught quite a lot of community ecology (which is what the course is about) in a statistics course I took a year and a half back. I didn't even realise it at the time, and then I was sitting in class all last week thinking "haven't I studied this already once...?"

More things. I have a prepaid phone here, because apparently it's a common thing here. Though it's not really what I thought of as prepaid before I got here. Basically it's the same kind of package system as in Finland, you pay an amount, and then it includes 2 Gb of internet per week and unlimited calls and Whatsapp (on top of the internet, because apparently Whatsapp is the primary way of communication here. Also between people and companies. Everyone and everything seems to have a Whatsapp number as a primary means of contact). The difference is that here I pay weekly, and that I have to pay, well, before hand. That's what makes it prepaid. And actually I don't have to pay weekly, because I can charge credits for a phone number, and then it renews the data package automatically, if there is enough credit. But this week I should have charged more credit for the number, because I had run out. But I didn't do it on time, because I completely forgot that it's already been three weeks since I did it the last time. Because there's is no way it had been three weeks since I did it the last time. Except apparently it had. And while trying to do that I got myself and the people I was taking a ride with to INPA for our classes stuck in traffic, because my need to recharge the credit for my phone made me ask to take the stupid route instead of the smart route, and the traffic was unusually absolutely terrible that morning. So we got stuck in traffic, were late for class, and I didn't even get my phone credit charged. So that sucked. I did get the phone working again (it wasn't working all morning, because I had failed to pay on time) over lunch when I got to a place where I could recharge it.
The next morning my ride (I rode to INPA with the same people every day, because I don't want to walk with the laptop and there are other people in the class who live nearby) had left without me. Apparently this time I had happened to be at the pick-up-spot a minute after my ride instead of a minute or two earlier, like usually, and the ride had assumed that since I wasn't there, I wasn't coming. Because I hadn't said anything. Because I didn't think "I will be at the same place at the same time as every morning this week" needed to be said. If I had been late, sure, but I wasn't late. I just happened to not be early. So after wondering for ten minutes why everyone was so late I found out they had already gone, and I had 20 minutes to be in class, which was definitely not possible. So I hopped on a bus to be there as soon as possible. And got stuck in traffic. Because that's just what you do here between seven and eight thirty in the morning. I ended up being even more late than the previous day.

On Saturday I went to the grocery store because I didn't have any food for the weekend at the new place (I had eaten at the restaurants all week), and tried to buy some bird sausage, because I'd already had some here (unless people lied to me), and I wanted to make something out of that. (Mind you, with the previous roommate we always cooked together, so this was basically my first time trying to cook alone for just myself starting from doing the groceries.) So I went to the store and read the ingredients on some sausages that had a bird on the package, and happily took them home. Only after getting home my brain caught up with the fact that swine and swan are in fact not the same word, and that I had bought pork sausages. (I acknowledge the fact that I thought the ingredients said swan should have instantly rang some bell in my head to tell me that can't be right, but it didn't. I have no idea how that's possible.) So I gave my non-bird-sausages to my roommate and had to return to the store to get myself something I actually eat.
And then, in the evening, I burned some popcorn in a kettle that is obviously not mine because I don't have any kettles here. And I couldn't get all the burned stains off. Well, I could have, with patapata, but I don't know what the equivalent is here, nor do I have it. So yeah. Now one of my roommate has a kettle with burned popcorn stains.

The only good thing about this week is that on the previous Sunday (the day I moved) I had bought myself some ice cream, because it was on sale (10R$/2l). So at least I had ice cream. Still do.
And ok, fine, Sunday was good. There's a market at the center every Sunday, so I went there with a girl I met in one of my classes, and we had some breakfast, and I bought some stuff for you people back at home, and myself some anklets, because if you're going to be in a country where your ankles are practically always uncovered, you have to have something on them. I can't believe it took me almost two and a half months to get some. And got some fruit I can't (I think) find in the normal supermarkets.
In the afternoon I was supposed to go do the exercises for the class (that's also this week) with some people, so we could talk about the answers together (we have to eventually return the exercises with the answers), but no one ever told me when and where they're meeting for that, even though I was invited on Friday to join them. So maybe they didn't do it after all. Or they forgot me. I don't know. But I spent basically the rest of the day writing blog posts. This one, and two more that I am working on little at a time, as I gather the stuff I need for them. You'll see one of them next week. The other probably won't be done before June.

So yeah. That was my week. I hope this one is better.
Sorry you had to basically read me complain about things. But hey, you could have stopped reading at any time, so it's not entirely my fault.
And I promise, I have something more interesting planned for next week.

~matu

Life

I had something I wanted to tell you about earlier this week, but I seem to have forgotten what it was. This is what happens when you don’t write things down, kids!

Anyway, I may have been a bit hasty with my declaration of Springtime last week, as it was literally two days and we got more snow... It melted like immediately, but way to make me look foolish, Mother Nature! I still maintain that it is spring though. I've gotten out my spring coat and all, and the sun is shining and it's actually warm (if you're not in the shade) so yes, it is spring. Also there's so much dust in the air... I'm just awaiting in horror for my allergies to kick in.

Other than me grossly underestimating the amount of Cosmic Irony that Life is willing to fling at me, things have been going pretty okay. I made some cookies today, and tomorrow we're going to have a game night! We're considering adding a new player to our party, and he's going to join us tomorrow to see if he likes the game and if the chemistries match and all that jazz. (don't know if you're actually here or not, but if you are, hi Michael!) I hope it works out.

I've wanted to draw a lot recently, but for some reason I can't seem to find inspiration. Or rather... I have a lot of ideas, I have several things I want to draw, but when I take out my pad and pick up a pencil, I just... sit there, not actually getting anything done. It sucks. I think that if I'd get something done, that would be a start, but I've just felt really distracted all the time recently. Can't really focus on anything properly. I hope it passes soon.

Been reading a lot lately. It's also gotten me into the mood for writing, and I have touched up on some of my really old works, so that's nice. It's nice to actually finish something you've worked on, not just have a million projects with no end in sight for any of them. But yeah, writing is fun. Honestly, I just want to do more creative things in general. Writing these help, I guess, let's me play around a bit. But I often find myself unsure of what exactly to write about. There's no real plot here, so to speak, just a collection of random thoughts. Although... does Life really even have a plot?

Well, in the mean time I'm gonna keep doing what I do, I guess. Not much else I can. And that's fine. Hm.

Until next week, bye~