Highway to Porto

We were driving back to Porto, I said to my friend who was driving: "Your roads are amazing". He replied: "Yes. And so is our debt."

I'm being spoilt

Yesterday after a group meeting some of us went to have a dinner. I love when my classmates bring me to places where no tourists ever go. The food was amazing, the sangria was perfect (it was with berries). Then a coffee next to the stormy beach and a ride home. Which was great because it was pouring rain.

Tomorrow we'll go to the weekend trip and I tried to bake a mud cake today. First i found out that we don't have a cake mould, then I spend forever in the supermarket trying to find out what is baking powder in Portuguese, then came home and realized that we don't have a mixer, so I was amassing sugar and eggs by hand, and finally the cake was in the oven for too long. They have better love the cake, I put so much effort in it.

Today when I got home from the language course I had a meal waiting for me, my Portuguese flatmate really is a darling! The same happened on Monday. Codfish number 6 I think. Now I'm full and supposed to study a bit, because I need to deliver an excercise tomorrow.

Around lunchtime I'll head up north where there is no internet, a report will follow next week.

The Chinese Las Vegas

I'm learning things about Macau. It was a was a Portuguese colony and both the first and last European colony in China. Now some Wikipedia quotes:

"In 1535, Portuguese traders obtained the rights to anchor ships in Macau's harbours and to carry out trading activities, though not the right to stay onshore. Around 1552–1553, they obtained temporary permission to erect storage sheds onshore, in order to dry out goods drenched by sea water; they soon built rudimentary stone houses around the area now called Nam Van. In 1557, the Portuguese established a permanent settlement in Macau, paying an annual rent of 500 taels ( 20 kilograms/44 pounds ) of silver."

bla bla bla, then:

"During the 16th century, Macau also served as a trafficking point for Chinese slaves to Portugal. Many Chinese boys were captured in China, and through Macau were brought to Portugal and sold as slaves in Lisbon." hmmm. and some were sold to Brazil.

And the article is long and I just got bored, so long story short: it was only in 1887 that China ceded the right of "perpetual occupation and government of Macau by Portugal". Then in 1974 after the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship the new Portuguese government determined it would relinquish all its overseas possessions...bla bla...The Chinese government assumed formal sovereignty over Macau on 20 December 1999.

And now: gambling revenue has made Macau the world's top casino market, surpassing Las Vegas.

I forgot why I started writing about this.

Joao, your version was so much cooler!!

Sweet dreams are made of cheese

I had my first dream in Portuguese. That was amazing. I just started speaking it in the dream, I even remember thinking "wow, Emilia!".

EDIT: The following night I was still speaking Portuguese, but now it was with English subtitles. This intensive language course is really getting to me.

FEUP week 2

This week was supposed to be the lazy week with no classes, but it seems that I'm even busier than normally with studies this week. All week just groupworks and language courses. I'm starting to think that there is only a limited amout of Portugese words that my brain can maintain: today we were learning how to tell the time, and I was thinking for a long time how to conjugate the verb "to be".

Today I got invited to join a weekend trip to Gerês in the north of Portugal. My classmate's grandfather has a big house there and my classmate thought that it would be a nice idea to take the foreigners (me and a guy from Germany) for a weekend-trip. Very very sweet of him. The plan for now is to go there on Friday and come back on Monday. Apparently this area is very nice, so I'm looking forward to the weekend very much!

Guimarães

Today I went to Guimaraes with a friend, our classmate works there so we got a ride in the morning, which was great. The city is about one hour drive from Porto. It was a bit bad planning from us to go there on a Monday, because all the museums were closed. We managed to see the castle though, which was nice. So with not much to do, we were walking around the beautiful city centre a lot. And naturally, we ate a lot. We were a bit late for lunch though, so almost all the restaurants were already closed. After a crazy amount of walking we finally found a place, just in time before I turned into a witch (which happens when I don't get food on time, as some of you might know :S)

Guimaraes is actually going to be the culture capital of Europe next year with Maribor, Slovenia. I don't recall Maribor being a particularly beautiful city, I guess I was "studying" there so hard that I didn't have time to explore the city. Well Guimaraes is beautiful, and it will be even more beautiful once they finish all the construction works they are doing, have to say that they'll have a VERY busy end of the year, it looked a bit incomplete.

In the afternoon we took the train back to Porto, and I went straight to my language course. And for the first time, I was completely lost there, they should not be teaching me grammar at 10pm. We were learning possessive pronouns and they were just too many. I'm starting to think that the Finnish language is easy, I love that the words don't have genders, they just make EVERYTHING very complicated.

Oh, and the fall is officially here. I was freezing in the metro today, and then I got very sad thinking that it won't be any warmer inside once I get home. I can handle the cold temperature outside, but I just hate it when it's cold inside as well. Now I'm wearing my woollen socks and I'm hiding under two covers, good night!

FEUP week

Nobody should have to go to university at 9am on a Saturday morning. Today I did.

But now the FEUP week started, which means that there is no lectures next week (I still have my language course though and group works) but I'll have some time to visit other cities around Porto. So the plan is to go to Guimarães on Monday and probably Coimbra on Wednesday. The bad thing is that from tomorrow on it should rain more or less for five days straight.

O verbo pretender

There is one verb that the Portuguese misuse a lot: "pretender". Let's say it's "to aim" in English. Well sometimes they forget to translate the word in English, and write "pretend" instead, so I'm always laughing so much when I see texts like "In this manual we pretend to define a set of rules..." or like today, a professor said that "In this project you pretend to improve an existing interactive model..." lolololololololooooooool

Good news and a bad one

I got a grade 18 (out of 20) in the Portuguese language test. Go Emilia! And today when we were learning words in portuguese to describe characteristics of people and played a game where you describe a person in the class and the others guess who it is, I was described as "the one who has dark hair, blue eyes and a very big heart". Awwww, so sweet!

And btw yesterday after we had a team meeting of one project (I have four of them ongoing. small time management issues here) we went to eat a proper francesinha (the sandwich with a lot of meat in it, I posted a photo earlier). This one had nothing to do with the first francesinha I had here, this was absolutely delicious. And the place was cool as well, straight from the 60's, a restaurant called Cunha. Strongly recommended. And because I was complaining to my friend that the beers were so small here (2dl), like shots, he ordered me a proper sized beer. I certainly seem happy about it:

The bad news is that one of my flatmates is moving out, which is really sad :( I hope we'll find somebody just as nice as him to live with us.

Cost savings

I was on the other side of the river (Gaia, actually another city) the other night and was looking to the Porto side. I was thinking that something was different from two years ago when I was on the other side of the river by night as well. Back then the city of Porto was lit up beautifully, the castles and all the pretty old buildings. No longer! Now they are saving costs and the city is quite dark by nights. Sometimes the signs of recession catch you by a surprise.

Accountant goes engineering

If anyone thinks that I'm in some kind of a holiday here - think again. I've never seen this motivated students and I'm spending a lot a lo a lot of time at the university, like today 12 hours. Every course has a groupwork, and the topics are like "invent a new business idea" or "take an existing interactive system and propose improvements or an alternative design". Plus one project that has something to do with information systems. I'm an accountant for god's sake, I'm really bad with IT!!

Dear Diary

I got a bit lazy with updating this. But here is the summary of the last couple of days:

On Friday I was at the university for 14 hours. I wanted to come home for a nap when I had a break, but we were doing our group assignment all 4 hours. The last hours from 7.30pm to 10.30pm I was just fighting not to fall asleep. This Friday will be the same, plus an additional bonus of a course on Saturday morning at 8am.

On Saturday I went for a swim, and after I had a lovely family dinner with my friend's parents. Another way of preparing cod fish, I think I have now tried 6 out of 365 ways of preparing it. Have to catch up if I want to try all of them. Then I went out, there was some kind of a festival with loads of live music in bars and pubs. Of course I couldn't manage to see any, because all the places were just too crowded. But it was a fun night, we were first in a pub called "once upon a time in Porto" a small place, like somebodys living room with great music that is not too loud and you can actually talk to people. Then we went to a rock bar called "Tenhinda" (I think), in Finnish standards not so rock but a nice place indeed.

On Sunday we had our traditional sushi-party with my flatmates, we are getting so good and they are more and more beautiful each time. Today I had a Portuguese exam. It was easy (well, I'll find out on Thursday when we get the results). We were also practicing pronounciation, this nasal sound that they have, I really can't say it and I just sound like very stupid when I try. Repeat after me: um limão, mil limões, um milhão de limões.

Stalker

After the Portuguese class (and a reminder that we have a test on Monday, which I had completely forgotten) me and my German friend went to a student party where another friend of ours was a DJ. The place is next to our campus, I felt really weird there, we were probably the only foreigners there, we were looking if there was anyone we know but we didn't find anyone (and for some reason everybody was just looking the same to me in their jeans, t-shirts and identical haircuts. I wonder if they all go to the same barber). Well we were enjoing our 50 cent beers and feeling weird with the Portuguese getting crazy with Brazilian music.

Just when I thought it couldn't get any more weird, a guy comes to us and asks me if I'm Finnish. I was wondering since when do I look Finnish? Then he asked if I have a profile in couchsurfing, he said that he just joined couchsurfing and he had seen my profile there. Which is a bit strange, since I don't have a couch here. And in my profile photo I'm not even looking at the camera so he really has been looking through my whole profile. He knew my age and that I moved here a month ago. How creepy. I officially have a local stalker now :S

Well then he disappearred and me and my friend took a taxi back to the centre, my friend was entertaining our taxi driver until his place, and I continued to entertain him for the rest of the trip with my fluent Portuguese. I don't know if we were talking about same things but I was explaining a lot of things to him. Poor man. Too bad I didn't have any pimped Eastern eggs with me to show him (that is my speciality in Helsinki).

I need to be at the faculty in 5 hours. Goodnight.

Räikkönen

I met two sweet girls from Greece. When the other one found out that I'm from Finland she was super excited: "OMG! Finland? Really? You know Kimi Räikkönen? I LOVE him!" Like one Spanish girl once told me that she wants to move to Finland and learn Finnish because of Ville Valo.

Me studying in Norway, and Andreas Thorkildsen being Norwegian is just a coincidence.

Candy

Today I really wanted some candy and I haven't realized it before, but the candy-shelfs in the supermarket here are just pathetic. Or are they just normal size and in Finland they are enormous? Or is it true what a Portuguese guy said when he didn't want any chocolate: "I'm sweet enough without". Sweet...or cheesy?

Dammit

I think I'm going to stop writing this blog, because
1) nobody asks me how I'm doing anymore
2) nobody tells me how they're doing anymore.

Lazy Sunday

I'm like 1% homesick today. To cure that, I'm going to watch now the Finnish version of Strictly Come Dancing. Then me and my roommates are going to make a sushi party vol 2.

Porto by night

Sice I'm here (4 weeks excactly) it has rained once. And then I was sleeping. So far it's been so, that when we go out, we just gather in a square called Piolho, we get drinks from bars (or sometimes just people that go around with their bikes selling cans of beer) and have them outside. There are some streets around the square that are just packed during the night, everybody is just standing outside. It's great but weird, being used to the Finnish laws. I wonder how it's going to be when the rainy season starts. I cannot believe it's October and the weather is still this great (apparently the summer was bad here and this weather is exceptional).

Mrs. Augusta

Have I told that we have a cleaner lady coming here once a week? How perfect! She is supposed to come every Thursday around 10am for 3 hours, but twice she didn't wake up to come. But the idea is great anyhow.

Homeless guy 2

The homeless guy has a friend! Last night when I got home the homeless guy was sleeping in his bed and his friend was sleeping there also, using the legs of the homeless guy as his pillow. So sweet.

Access

Today I had a test in using Access. I did study yesterday (last night) but somehow I managed to screw up the exam. Not only that, but we had to send the file to the professor by email and I managed to misspell her email adress. Two hours later I noticed that the email never went to her, I sent it again and I was worried that she'd think I did it on purpose to get more time to fix it. But I'm sure that when she opens it and sees my forms that do not work, she'll know that it's the original one.

Touchy!

Ah, a title from my favourite band :)

The Portuguese are very touchy. I'm kind of used to the greeting kisses now, but I'm having a problem with random people touching me. They come so close. Absolutely no respect my personal space (and since I'm Finnish, it's a big one!).

Human Computer Interaction

I have one course with the 1st year students (I'm on the 4th year). We were talking about icons in programmes, and the professor was demonstrating it with the "save" button, where you have a picture of a floppy disk. Apparently I'm the only one in the course who ever saw one, not to mention that I actually used it. Feeling old.

Sushi

This is how our sushi turned out yesterday (I'm obviously not studying). My flatmates were so happy about it that I'm extempted from washing the dishes for one year. Note our amazing tablecloth. It's the kitchiest thing I've ever seen.

The Biggest Loser

Oh, I went to the gym today. They were showing the Biggest Loser on TV. What kind of a gym did I sign up for? Anyway, when I saw the show I just got very hungry. That was probably not their goal.

Back to the days in Vaasa

I have my first exam tomorrow. It's now 2 am and I'm studying. Just like I did when I was doing my first degree.

Shopping

This morning I spent running around in supermarkets trying to find stuff for tomorrow's sushi-evening. Me and another Finnish girl are cooking for my flatmates because they keep feeding me their delicious food. Anyway, finally I found everything and actually found a very good Chinese supermarket, must go back there.

Then I met my Portuguese friend and we went to a flea market. On the way we passed a demonstration of some party but of course I forgot which one it was. I kind of participated (by crossing it and going shopping...hmmm. Keeping the economy running here). Some people who were filming it for some news or something said that some people went to the hairdressers before in case they would end up in the news. sweet.

The flea market was very nice, hot but nice, it was around 30 degrees here today. They were people selling their old stuff, but a lot od small designer shops also selling their products. I could have bought a lot, but since I'm a generous person and I only think of other people, I only bought one thing for my sister. Elli, here it is (Ulla, next time something for you):