on my way

to that very special man who was my life long before we actually met

thank you :) without you i wouldn't know life is so much!

sometimes it's not wordable

i just had an encounter with words but where it was the non words that were acting the stronger part of things. i think from very young i've preffered touch and smell and other ways of saying what's important. there's a world of ways to communicate and touch. 31 years ago i already knew that which is such a huge part of my life now ** (thanks ma for reminding me!)

the view of you by the window and me

a couple of years back i spent a few months in the room of a guy who was away traveling. it was a bit scary to find that his cd collection looked just like mine, we seemed to have all the same albums even when they were strange things that are not so common. i immediately liked the few things i found there that i didn't know before. and i'm sure he'd like the ones i have that he doesn't. funnily enough the guy was from a northern european country but he had a black and white picture of my city on his work table. i remember finding this song there and it made me feel like home, where i had this album stored for a long time.



I had a plan
That was built on thinking too long
Canadian winters
At home with your sisters
the romance was hard to ignore
You were beautiful
I was happy to fall
So happy to fall

I remember you searching
I thought you were searching
that's how I picked up the phone
Happy to hear you remembered the view
So glad to assume it was fate
I thought at the time it was clear
I thought at the time it was clear

So I stood at the station
With a plan and a pocket of poems
Heroically tragic
Bearded and blind with obsession
I'm a car without hope
Too close to the ditch to go far
I showed you my field
I said this is my field
But you weren't impressed

You said why are we here
Your motives are clear
In this room with a view
and so much of you
is so far from here
it's so far from here
it's so far from here
it's so far from here

Oh my heart
It just fell apart
And i wished I could show you
The same view
of you by the window and me
feeling fine
And me just feeling fine
Yeah me just feeling fine

how many days have you lived?

today my niece cristina asked me 'how many days have you lived?'. i took my mobile and did the calculation and i had the answer: i have lived 11315 days so far. 1648 weeks. 378 weeks.

floating in a day dedicated to children *

* ...

hOme

i'm glad i didn't leave without seeing this :)

is love the only real sugar?

sometimes i think so, sometimes i think the opposite xx maybe there's just a huge variety of love, of loves and of real sugars, and love is a much broader word than the way we hear it used most times.

good morning

sing your melody

this song marks an important time of my last 14 months in lisbon. in the beginning, when i still thought i was here for 3 or 4 months, when i could hardly think and feel and read and speak and move in portuguese. and somehow this melody marked a moment when i understood and accepted lots of things and that made my life bigger and healthier and i got more in tune with this place. nice film too.

good times!

i travel and travel and i still haven't found a place that touches me as deep giving me so much space and peace and inspiration and that shines such a light on me as iceland does **

:)

for my sweet 'diabrete'

the stars we forgot to count

welcome rumi :D

the son of one of my favorite people in the world just got to this side of things and is now breathing in his first days here :):):):):):):) it makes me think of so many things and feel such a special sweetness and a deep, very much under the skin happiness :D today a very special part of the world is more populated :) namaste rumi!!

easy smile

it's quite amazing all that we go through in life. and all the times we fall in love.

smoother road

spirited away

i spent many hours of yesterday and today doing something i love to do - i emptied 2 shelves and 2 drawers of stuff that i took to the recycling spot close to my house :) and suddenly i had gone through stuff i've been storing in the house for over 10 years, things i wrote, stuff i kept thinking i'd read, leaflets and magazine articles that once interested me, piles of maths exercises i did at school... so many things! all waiting to be recycled :) and my shelves & drawers with all this space :) so i can put new things on them :) space is great!

"the further out you look, the further out you'll be"

chungking express

this film made me go straight to the chungking mansions when i first arrived in hong kong 5 years ago or so. the building has the whole world in it. i tried a few different rooms on my stays there. some were about 2 meters wide and i couldn't even open my arms inside them. i felt sticky from the humidity and i remember how the skin hit the walls too close to the body. i had the best indian food of my life there. and going to a different floor i tried exquisite ethiopian food for the first time. different floors and different blocks of the mansions offer cuisine from every part of the world and the smells in the air are like being inside a globe full of spices from everywhere mixed with the happiness of people coming from all corners of the world to find these tastes there. there was never a quiet moment in any of the times i stayed there. the elevator is busy at all times of the day and night. and i love the mansions in daytime... but it's at night that the full tower of babel effect comes to live :) this is one of those spots in the world that make you reconsider the geographies that we bring to life. i think you can find anything you really need in the chungking mansions. except for love, maybe. or you can, with an expiry date

this one is for andre

while a is in the air to berlin i sing along... l-o-l-a lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola (have fun atje!)

* **

best UNO game ever!!

on my way to hong kong to get my flight home after my first year in asia i got stuck at the airport as usual when departing the 'indian subcontinent'... but how can we complain about biman airlines making us wait for 12 hours when we had so much fun?! good times at the airport in dhaka, bangladesh xx

i love elephants

these amazing creatures have such deep tender eyes and amazing skin and their legs are so wide and they have some sort of confidence in their movements and a really sweet way of caring for their little ones :) they made my second day in sri lanka really magical and reminded me how beautiful the world is when i arrived from london where i really couldn't see that xx they go on moving inside me

white winters

i miss listening to this in a cold northern country

sweet afternoon

... and you want to travel blind ...

"i've been around the world a few times and now only banality still interests me"

"he liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time, those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories"

i always come back to this film, it's a circular thing, i'm never out of it, i circle and circle and often we touch again

( )

*

part of me left already

there is a part of me that went to indonesia ahead of the rest of me. while i'm still in portugal, i feel that little particles of me are crossing the oceans, moving east, finding their way around south east asia. i take long to answer questions in lisbon because i'm looking at an island i can't yet see. i take longer to feel things here because those things need to travel east east east and try to bump into the pieces of me scattered between here and sumatra. while i swim in lisbon i sense some parts of me swim in a far away ocean. when i smile now i don't know if it's from things from here or from in between or from the land of the gorgeous volcanoes. the sun touches me here but also along the way. i'm traveling already, moving places, and i'm not quite all here x

"i'm lucky we're in love in every way, lucky to have stayed where we have stayed, lucky to be coming home someday"

this song says something so simple :)

darjeeling, sikkim and kalimpong

anna is going to go to sikkim and she wants to see pictures and know a bit more about the place, so here goes. it's beautiful up there :) it's green and moist and yes, it's officially india, but it's a mix of a low tibetan with butanese and sikkimese culture and that common high himalayan ambience with beautiful mountain peaks showing up every now and then and with prayer flags shaking n the wind and making you smile and everything seams to be floating and you travel in sikkim but also to many other places as you get that tibetan feeling of everything being in connection. the food is the normal momos and thick noodles and sometimes you also find that more touristy menu with food from other parts of india and even fried eyes! in some places there is really delicious food :) the best momo place in pelling takes forever - so go with time and patience, bot GO because they're sooooo good and have a special sauce and all! strangely enough in pelling there is also a pizzeria where the guy has a great music collection and even some sort of chocolate dessert if i remember it right ;) the temples in sikkim are beautiful and if you try hard it's possible to sleep at least in one of them. look at the books in the temples and the paintings in the walls... they're amazing in sikkim! you'll see lots that you can't see in tibet anymore. the monastery trek is easy and gorgeous and people are really nice along the way :)

on your way to sikkim you'll go through darjeeling. the train up from kolkatta is amazing. i took the Darjeeling Mail to New Jalpaiguri (me and k met on that night train!). you can then take the old toy train up to darjeeling. i think me, k and a took a shared jeep. ALIMENT hotel is a great place to stay!! it's a steep walk till you get there but i highly recommend you do the walk! it has an amazing library, really really great :) the restaurant at the top is super cozy and you can read the books there. they have pancakes! the dorm rooms were super cheap, 60 rupees per bed! and there's internet and international phone calls on the ground floor. they also sell a great chocolate bar called TOURIST ;) try it, it comes in milk chocolate and white chocolate flavors and i remember when i was traveling with k, a, j and ka we finished them all...! good times :) darjeeling is beautiful... i don't want to say too much because it's great to explore and be surprised. (just a hint - look for the japanese peace pagoda). getting the permit to sikkim in darjeeling is a pain in the ass but it is definitely worth it!! you have to go from one office to the other a few times... you can take rides at the back of jeeps but some drivers don't like it so they'll try to push you away! at the market in darjeeling look for the super cheap momos sold in dark little holes in the back alleys - they're the best! there's a good cinema in darjeeling and joey's pub is crap! there's some sort of nightlife in town though... explore! oh, and if you feel the need to watch some soccer, i remember seeing barça beating arsenal in the middle of the night on a little tv somewhere in a small restaurant downtown...

sikkim is wonderful :) the monastery trek from pelling to tashiding is fantastic! and you can do it like we did - 1 day walking, 1 day resting... perfect rhythm!! if you still have the stamina after that you can go to kalimpong - it used to be buthan :) the town has a special and strange atmosphere, interesting... there are beautiful temples and at the market they sell cheese! (you know how it feels to find real cheese when you're in india!) i also remember eating the best poori that year at a tiny place close to the ATM in kalimpong. the same street has good bakeries that make you smile like a kid :D good croissants!






































































the atmosphere is different in kalimpong. the temples have another feeling to them



you might see WIZ packages in the ground all over the place and that could tempt you to buy them and give them a try..... but DON'T DO IT! just leave the thing alone!! it's really really REALLY bad!


i think poori tastes much better after trekking for 2 weeks :)