Saturday, September 24, 2005

Thomasinho

I met "Thomasinho" the first time in real life. He's the guy who started the "Studying in Oporto" thread in the portugalforum.de (we have about 15 pages by now!). We had already chatted on MSN and I had seen a photo of him but he was very different from what I expected anyways.
I thought he was vegetarian so I went to have food at ComIda & Volta Light & Green (comida=food, ida & volta = two-way trip), they have vegetarian versions of typical Portuguese food. Thomas is a pesco-vegetarian, though (i.e. he eats fish but no meat), well then life won't be that difficult for him in Portugal.
At that time Thomas was still living in some kind of pension (13,50€/day) and hadn't found a room yet. I took him to my campus cos there were still announcements.
Later we met w/ a friend of him, a Turkish toxicologist who is here to do his PhD. His name is Görkem which means "marvelous" *LOL*. In a café we met other friends of Thomas who have an appartment together. Two Finnish girls (Anne & Eriika) who study Spanish & Portuguese, one Spanish girl (Saray, studies Chemistry) and a Brazilian architecture student (Adriano). When I talked to Adriano there were some confusions. When I told him that I'm from "Berlim" (the Portuguese name for Berlin) he understood "Belém".
Their appartment was awesome! Big, good furniture, big kitchen too and they seemed to get along all so well. They had gotten to know in a hostel only a few weeks ago but were so close already. Görkem had called Anne "mom" cos in Turkish [Anne] (Annä) means "mom" so everybody started calling her mom now. I decided that Adriano (the only man in the house) should be dad then.
Görkem was just a bit unlucky, he doesn't speak any Portuguese but in the appartment most of the time everbody spoke Spanish (Adriano doesn't speak English, Saray gets along well when Anne and Eriika understand her). And now I started to talk German to Thomas (also I can follow Spanish conversations more or less). Thomas called out "Babylon!!" once in a while and laughed.
We had dinner together, went to a free Hip Hop concert but the Portuguese audience wasn't partying at all so we left and went to a club "ContagiArte". It's in an old house w/ two floors and a backyard garden (and it seems everybody talks about it nowadays). On the lower floor there was ethnic music and they danced (mostly Adriano, the one w/ the Brazilian blood) until we got kicked out at 6am. When we left the club and walked down the street we noticed that there was an appartment for rent in the street so Thomas started to note down the telephone number. A car stopped and a funny looking old man got out the car. He said "If you want to rent an appartment I can show you it now". Go figure. It was about 6:30am, it was still dark and the whole bunch of us went to see the appartments!
The man kinda offended me though w/ ignorant words (no harm intended but I was too tired to overhear it), calling me the Japanese all the time. I actually met him again some weeks later but ignored him.
We took forever for the short way and I was home at 8:30 or something.

Friday, September 23, 2005

I booked a flight to Berlin over the Christmas/New Year holidays w/ AirBerlin. Last year it was the other way around... I flew to Oporto for these holidays.
But I was multitasking (MSN, surfing, booking) and also somewhat confused - I suck at deciding and I still don't know whether I really want this. But here I had this fight w/ family members - yet in Berlin all my friends will probably be away from Berlin.
The last X-Mas 2004 are unforgetable anyways :p, it's better not to compare...
Anyways... I forgot to note down my flight number. But I thought I'd receive an e-mail. I didn't...

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Rodízio NON STOP

Mark invited me to go to a Brazilian restaurant at the Ribeira (side of Gaia) with him and his girlfriend. All the waiters were Brazilian and very nice, there was also some live music (band + female singer). Diana (Mark's g/f) said she had had so much food for lunch and just ordered a soup whereas Mark and I ordered a "Rodízio NON STOP", a meat madness.
Just to give you an idea: In Brazil instead of saying "that's a piece of cake" ("das ist ein Kinderspiel") they say "it's beef" ("das ist Rindfleisch") b/c beef is so common in Brazil. Brazilians eat a hell of a lot of meat (and lots of feijão=beans) and a Rodízio consists of rice, bananas, vegetables, feijão and then the waiter will bring you grilled meat of all kinds directly from the kitchen, you get some hot slices and the waiter goes to the next person, in a few minutes the next waiter will bring more meat (you get the idea of "Non Stop"?). I ate a hell of a lot! (My stomach hurt that night :P) Diana refused to have some of our food but she couldn't resist the bananas!
That night Mark and I still had to study for "Automation Systems". We went to Diana's place and as it was quite difficult to investigate on the questions Mark didn't bring me home before 2:30am X_X.
In the meanwhile I've quit "Automation Systems", the professor is a bit strange, he doesn't teach much, he always asks questions and if you can't answer you have to find out until the next time. Also there are many things I need to know I never learned in Berlin and 4 classes (all involve lots of work) is enough!
So I kept "Automatic Control" (3rd yr mechanical engineering), "Industrial Computation" 5th yr mechanical engineering), "Digital Control" and "Operational Investigation" (both 4th yr electrical engineering), all automation classes.

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