Journal | Unexpected things that I miss...

 There are some obvious things I miss from back home. My dogs. Some people. The food - oh, my God, the food! But all of these things were expected somehow. I prepared myself for that, I knew I would miss them, even before my plane took flight. There are also things about how people live here that are just weird to me - like how people don't mind drinking warm soft drinks, which I find baffling... But these small cultural shocks are also not unexpected.

Be that as it may, after two years at Oxford however - with only a brief interlude of 20 days back home - I came to find out that there are some unexpected things I miss. Things that used to be part of my routine, things I had become accustomed to, and that I miss, now that they are absent. Small things, silly things, things I can live without, but things I miss nonetheless.

5. The atmosphere of the mall when everyone else is gone... 

The Westgate Mall, at around 22:30h

The other day, I went to the Curzon to watch Deadpool & Wolverine, and by the time I left the cinema, it was late enough that all of the shops at the mall were closed. I stood there for a while, watching the lack of any human movement, and I remembered how I used to like being at the mall in my hometown, after everything was closed...

 It happened all the time. My family had a shop there, and when my brother had to close the shop at night, I got to tag along. I often retreated to the storage area upstairs until everyone else was gone, and I only came down when my brother was the only one left. Often times we would be there for another hour, him showing me all of the new perfumes that had arrived since my last visit, and I kept the scent strips in my backpack so it would smell nice. Other times I would get some food at the food court, just before it closed, and we would eat at the shop, when everyone else was gone. 

I always enjoyed the walk to the car. Especially when we stayed longer than usual, because then, even the other shop owners would be gone, and it was almost as if we were in a post-apocalyptic video game, the rest of the world was gone and there were only the two of us left... 

Well what can I say? The last of us isn't my favourite video game for nothing... I don't get to experience the mall as a liminal space as often, but when I do... It's pretty amazing.

4. Enjoying the ride... 

Oxford high street. Walking back to my room

 I used to go on drives all the time.  I wasn't usually the person driving, but I was in the passenger seat, enjoying the ride. Sometimes, usually on weekend mornings we would take the long way to the magazine stand so I could get the latest X-men comic book. Other times, we had an errand to run, like getting some food for the dogs, but we'd drive all over town, making multiple stops along the way, driving up the main avenue all the way to the Park with the Government buldings and back. And sometimes we would just go for a ride, late in the evening, with no particular destination, not necessarily stopping anywhere.

I don't really have that anymore. I rarely get into cars here, and when I do, it's usually because I am getting a ride to some work thing, so it's never... easy. I always have to worry about maintaining conversation, about saying pleasant things, about appearing normal... But a while ago, a friend of mine took me on a ride around the countryside, and I remember how much I enjoy the feeling of just sitting on a car, driving around, enjoying the ride. Taking the long way home.

I ride my bike here sometimes (though, not to work anymore, because I am not very good at it), but it's not the same. I always have to concentrate so hard on the cars and the buses, it's not relaxing at all... Which makes me miss those drives all the more...

3. Getting the nice cold feeling when I walk into the movie theatre

 

  Going to the movies has always been the most reliable get-me-out-of-the-house activity, since I first moved to São Paulo. In fact, I would often say that my favourite place to go in SP was Sala São Paulo, to watch the state philharmonic, but that's only because there were about ten cinemas within walking distance of my building, and they split the vote. 

There is much I enjoy about the experience of going to the movies (provided the room is not too crowded, of course, because a crowd can ruin a movie), but one thing in particular I have always enjoyed was the cold breeze that hit me the minute I walked into the cinema, the instant relief from the warm weather. 

Oxford has 4 cinemas (it had five when I first moved here), and some of those have saved my life here on a few occasions - in fact, I have a post coming about all the cinemas in town. However, they don't have that cold breeze thing. I think perhaps because it never really gets too hot here, so they never crank up the ac, and the temperature in the room is not unpleasant by any means, but it lacks that delicious thermal shock of being cooler than the air outside. And I kind of miss it. 

2. Waiting for our turn to order at the weekend steakhouse

I love this tree (London Plane) at Magdalen College

 

I know. I said I would talk about food, but hear me out. 

My family has a go-to place to get take-away barbecues back home. It's not the kind of place where you get a sad individual portion squished in a plastic box. No. This is the kind of place where you go to get a family meal, stuff to put around the table so that everyone can share. It is this huge place with brick barbecues from one wall to the next and at least a dozen different options of meat. They also have accompaniments. Rice, mayonnaise, cassava flour, the works. All the things a self respecting steak house should have. And in the weekends, around lunch time, mother would often send my brother there to fetch us a family meal. I would tag along. 

The food was excellent of course, and I'm not gonna lie, two years in, I have not yet adapted to the lack of excellent food in this part of the world. But the food is not exactly what made this special... It was going there. We would stand in line, waiting for our turn to order, and my brother would often let me help choose what kinds of meat we would get. He did all the talking of course, interacting with the guys at the grill, talking to the owner at the cash register as if they were old acquaintances - which in a way they were, the guy would always ask how the family was going. And I enjoyed being along for the ride, watching how well he navigated through that flood of social interactions, as if it was easy, as if it was nothing... On the best days, we would order a small portion of chicken hearts just for us, and we ate in the car, using toothpicks, like criminals, having fun with the fact that no one at home would even suspect we had had a small entree before the main meal. 

I miss that kind of thing here... Nowadays I still have weekends when I don't really want to cook because I am too tired, or too lazy, or just not a very good cook. But I just end up getting some fast food, or making a quick Tesco run. It's just... not the same.

1. Knowing that the next car around the corner could be for me

Bus stop in front of the main entrance of the John Radcliffe Hospital. I was at the lab until after 9 this day.

 

Yesterday, I had a long day at the lab. I didn't get out of there until 9 or 9:30 in the evening. And when I was in the bust stop, all by myself (buses are far and far between at that hour), I caught myself watching the cars that turned around the corner, and thinking back of when I would get out of a late shift and wait for someone to pick me up. 

My hometown is the kind of place where anybody who wants to get anywhere needs a car to get there. Kind of like L.A., I'm told. I however, have never driven much. And though I have always wished fervently that there would be someone who would help me practice driving, the fact is that most of the time, when I was out at night - usually because of a late shift at the hospital - someone would pick me up. It was usually my brother, or sometimes my father. I would stand outside the hospital, near the guardhouse, where it was safe. The drive home took about 20 minutes. Often, we would talk. I would have tales to tell from my shift. Or we would listen to music, and I'd watch the city passing by the window on the passenger seat. My side of the car. It was nice. And it isn't that I didn't appreciate this at the time - I was certainly grateful to not have to take the bus that late by myself - but it was something mundane. After all, I had shifts at the hospital every week. It was part of my routine. A habit.

I particularly remember this one time, I was getting out of a surgical shift at the Regional Hospital, and it him a long time to arrive. I walked around the field around the helipad, listening to an audiobook of Imzadi by Peter David. I watched the cars turning around the corner, hoping every time that the next one would be for me. Until it was. 

Well, yesterday, as I watched the cars turning the corner towards the main entrance of the John Radcliffe Hospital, I caught myself thinking about this. And I realized that the thing I missed wasn't the comfort of the air conditioning, the privilege of not needing to use public transportation or even the conversation. I missed the warmth of knowing that there would be someone coming for me, even at that late hour. So I stood there, watching the cars turning that corner, wishing that one of those was for me, knowing that it wouldn't be...

And eventually the bus came and I headed back to my room.

Music | A playlist for July

This month, I made a playlist. 

I have never really been a playlist person, not in the mix-tape meaning of the word. I have playlists on Spotify, but they tend to be little more than large repositories of music that fits a certain genre. "Indie Rock", "Bossa Nova", "Opera",... Things like that. And that has suited me for a long time. For one thing, I seldom listen to new music releases. Even for my favorite bands, it will sometimes take me months before I give any new album a try. I never thought too much about it, I don't really know why. My taste skews towards older music - which sometimes means the earliest albums from a favourite band, and sometimes means music from the 30s, 40s and 50s... And once I find songs that I like I listen to them over and over again. All of this means that I never really needed  - or wanted - to make monthly playlists. Until now. 

It happened on a bus ride to the lab. I was listening to "I'm a Cuckoo" - number one on this playlist - and it dawned on me that there were fragments of the lyrics that translated my thoughts better than I possibly could, and it occurred to me to put it on a playlist. Then, another song came along and I added that... And another. And I kept adding songs that fit this patter until the very last days of July, and I went back to this playlist, again and again and again. These are not just songs that I listened to repeatedly this month, though... My heart, my vulcan heart, sometimes feels like a wild dragon, that is particularly difficult to ride. These are that songs that spoke to the twists and turns of that dragon's flight. 

1. I'm a cuckoo, by Belle and Sebastian

 On the tail of what was easily the best concert I've ever been to in my life, I was listening to a lot of Belle and Sebastian, earlier this month. Mostly I gravitated to Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003), which has my top Belle and Sebastian Song, "Piazza New York Catcher", but it was "I'm a cuckoo" that captured my heart. The final line ("There's something wrong with me,...") was easy to enough to relate to, and there were bits ("I'm glad that you are waiting with me / Tell me all about your day") that reminded me of a time when I wasn't entirely on my own. But it was these lines in the end that turned out to be things that I had in my throat the whole time, but couldn't bring myself to say to one person who should really listen.

"I was there for you
When you were lonely
I was there when you were sad
I was there when you were bad
Now it's my time of need
I'm thinking, do I have to plead to get you by my side?"

 

 2. Bus, by Travis

 

 

Before I moved to Oxford, I came across new music more often. It happened mostly during car rides, and though I never really enjoy having to "break in" a new song, some of those became some of the favorites I listen to all the time. Since I've been here, though, that connection ceased and I am the poorer for it. But this one song came to me, and at the exactly right time. "Bus" captures the bittersweet feeling of thinking you have something, only to realize that nothing was ever like what it looked like in your heart and in your mind. There is a theme to this playlist - as perhaps it was inevitable, because there was also a theme in my mind and in my heart. An absence, that dominated my thoughts more than anyone I know could understand or even believe. And processing this absence, much like the lyrics say, I too "lost a little bit of trust"...

I thought it was just us
Waiting on this bus
Darling, I have lost a little bit of trust
I thought it was just us
Waiting on this bus
Waiting on a gust of wind to blow us away
Away to better days, away to better days

 

3. Will anybody ever love me, by Surfjan Stevens 

 

 

I first listened to Surfjan Stevens in the soundtrack of Call Me By Your Name (one of my top ten movies ever), but I didn't really get into the rest of his stuff after that. I don't even know how this particular song came to pop up on my Spotify. But it did. And it spoke to the questions that arose in my mind when I understood that my best friend had grown weary of my friendship. Because if this person had become sick of me, I have to wonder - a wondering that is yet to be met with an answer - will it ever be any different? Or, in Surfjan's words, "will anybody ever love me?". Becuase it this person couldn't, perhaps it means that no one ever will....

Will anybody ever love me?
For good reasons, without grievance
Not for sport

Will anybody ever love me?
In every season pledge allegiance to my heart
Pledge allegiance to my burning heart

 

4. Trains to Brazil, by Guillemot

 

 

 The title of this one is perfect. I have no idea what it means to the people who wrote the song, but it means something to me, something difficult to put into words. And the rhythm, the music, the style, everything is just about... Anger. Anger about the waste of it all, about having to watch this beautiful, precious, rare thing fall through my fingers like dry sand, unable to do anything about it. And it you replace "cold winter" for "hot summer mornings", yeah...  The do remind me of that all the time. Only there's no place for that memory to go now.

 

And I think of you on cold winter mornings
Darling they remind me of when we were at school
Nothing really mattered when you called out my name
In fact Nothing really mattered at all 

5. Somebody that I used to know, by Gotye

 

 

I listened to this one at the peak of the hype, but I had never really thought about the lyrics. I had never thought, for instance, about the reason why there are two voices, and about who these characters are, what story are they trying to tell. But now I listen, and I can't help but pay attention to the girl, and to what she's saying. Because it seems to me that the guy is complaining that she is too harsh for cutting out all contact. But then she speaks, and she talks about what he did. And you know what? I understand her. The guy says that she "didn't have to do that", but I think that she kind of did. The worst moment for me is when she talks about him gaslighting her, because yeah, that's heavy. Thinking that someone has your best interests at heart and trusting them completely, only to realize that they were only doing what was best for them, and using your shortcomings against you, making you believe that you are even more broken than you really are... That hurts. 

Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over
But had me believing it was always something that I'd done

And I don't wanna live that way
Reading into every word you say

 

6. Gota d'agua, by Chico Buarque

 

 In the last days of the month, I decided to listen to one of Chico Buarque's albums (which brought to mind a lot of complicated thoughts, that perhaps should inspire their own post), but in doing that, I came across this old song for the first time. There is a story here in these songs... A story of loss, of anger, of trying desperately to do something about it. Then fear and sadness and anger at realizing nothing was as it seemed before. A weariness of pretending that nothing is wrong. And this song captured it all. Which was comforting... It reminded me of a universal truth: that even though I know no other human beings whose hearts have the depth of my own, not personally, no one who could fathom who I really am, there's not a feeling I can experience that haven't been felt by a kindred spirit in the past, no pain whose remedy I can't find in the classics, be that an old novel, or this very old song (which is, for better or worse, a Brazilian classic). And though the pain and the bitter-sweetness have not left me, it is good to know that at one point, there was someone else whose heart was "full of mágoa". And that that is okay 

Deixe em paz meu coração                                                    (Let my heart be
Que ele é um pote até aqui de mágoa                                   Because it is a put full of hurt,
E qualquer desatenção, faça não                                         And any lack of attention, don't do that
Pode ser a gota d'água                                                          It could be the last drop)

 

Travel | Touring Belgium

This trip was a bit different from any other trip I've taken. I'm a soprano at the Jesus College chapel choir, and we went on a tour of Belgium this summer, with 4 performances over the course of a few days. It was different, different even from last year's tour in Amsterdam, in part because there was considerably less time to explore freely. Still, I managed to see some pretty cool stuff... 

 Days 1-4 

 For the first four days we stayed at the Abbaye de Maredsous, and we had two performances in the region. I expected this to be a calmer, quieter part of the trip, and indeed it was. We stayed in the monastery and took a tour of the distillery in the last day, but other than that, there wasn't much to do other than walk around, visit the farm shop, have some cheese at the gift shop, things like that... The tour of the abbey itself was very interesting, with the monks talking about how, even today, monastic life is about studyng alone, praying alone, praying in a group and receiving guests... I spent a lot of time in the cloisters reading and writing. 

Day 5

On the fifth day I had a day off, so I went to Brussels to walk around the capital and - the thing I was looking forward to the most - go to a Belle and Sebastian concert that evening. 

 The tour started at the parc du cinquantenairemont, from which I walked down to the buildings of the European Parliament. They weren't open for visitation, but I wanted to have a look at the place, and it was on the way down to the city centre. From there I walked by the royal palace, to the spetacular views of the mont des arts.

The cinquantenaire arch. There was a little board game fair at the park while I was there, but sadly there wasn't mush time to stop and try a new game.

 

The European Parliament. The writing on the wall features all of the languages in the European Union.

 

The Royal Palace.

Mont des arts

 

The carillon next to the Mont des arts. I got to listen to it as it rang, it was a special little moment.

I included the manneken pis on my tour, which was dressed in a weird blue fluffy onesie... I didn't get to learn why that particular outfit, but apparently, nowadays the little statue is dressed for about half the year

Manneken Pis

I finished my tour at Grand Place/Grote Markt, a beautiful square in the city centre surrounded by guildhalls, the Flamboyant town hall and the Bread house, which houses the city museum. From there there was still time to have a look at the city cathedral (Cathédrale Saints-Michel-et-Gudule). The church was beautiful, and immediately after I entered I noticed the statues of the apostles, in each of the columns that supported the main vault. The pulpit, with carvings depicting the expulsion from paradise was also very beautiful. Near the altar, at the other end of the church there was a relic of St. John Paul II, which I found kind of cool.

Brussel's town hall

The Bread House

 

Another corner...

 

Façade of the cathedral

Expulsion from paradise

All the while I was walking by these landmarks, I stumbled upon some pretty cool places around Brussels, which is really the best part of this kind of wandering self-guided exploration...

Scary Tin-Tin at a bookshop window

 

I spent some time here, looking through the book boxes outside the shop, trying not to go crazy buying new books :)

The city, talking to me

A record store

Look at this charming little corner cinema... I have a fondness for cinemas, they are always a refuge for me when I am having a hard time...

The city speaking to me again...

I really liked the sign, but the cinema itself seemed abandoned, sadly...

 

Finally, it was time to stand in line for the gig. This was the best gig I have ever been to, but it deserves a post of its on. All I'm going to say now is this: it was amazing.
 

The line for the Belle and Sebastian gig outside the Ancienne Belgique

Day 6

On Day 6 we had a performance at the Flemish Coastal city of Ostend. Being near the ocean for the first time in months, I wanted nothing more than to spend some time at the beach, enjoying the sea, and that's exactly what I did. I found a nice spot, watched the waves, walked up and down the coast line, had some nice food, and relaxed for a whole day. 

Ostend. This is the only picture I took before my batteries ran out, but that was okay... The day wasn't about photographs at all...

Day 7

On the final day, I had a few hours to explore Bruges, location of our final performance. I took a boat tour of the town (on a much smaller boat than the one in Berlin a few weeks ago), which was very informative. A particular highlight was getting to see the house where Audrey Hepburn lived when she was in Bruges. Then I went to a couple of bookshops, looking for my traditional copy of Harry Potter in the local language. As Bruges is in the flemish part of Belgium, it would have been nice to get a copy in Flemish, but as it turns out there isn't one, so I had to settle for the Dutch version of the deathly hallows. 

Audrey Hepburn's house, view from the canal

The tower of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Lady), the tallest structure in Bruges. I stopped down later, to see the Michelangelo Madonna they house in there, but the exhibition was a bit of a let down. The Madonna was stolen already (or there were a couple of attempts at stealing it), so you can only see it from many meters away, and the statue wasn't made to be appreciated from such a distance, which is unfortunate.

 

There was much in Bruges that I would have liked to see, the museums in particular, and the art of Van Eyck, but there wasn't much time with our schedule of rehearsals and performances. Furthermore, on the only day I had to look around, all of the major museums were closed. But I got to visit a really cool place: the torture museum. This was especially cool to me because, growing up, I had an "inquisition phase", during which I was trying to learn everything I could about the holy inquisition. I still remember the word document I compiled with information collated from multiple websites. And at Bruges, I got to see many of the torture devices I had only ever read about. What is more, most of the items in display were originals, not replicas, which made the museum that much more interesting. 

This is the famous iron chair

Isn't this cage simmilar to the one Madmartigan was locked in, in Willow?

The breast ripped. It does exactly what it sounds like.

In addition to information about torture devices, the museum also had some info about tools of humiliation. This barrel for instance was a common punishment for drunkards in some parts of the world.

An original Judas' craddle. One of the most impressive items on display at the museum. By the ways, the walls in the back are the original walls of a prison that used to be located at the site of the museum (in the heart of the city centre). The exhibition is underground.

An original iron maiden.

After the museum I had lunch at the main square (Bruges Markt) and visited the historium, which was kind of like a precursor to a holoprogram in a way. This museum supposedly provides you with an experience of what Bruges was like during the time when Jan Van Eyck lived here, but what it actually is is a movie. The only thing is that instead of watching the movie in a theatre, you move through a house, watching different scenes in different rooms, the rooms in which those scenes take place. That way, instead of just visual and auditory clues there's also an olfactory element to the experience, a sense of actually being in the room when those things happened. The story was about an apprentice of Van Eyck who lost an expensive bird his master required. It was super cool. 

View of the Belfry, from my lunch table across the Markt

Provinciaal Hof, where the Historium is. This is also where the Waterhalle used to be, the central port of Bruges. Kind of unbelievable, but even now, the river runs beneath the building.

Inside the historium. We see the scene unfold in the other room. Notice Van Eyck at the back, talking to the main character of the story. 

While the story unfold we climb up the building, and after the end, you get out at the balconies of the Provinciaal Hof, to a beautiful view of the Markt.

View of the restaurants in the Makt. There's also a fnac on that side, something I had never seen outside of São Paulo. 

The European Union flag, with the Belfry in the background.