About letters

I can hardly imagine the day technology could substitute the pleasure of sending and receiving letters or postcards. No secret I am a big fan of this practice, and facing the lack of adepts among my friends, I ended up joining Postcrossing (which I find a brilliant project!).

Sure Skype does a great job in connecting people, that is indisputable (Skype has in fact been my most frequent companion in the past couple of years). But I feel that the paper brings a more poetic presence of the person missed - and this has nothing to do with the writer linguistic skills. It is about the emotion of finding an envelope when coming home after a long day, those few seconds of anxiety to discover the content while tearing the envelope that feels like ages, the feeling that this piece of paper carries bits of someone and that it travelled all the way, across countries and oceans, only to bring you that message. 

I cry a river whenever I receive letters from my grandparents and my aunt Laiz, from Brazil. The letters are not sad, quite the contrary. Full of love and care, they always comfort me. Choices I have made in life have set us apart, and I miss them everyday. Today I received another letter full or art, as they always are.

with love, from Atibaia

About the romanticisation of things

... and of a time in the past, of a political ideology, of a condition. Some time ago I was a following a very heated debate (about an issue that is not exactly relevant now) when all of a sudden I felt a slap on the face: one of the speakers accused the other of romanticisation of poverty. That rocked me! It ringed a bell and it made me think over whether I could possibly be doing just that, not only towards poverty but also, for instance, towards communism. I must admit that I have never dedicated much of my time to better understand any of these, neither socialism nor communism and even less poverty. And this whole romanticisation thing definitely deserves some more reading, too. 

Last weekend I finally visited the Memento Park. I had been meaning to go there since I moved to Budapest - which now makes exact 5 months - but kept postponing it, so typical of me. So I did, and it was magic. Some could say that this fascination with this period of history would not persist have I lived in those times or under its late effects. Maybe, maybe not. For the time being I will keep flirting with these ideas.

One of the statues at Memento park

I took a few pictures there, surely fewer that I would have liked to. My poor fingers could not remain gloveless long enough! I will arrange them on a nice Flickr album all of their own, soon hopefully.

Has this story reminded someone of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris? :)

post scriptum: an album for the beautiful statues of Memento park