Monday 2019_01_21

I haven’t actually vomited but I really want to!

I don’t know why but I tossed and turned in bed until well after 4am this morning. I’d only had one coffee yesterday. Anyway, I didn’t surface until mid-day, and then panicked because jPhone was reminding me about something. (It turned out I’d not deleted an appointment that was no longer going to happen.)

So I responded to a few emails and revisited my interview and focus-group questions. I still can’t see how to reduce the number of questions. There was also quite a lot of e-conversation about meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, and an annoying amount (i.e. more than none) of administrivia around research ethics. I know why ethical precautions necessary/beneficial and I fully support taking such precautions, so I don’t skimp on them. But it seems to absorb far too much time, especially GoogleTranslating consent forms and information sheets.)

However, I came across something exciting while scrolling through Twitter during a coffee-break.

Click the graphic to go to the actual tweet.

A big democracy event. In the Netherlands. On an island I want to visit. Within cycling distance of IJMuiden. What’s not to like? As my wife pointed out, I may no longer be an EU citizen by the time of the event. I’ll use my Australian passport if the EU gets snippy about UK citizens visiting (which it almost certainly will not.) I also need to look into whether and how I can share my citizenship of $deity’s own earth with my wife.

After battling GoogleTranslate for a few hours more, I realised it was late and I needed dinner. I had hoped to go to Prema, just around the corner from my hotel, but it had closed for the evening. So I hobbled up to Potato Place to buy some snacks and water from a supermarket.

Unfortunately this recording doesn’t do justice to the base licks.

The supermarket was closed, I was still hungry, and I’d forgotten about the delicious doggy-bag Hugo and Eliana had given me. The usual crowd of stoners and grebos was around, and the samba band was back, including their gimp-masked mascot. So I ordered beans, salad and [fried] cassava from one of the cafes. Mistake! The salad was unappetising, the inside of the cassava was like deep-fried crispy flip-flop and at the bottom of the beans was a bloody great lump of dead animal. Now you know why I want to give my stomach-contents an airing.

To cap it all, a sweaty, probably drunk bloke sat next to me. He wasn’t malicious but he just didn’t get that I don’t speak Portuguese [yet], despite me showing him several times (via GoogleTranslate on jPhone) that I don’t understand Portuguese. He kept on talking at me – he could have been saying anything from ‘where are you staying?’ to ‘how much does it cost to legally have sex with an underage Antarctic aardvark in your country?’ Eventually I asked for my bill, paid it, left most of the alleged food, and slunk back to my hotel.

So, not the world’s most successful day, but the arrangements that have been made for the rest of this week (thanks to Hugo, Leandro and Renato), and the samba band made it positive on balance.