Meet...

Mr. Aicsou Taumbom! xD




This was the puppet we did for testing walk cycles... Obviously it was also to learn how to make the structure... but most of us got carried away and gave them faces and (somewhat) personalities!





Aicsou and Anja's girl...



the first walk... not very nice, the steps are way too small...



and the second walk cycle... better, it starts pretty nice but in the end I was too hasty. I hope I have the time to give it one more try!

Recipes...

When João was here, we cooked quite a lot! (well, at least to my standards...)
First we did some "Pastéis de Nata" for Eni's birthday...



And then some "Queques de Cenoura" (carrot muffins) also for Eni. We wanted to give her some Portuguese sweets, besides the Vintage Porto from 2003.





Aaaand, almost in the end, João decided to make up something, based on the "Pastéis de Nata" recipe... and it was so good! These were actually Eni's favorites! (chocolate never fails...)
So here, have some pictures and the recipe written by João (because Eni wanted to do it, which she did, and now I noticed there's another roll of that pasty in the fridge... probably more coming!)





Manheuse Chocolate Custards

pre made puff pasty
4 egg yolks
2 tablespoons of flour
3 tablespoons of sugar (maybe more or less, according to your taste)
chocolate (whatever chocolate you like, whatever amount you like, wise men say “no amount of chocolate is too much chocolate)
2 or 3 teaspoons of coffee
1 teaspoon of cardamom
1 ½ cup of whole milk
1 cup or small box of cream
cinnamon (wise women say “no amount of cinnamon is too much cinnamon”)
other ingredients you may find interesting to throw in the mix, a personal touch is always good
Begin to fill the cups with the paste. Instructions on how to do so vary from paste to paste and cup to cup, but usually instructions may be found on the box or cover sheet. Anyway, it's good to have this done before starting with the filling, so you can focus on the filling later. Also, it's boring so it's good to put it away as quick as you can.
Having this done, you can start by melting the chocolate, if you use it in bars (which i advise) in the lightest fire you can. You can help it not sticking by adding some butter, just a teaspoon (oops, forgot to add the butter up there, but it's optional, anyway...). Have it melted, but don't waste too much time and start adding the milk, cream, and the egg yolks. Start stirring and don't stop until the very end. I know it sounds a bit boring and tiring, but you'll start smelling it and then you won't want to stop.
Anyway, add the cardamom, coffee cinnamon too. After a while, the yolks must be cooked already, so you can start tasting and adding more coffee or other ingredients so it meets your taste. In the beginning, the mix will look maybe a bit too light, but it will darken eventually, don't worry.
When there are no more chocolate lumps in the mix, add the sugar and the flour and stir away till you have a soft paste. Once you achieve this, you can stop the fire and start filling the cups (see, if you hadn't done them before, you would have to do them now...).
Once filled, put them in the oven, which must be pre-heated and as hot as possible, so the paste gets really crusty.
Take them out when they look good enough or when you can't resist the smell anymore.

Character Design

For my Animation class we have to make a stop-motion based on a story the teacher gave us.
It must have 2 characters... briefly, the story is: one is eating, the other one distracts him and gets his food, the first one gets angry and hits him and manages to get the food back.

The idea is to work on the expressions and in the animation itself, and not so much about extending the story.
We are going to have a king and a jester :)
Here are the character designs that I did, for my group to work on (we are now in the process of building the puppets, so more on that later!)


The first sketch for the king


More sketches for the king: expressions, chewing...


Adding the jester


Sizes, interaction




it's easier to draw than to make that in stopmotion!


testing colours (not the final ones)


First sculptures of the heads



changing the nose...


more on the noses, and aproaching the final designs


sitting at the table


final jester in a standing position and with the final size, so that we can measure it and build the armature
(actually we altered a little bit these drawings after)

and final king:

The saga continues...

My bank "uncanceled" my card but now it's the hungarian bank that will not give it to me... Montepio tried to convince them for one hour to give it back, but they say it's the rule and that for security reasons they just cannot give it back. Oh well. A new card has been issued so I'll wait for my parents to send it to Budapest.

An advice for future ERASMUS students: take 2 cards with you, that way if something bad happens to one, you'll have a plan B...

Illustration Friday: Unbalanced

Just a quick quick quick idea/illustration on the theme "Unbalanced"... I'm trying to keep my promise!

Having a rough day...

So today I went to the ATM machine to get some money because I only had like 200HUF (less than one euro)... and my card gets "swallowed", "held by your issuer's order".
What??
I went inside, told them my card was stuck... and the lady said unfortunately she could not give it to me because my bank told them to hold this card because it was not authorized...
What??
(she did check the expiry date, but it only due in May)
So I called to Montepio... and they told me my card had been canceled.
What??
It was getting better and better...
Besides, they didn't know why, there should be an explanation but there wasn't... so the guy that was speaking with me on the phone tried (is still trying?) to figure out what happened and waiting for the answer of the place where I asked for the card.
I suppose that now I will have to wait until monday...living with money that anja lent me.

But... I am pick of the week in Illustration Friday!
At least that made me smile in the end :)

Illustration Friday: Blur

Blurry Poetry for my Desktop
...the topic was just an excuse for me to experiment with the blur tool in Illustrator, actually.
Not 100% happy with it, but it served the purpose.

More on Processing!

An old exercise about using variables... just something a little bit related to "Op art":

Link to "Círculos"

And another one, quite recent, a further development of an exercise in the class. If you click on the right side of the drawing, it will increase the number of sides. If you click on the left, it will decrease. You may, of course, do some print screens and use the images for something if you want! (that's what I'm going to do ;)). Here it is:

Link to "Raios"

ps: thank you so much to João that has a lot of patience to explain me about programming and helping me out with the exercises whenever I am stuck :)

Plitvice at last!

me in Plitvice in the morning, photo by João.

We decided to wake up early and be at the entrance to buy the tickets at 7h (our guidebook advised to go to the park before 8h)... we were there at 7h30 but apparently the booth only opened at 8h. Oh well, we can wait in the cold! (I bought a hairdryer before heading to Croatia, and when I was about to use it this morning before the Lakes it did a weird noise and a lot of smoke... so I went outside with my hair wet. Nice!)


The first picture I took inside, everything was covered with that morning frost!

We were the first to enter the park, followed by a horde of chinese people.


One of the 2 goups of Chinese people we saw at the park.

It was a nice, sunny but a little foggy, fresh morning and the cold actually made us move and feel like moving.


...every path was covered in white!




Plitvice Lake

The scenery was breathtaking, and we were immediately sure it was all worth it... and the fall colors fit just perfectly the deep blues and greens of the lakes.
We decided to take the route "A" because it took between 2 and 3 hours, but you had routes for every taste, including 6 to 8hour-routes! (the longer ones). We were kind of sorry of not having more time, but route A was quite enough.


a tiny detail...


photo by João. Those colors were amazing!

We stopped for a cappucino in a coffee-house in the middle of the way (after about 1hour and something of walking) and oh, it felt so good to have something warm in a cozy place with big windows and that beautiful landscape all around us!
Cappucino gone (and lazyness too), it was time to walk again and try to compensate the time we were in that stopping-point.


Smaller waterfalls

So we were climbing the mountain, going up up up, taking pictures,being marveled, etc, when I noticed I left my backpack at the coffee house! And there goes João running (poor guy...) because we were afraid we didn't have enough time to get to the end of the park in order to catch the bus.
It was time to speed a little bit (I'm glad this part of the route was not so pretty), looking at the lakes... and waterfalls... and rumbling water... when I get this irritating feeling that I really need to pee. Damn!
From now on it was only João taking the pictures because I was too focused on trying to contain my bladder (how noble, Carolina! and how nice that you're sharing it with us!). My mind was racing: still about one hour of hiking to go. Ok. Oooh, what a nice ladscape. I need a bathroom. Oooh, big waterfalls. Amazing, but I want a bathroom. Lakes. Pretty. Bathroom!!
All of the sudden it was over...the feeling was bitter-sweet, if it was not for the fact that the bathroom was outside the park, it would have been a pitty to leave!


lol, here is João imitating the Chinese... when we went to these wooden lockers outside (before entering) and opened the door to place the bag, we heard some Chinese going like "ooooooh! flash! flash! flash!" (what the..? oooh, a bag inside an outside locker? that is so cool, let's take pictures? lol! And inside the park another one took us a picture, put on a big smile and waved goodbye... lol, I felt like a souvenir.)

We had 30 more minutes of waiting, so we decided to eat something traditional (at least it looked like that) and just rest at the bus station.


it was quite nice! it looked like a sweet "bôla-de-carne". Mine was peach and forest fruits, João's was of Chocolate and walnut.

The bus didn't take long, and soon we were in Zagreb again.
And there we were, with plenty of time until the train arrived.. and there goes one hour... and another half-an-hour... and it was almost almost time. Where the hell is that train?? I'm glad I had João with me, because I was quite pleased drawing when he figured out we were in the wrong platform(actually it was the right platform, the right number, but not the right letter, which meant we would have to go furder until we found it). We started running like crazy, and as soon as we confirmed we had found the right train, we hopped on and the train immediately took of. Uf! More than one hour ahead of schedule and we actually almost managed to miss it.
The rest of the trip went smoothly... and 6hours later we were home again.
Even after all the little problems, I can say it was a really nice trip. I have a feeling we will go back eventually, because there was so much left unseen...

Road to Plitvice

We intended to leave before lunch and eat in the Plitvice National Park (the bus from Zagreb to the lakes takes about 2 hours and 10 minutes)... but due to some complications (our "ride" fell asleep and we decided to take the bus that left around 12h40) we got there later... muuuuuuch later:
We were tired, and fell asleep in the trip... but I had the alarm clock set to ring after 2 hours (so that we could have about 10 minutes to wake up), and we actually even woke up earlier than the clock. We were awake for about 15 minutes or more when we stopped in the middle of nowhere... And João found out we had passed our stop. The guy that checks the tickets told us we were sleeping (yeah, thanks a lot for noticing and not awaking!) so we got out in that station and just waited for the next bus...that was due in about one hour. nice...



There was nothing there except for a not-so-inspired painting of the waterfalls as an advertising, and a coffee/restaurant for the travelers to have something before heading to the road again. On the way to the toilets you could see a lot of stuffed animals like foxes and rabits and deers and rabits (all sort of animals from that area) that were put in a way so that they would be drinking beer and playing cards! I wish I had taken a picture, put I was too pissed off to think about it, I suppose (I hate wasting time...).



So, we just walked around that area... the mountain was quite impressive, and the sense of space and abandon caused a strong impression on me. Aaaand, they had bears enclosed in the back of the restaurant (I wonder if they were kept as pets??).



When the other bus finally got there we found out we had to wait (yet again...) for about 30 minutes, since it was their "stop in the middle of the trip for eating"... oh well.



We eventually hoped on (and spent more money to go back...) and arrived at Plitvice at nightfall.
The owner of the Hostel went to pick us up (the house was pretty close, but his english was not that good and he was having trouble explaining the directions over the phone). The room was actually quite good: really warm and comfortable, and with a private bathroom.
And then we found out we almost had no money. João payed with euros, but we didn't have cash to return. How nice! And you know what? The next cash machine was 2 kilometers away. Aaaand, there was no bus going there, or cab, or any means of transportation. Aaaand (yes, it gets better!) it was already night, dead cold, and the only way of getting money was by foot, walking along the road (kind of like a highway). There was really not much light but we headed to the cash machine anyway. And you know what? There were traffic signs for the drivers to be careful with eventual bears. How cute! And my backpack had two big smelly sandwiches! Cool!
Basically we just walked for about one hour, telling stories of people being chased by bears, and people that got bitten by bears... and I even had time for "noivado do sepulcro", 'though I couldn't remember every word. It was actually quite fun. The return took us less time (we were hungry and the road was going down, so it helped). We had dinner at the (only) local restaurant and decided we were going to buy the tickets for the park around 7h a.m.,in order to have some quality time there before going back to Zagreb to take the train back to Budapest...

oh well, tomorrow I will show you Plitvice, because right now I have some homework for Processing to do.
See you tomorrow!

Zagreb!

Pictograms at the Zagreb train station
(now this is the kind of pictogram our teachers in Portugal will never ask us to think about...lol, I really liked the contrast of the gun and the ice-cream next to it...)

Me and João went to Croatia for a few days, and we were sorry we didn't have more time to visit the whole country... it seems nice!



We were thinking of renting a car, but we forgot a tiny little detail: none of us has a credit card. We were glad to find out that it only costs around 28€ to go to Zagreb and come back... and not so glad when we realized it was really slow (about 6 hours, by car would take us half of the time!) At least I had time to do my hungarian homework (and get nauseous after a couple of sentences)... and I crossed a border for the first time! I mean, one that has controllers from both countries, and people asking if we have something to declare (we were asked if we had, for instance alcohol, or souvenirs. lol, souvenirs?? Is that really a problem??)



In Zagreb we met some friends from Morena (a croatian girl that is doing ERASMUS in FEUP), that showed us a nice bar and allowed us to stay in their house for 2 nights (thanks Tin!!).
So we only did some sightseeing during friday, but it was more than enough to see the small but pretty Zagreb. Of course, we would have enjoyed a few more days to explore the city (unfortunately we didn't have time to see the graveyard, apparently it's worth a visit, according to our guide book)... at first sight, the city reminded me a little bit of Budapest... but in a smaller scale, with narrow streets and small buildings.



Tin said something like "yeah, we had a few bombs a few years ago, but nothing special, only a few people died"...it's such a different reality from peaceful Portugal! Anyhow, the city seems well preserved and clean, it was nice to just walk around the downtown area.


Saint Marcus' church... that roof looks like pixel-art!


Neo-Gothic Cathedral, seen from the back


...and this one I don't remember. It was nothing special, but i liked the picture!

To end the day, a meal with Tin in a terrific restaurant that had really well cooked stuffed meat, apparently a specialty from the Balcans.



and on Saturday... "Plitvice here we go!" (more on that tomorrow ;))