Saving Goethe When I was a teenager I used to do a lot of reading. My daily goal was to get home as soon as possible from school, just to be able to spend the rest of the day locked in my messy room, lying down on my comfortable bed reading one of those incomprehensible classic books that I pretended to understand very well. So at that time, I blindly believed it would be very likely that I already had read Goethe's Faust by the age of 20. Silly me. Now I have no time and no discipline at all. When I finally started my degree in literature and linguistics studies, I thought, "Oh, it is going to be amazing, now I will be able to read as many books as I can without blaming myself for lost productive time with pleasure". Silly me part II. To my surprise, the literature subjects were focused more on theory than on practice. In other words, we were bombarded by the theory of The Brothers Karamazov, the theory of The Iliad, the theory on how to read a novel properly. The more my boring professors talked about these theories the more I asked myself when the hell they would give us another life so that we could have enough time to read all those books before the class. I mean, what is the point of talking for hours about the theory of a book that no one had time to read? Now that I have managed to get my degree I find myself in adulthood. I mean, I have to work all day long to provide for myself and when I get home I am feeling so tired that it seems to be too much effort to pick up a book and start doing something more challenging than watching TV series on Netflix. I am currently trying to come back to my old reading habits. And it is weird and sounds unnatural to me: to force myself to do something I actually like and avoid things I just don't like at all.

Life in Panama I've been living in Panama for four months and I'm really enjoying it. This change was a little bit difficult at the beginning because I didn't speak any Spanish, but as I'm Brazilian and Portuguese and Spanish are very close languages, so it didn't take long for me to start to understand what people were saying. Also in a very short period of time, I've made many friends from all over Latin America: Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Argentina. Everyone has been so nice to me! I've also met amazing people from other parts of the world such as Spain, the Netherlands and the United States. This was possible thanks to the large number of foreigners living in Panama City right now. My friends here love to party. Every weekend they have parties, barbecues (which as a Brazilian tradition I love) or go for a short trip to the beach. Usually we go to the caribbean beaches, but there are pretty good beaches in the pacific as well. So what else can I say? People here really know how to have fun. Obviously sometimes I miss some things from Sao Paulo such as night clubs, cinemas, theatres, restaurants… and of course, my friends! But in the other hand, when I lived in Sao Paulo my life was so busy that I didn't have time to enjoy all that stuff. Besides, Sao Paulo is a very dangerous place and I was afraid all the time. It may sound strange to some people, but it becomes a normal feeling when you live in a violent city. So when I start to think about these things I realize that here in Panama my life is really much better than it was.

La vida en Panamá Hace cuatro meses que estoy viviendo en Panamá y me ha gustado mucho. El cambio fue un poco duro al principio porque yo no hablaba nada de español. Pero como soy brasileña, y el portugués y el español son dos idiomas muy similares, luego empecé a entender lo me decía la gente. También en muy poco tiempo he hecho amigos de várias partes de Latinoamérica: Venezuela, Colombia, México, Perú, Argentina. Todos muy buena gente! Sin contar los españoles, holandeses, suizos y americanos que he conocido. Esto debido a gran cantidad de extranjeros que viven en Panamá. A todos mis amigos de Panamá les gustan mucho las fiestas. Todo el fin de semana hay una fiesta en la casa de alguien, un asadito (que a mi me encanta, como buena brasileña que soy) o un viaje a la playa. Generalmente vamos a las playas del caribe panameño, pero también nos gustan algunas del pacífico. Qué más puedo decir? Aquí las personas saben disfrutar de la vida! Obviamente que a veces me hace falta algunas cosas de Sao Paulo. Las casas noturnas, los cines, los teatros, los restaurantes… y claro, mis amigos! Pero el otro lado de la moneda es que en Sao Paulo yo me quedaba tan ocupada y apresada que casi no disfrutaba de la ciudad. Además, Sao Paulo es una ciudad muy violenta y vivíamos siempre con miedo. Así que cuando pienso en esto me doy cuenta de que aquí mi vida está mucho mejor.