EXCLUSIVE LIVING HOTEL. Is this a hotel that is both exclusive and alive? Or is it a hotel where one can live in an exclusive manner? Depending on the order in which they combine the three words, the reader will hear one meaning or the other. The intended meaning is, of course, the second one, in which the first two words are grouped together as a compound adjective. Question: What kind of hotel is it? Answer: One that enables exclusive living. Yet although we know it’s not intended, the other meaning lingers on, ghostly and tenacious: a living hotel, a dying city centre. The forces of life and death haunt tourism just as pervasively as the notions of authentic and false. The hotel in this image is in Porto, and Porto attracts tourists because it is vibrant. It is a dense city full of life: washing hanging from balconies, pedestrians, tiny cafés and greengrocers and bakeries in almost every street, odd-shaped doorways, steep alleys, views over crowded rooftops, students in traditional...
FRIENDSHIP, DIFFERENCE, BEING OUT OF PLACE. I write about being in a foreign country, speaking a new language, and living through cultural differences. Texts in English and Portuguese.