raluca's space
Sent on

travel impressions with a sprinkle of updates

my dears,

as it has become customary way too early, i've been late with the promised update so i'm merging everything in one issue. since i returned from Portugal, i could not sit still and gather my thoughts around it so i waited until "the elegant next step was obvious," as one tweet suggested when to act. well it's 1:38am local now and i started writing this update since inspiration (instead of sleep) just hit. update: it's some week later when i'm wrapping up, from yet another airport

highlights of my time in portugal

  • a thank you letter to my homemates

    to my absolute blessing of housemates on rua dos caldereierereiros (or however we spelled that), i thank you for all the shared chats, walks, dinners, parties, the too many french fries, pastéis de nata, and, apparently, wine glasses. for the night of sharing monuments of cringe national music, for your ruthless, yet patient scrutinies of my gift economies of scale proposal. thank you for the multilingual dialogues and everything i misunderstood because of my poor, unpracticed French. thank you for the chats i overheard through the floor way too early in the morning, for the boardgames night with Romanian-style rummy, for all the jokes and references we built over the weeks. for hyping me up about Matosinhos, the one-day trip there, and the best, unexpected company in Guimarães. thank you all for co-creating a home together. see you on the road again one day.

  • ETHPorto and in-person web3

    the main reason i went to Portugal was to volunteer at ETHPorto, a web3 conference and hackathon focused on public goods, decentralized infrastructure, governance, and desci. the whole experience was what i hoped for- and more. it left me recharged with motivation, inspiration to build, just good vibes all over the place, and insane exchanges of the best energy that fuel me even today.

    seeing and meeting in person some of the people i've been following on regen CT and across discord servers for up to one year now was amazing. my favorite interaction must of course be about gift economies when i had the chance to briefly pitch the project to Griff from Giveth (one of the projects which i had already planned to incorporate as a case study!) and got two great suggestions to explore. nonetheless, there was something valuable to find in each and every interaction, and just by virtue of being there and absorbing as much as possible of what was happening. a common joke was that if we get so (positively) overwhelmed at ETHPorto, a ~700 people event, how must it then be at ETHDenver where some 20k people attend. i'd probably need to mentally train before to make space for so much stimuli; that's a sure way to get me to drink coffee.

    on another note, i realized i missed volunteering. i used to do that in high school on a regular basis as an afterschool mentor as well as help organize larger city-level events for underprivileged social groups. i enjoy the purpose derived from it, the space for creativity and ad-hoc problem-solving it allows for, the teamwork and mix of tasks. for a few years i've been flirting with the idea of volunteering for emergency services, but so far language/location/personal constraints have been real, but it's still on my radar (although slightly shifting my volunteering interests towards affordable housing projects)

  • the cities

    during my stay, i visited Lisbon, Aveiro, Porto, and Guimarães, before returning home via Alicante in Spain. without doubt, Porto remains the optimal choice if i'm to ever move there, but i wish to give a special shoutout to Aveiro. i almost didn't go there, as my train ticket was booked for Porto, but in a short moment of trusting some random review online, i booked my accommodation in Aveiro and got off the train earlier. almost instantly, the city felt to me like the residential areas of Amsterdam that i had so much enjoyed, with flat, spacious, mostly car-free streets and little to no advertising to ruin the walls and the calm aesthetic.

    on my second day in Aveiro, i passed by the university. from my limited perception of solid (and regen) urban design, the campus facilitates the main purposes of a university in a smooth manner: the learning and research buildings are well delineated, with the social spaces interconnecting them allowing for both casual chats and fruitful discussions to happen.

    also, Aveiro is weirdly obsessed with crosswalks- in one place, there were three of them over 300m.

    shoutout aside, Porto remains among my all time favorite cities for its dynamic, atmosphere, and aesthetic. Porto felt hassle-free, yet eventful, refreshing, and visually stunning all at the same time. the fact that the web3 scene in Porto is growing- with Lisbon, Coimbra, and Braga all following the same trend- only adds to its attractiveness.

updates, updates, updates

  • as some of you already heard, i will be in Vienna for an undetermined period of time, where i will be doing research x blockchain. if you're in the city, i can't wait to catch up in person soon!

  • remember how i mentioned that i consider the Kernel stewards to act as human channels? well, they just connected me with a few other people from the US and Canada (all Kernel fellows from previous cohorts) who are also working on gift economies in different ways. we had an initial call about the topic, with more on the way, and i never felt my motivation so well resonated with and goals understood. i'm in awe

  • i'm also thrilled to announce that i have cured my twitter addiction. the only problem is that i replaced it with a Farcaster (FC) one. FC is the web3 social protocol (well, one of them) and warpcaster is their twitter-like client. however, the protocol is far more than just a way to microblog, and i hope to be able to learn and tell you about its many more applications next time

  • i will be pausing the newsletter until (at least) early June, which technically means skipping (at least) one month. at the same time, i'll be rather unavailable on any form of IM for the next two months, but you should have my email (by virtue of being subscribed to this newsletter) which i will monitor much closer

AAAAAAAAAA

y'all, i have so much excitment for the future despite all that is happening in (geo)politics, our economies, and in nature. there are some things that seem to be aligning better than i could have imagined. i can't wait to share more with you over the next months, depending on how they materialize by then. i found that, following some interactions, observations, and lengthy discussions, i gained a lot of the focus and clarity in my work that i had been struggling to find for the past year. sure, i had some better moments where i managed to lay some of the groundwork, but overall i was missing the personal element of accepting, owning, and giving in to what drives me. but now it's here :)

see you in summer,

raluca