Road to Miss Universe 2011 Marina Rodrigues, Miss Portugal Universe 2011. Marina Rodrigues is 26 year old and a model. She was the former girlfriend of famous soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. She was recently been handpicked by the Portuguese franchise holder to represent Portugal in the Miss Universe 2011 Pageant. Special thanks and credits tobeautypageantnews.com source: (Thank you and credits to http://freedom-guy.blogspot.com/ and all sources for the information and pictures)
The interesting detail noticed in this hotel (the project of Portuguese bureau Risco constructed along harbour Belem in Lisbon) are jalousie which close not only windows, but also deep balconies.
Altis Belém Hotel
The design of an interior is executed by studio FSSMGN
I got some wanderlust from my dad and I took a travel writing class last year, so I was really intrigued by Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World
, one of the few full length travel narratives I've seen written by a female. To add to my interest, one of my good friends from high school really liked the book so I knew it had to be pretty good. Rita Golden Gelman has reached a turning point in her life. She is living with her husband in California, but they no longer love each other and she hates their modern lifestyle. Her children are on their way to college and she doesn't feel like they need her anymore. Her career, a children's book author, doesn't require her to stay at home. When she and her husband decide to take a break she goes south of the border to Mexico for an intensive Spanish class and finds that she loves traveling. After that trip she changes her life and has no permanent address, she lives on a small amount of money, travels, and meets new people.
The bulk of this book takes place in Indonesia and in my opinion it could have only taken place in Indonesia. Her time in Mexico shows us where her nomadic journey began, but her random trips in the United States and Canada could have been much shorter. Indonesia was really the only place where Rita got to know the people around her and really participated in the culture. I really liked the places Rita went to in the book, but she didn't get to know hardly anyone so it was basically just a book about everywhere she went in this time span and everything she did.
I wanted to like this book a lot. I love the idea of just packing up your stuff, taking off, and seeing the world in your own way. Rita's voice got in the way though. The book is written in the present tense, which lends itself to "I did this, I see this, I hear this" writing. She spends so much time talking about what she did that you don't ever get a good feeling of what the culture is like. She spends at least 100 pages in Indonesia but I didn't come away from the book with any different perspective on it. And that's not totally necessary for me to enjoy a travel narrative. The Moon, Come to Earth didn't change my perspective on Portugal, but it did make me think about travel in a way that I wouldn't have without the book. That was not the case with Tales of a Female Nomad. Honestly, I thought Rita was a little self-centered and while I enjoyed reading about a few of the amazing things she did, there was always this nagging feeling in my head that the way she was telling them just wasn't right. This book could have been awesome, but it ended up just being okay.
I give this book a C.
I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.
by Philip Graham is a travel book about a year he spent with his wife and daughter in Lisbon. On the surface, that is. When I began reading this book I was excited to read about Portugal, a place that has always mystified me. What I got instead was an amazing account on fatherhood, growing up, and finding yourself.
The book is a series of dispatches for McSweeney's and begins like a trip begins, how they go there. It moves to unpacking their items in their new apartment and on to exploring the nooks and crannies of Lisbon. Graham writes beautifully about the culture, inserting the Portuguese language at the most key of moments and speaking honestly about the good and the bad of Lisbon. He is definitely a narrator you can trust.
As the book moved on, for me, it became less about Lisbon and more about Graham's twelve-year-old daughter Hannah. She struggles at her first school where she knows none of the language and is bullied by other kids. After switching to a new school she finally starts to find her place and fit in, but only after a crash course in Portuguese and changing her eating habits. As a girl on the brink of adolescence she faces challenges that her parents do not face, and perhaps do not entirely see. Graham takes the blame too, he admits that taking his daughter to Lisbon might have been a bad idea. At the end Hannah does love Libson, and wants to return immediately, so there is a sense not all was lost.
Overall this was a fascinating book, one of my favorites I've read this year. It's a quick read and I truly think there is something in here for all of us.
Paperback: 168 pages Publisher: University of Chicago Press; 1 edition (November 15, 2009) Language: English
I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.
This weekend I'm joining over one hundred blogs in the Got Books? event where we are all giving away some books to our lovely readers, new and old. This is really my first book giveaway and I put a lot of thought into the books I wanted to give away. One of them is a book I continuously talk about even though I've never reviewed it here and the other is a book I read when I first started blogging and it's one of my favorite books I've read since I started blogging. So what books am I talking about?
The first book is Notes From No Man's Land by Eula Biss. This is the book I haven't reviewed on here since I read it over a year ago before I even had a blog. I have talked about one of Eula Biss's essays though, The Pain Scale. This is a fantastic book of essays that I think a lot of you would enjoy. It deals with race, gender, human differences, and America. I mean, I read it over a year ago and I'm still talking about it, so that has to tell you it's pretty good right?
The second book I'm giving away is another work of nonfiction, The Moon, Come to Earth by Philip Graham. This is a book that came out of Graham's McSweeney's dispatches from Lisbon, Portugal. It's a travel narrative, but different from a lot of travel narratives I've read because it's about Graham's experience traveling with his family. The story actually really comes away from being a simple travel narrative and becomes more about the experience of being a parent. I posted a review back in November when I was still trying to figure out this whole blogging business. It was the tenth review I ever wrote on here! How crazy is that. Anyway, I also posted about a reading of his, which I attended.
If you'd like to enter (and I really hope you do!) just fill out the form below. You can enter for one book or both. The contest is open until Sunday, July 25 at MIDNIGHT Central Time. You can earn extra entries by being a follower or by tweeting, but you don't need to be a follower to enter the contest. This is only open to U.S./Canada.
