The pictures are true: the light, the tiles, the laptop on a café table with a flat white beside it. That's a real Tuesday. What the pictures leave out is that the café closes at four, the wifi drops when the tram passes, and the flat white is the third one because the first two were the price of the table.
So: the honest version. I work from home, in Santos, in a room with a window that gets the morning. I go to a café once a day for one hour, for one coffee, because a person needs to see other people and the café needs to pay rent. The good ones know this deal. Copenhagen Coffee Lab knows this deal.
The time zone is the real gift. Berlin is an hour ahead, which means the standup is at nine for them and eight for me and I've already been to the sea. The sea is fifteen minutes away. I know how that sounds.
Three years. Rent has doubled, my Portuguese has plateaued at 'polite', and I've stopped noticing the light, which Zofia says is when you actually live somewhere. I'd like to go back to noticing. I'm working on it.
