At the beaches of Lagos, in southwestern Portugal, the free semi-naked models and sketchable natural landscapes abound.

For my third class as instructor in the Urban Sketchers 10 Years x 10 Classes programme in Lisboa, we went to Campo de Ourique market, a small and cozy building, in an uptown district, that underwent a deep renovation a few years ago, and is now a posh destination to eat and drink in the city.

One thing that relates Poland with Portugal is that they usually show up next to each other in drop-down lists when filling online registration forms.

The challenge was to sketch far and below from a skyscraper. But conventional tall buildings are scarce in this capital city, and not very suitable places to sketch from, so I opted to lead the participants to one of Lisboa’s own alternative skyscrapers – the Nossa Senhora do Monte vantage point.

For nearly a week, a few hundreds of tango enthusiasts from all over the world stormed the glorious setting of the Voz do Operário great hall to attend the annual International Lisbon Tango Festival.

The day before yesterday, I became a human puxada! I was scheduled for a sleep study, for which, the clinic staff took an hour an a half to attach, glue and connect all the 15 terminals that were to record my sleep patterns.

It’s been a month now since Marina Grechanik’s workshop in Lisboa and it’s still kicking in. I’ve been experimenting a lot with ecolines, waterwashes as sketching base, big contrasts and form simplification.

It is a complex territory, known for being heavily industrialized, but strangely enough, also for its vineyards and for being a haven for sun-seekers and nature-lovers. There are all kinds of small towns and villages, each with its own quirks and traditions.

The visit to the New Jewish Cemetery, deep in the heart of the Kazimierz district had, ironically, wiped away the specter of death. A peaceful chaos of tombstones blended with nature. For many minutes, we were alone in the dead quiet alleyways, until the arrival of a small horde of Israeli orthodox jews, teenagers, clumsy, euphoric with their trip down history lane.

The reasons to visit the old concentration camps are probably manyfold, as are, undoubtedly the reasons for not visiting them. But it’s only after visiting them that the reason becomes apparent. It’s a leap of faith to comprehend the human experience on Earth.

March was a month invested in education. I enrolled in a Certified Pedagogy Course that enables its graduates to become certified instructors.

Lisboa City Hall is promoting an activity amongst the Portuguese Urban Sketchers community that focuses on a list of 19th to 20th century threatened buildings. The aim is to attract attention to these buildings, alerting the civil society about the dangers of letting these gems perish.

The opera-singing lady in a street corner in front of the Church of St. Andrew in the Old Town of Kraków abused her features in a lofty exaggeration.

In Poland, food is cheap and delicious! Partly due to the many Soviet-era Bar Mleczny (milk bars), a kind of social canteen for workers that used to be subsidized by the state, serving cheap and nourishing meals in a grey, depressing atmosphere, mostly with one-seat tables.

Kraków is definitively more touristy than Warszawa. The medieval town’s survival during WWII made it possible for the city to skip the soviet-style modernist renovation and helped preserve the atmosphere of a historical European city, with all the layers of the preceding epochs in plain view.

The charming city in the north is the European Best Destination for the third time in a five-year span. But what has been making it so special for us, sketchers, in the past few months since the national Urban Sketchers gathering in 17-18th of September, is the work that was being done to publish the resulting set of sketches in the book “Porto por/by Urban Sketchers”.