FWIW, in Portugal, during my youth, I ate at the cafeteria rather often. It was decent food for the most part (it was also my first exposure to soy minced meat). It was hot, didn’t involve carrying a lunchbox, and it was tasty and convenient and cheap. Eventually I opted to go back home because I lived close enough to walk, and mom’s food is better.

We did not get ways to heat up food (though I bet you could have asked the cafeteria staff if you needed it) of our own, though.

Do you happen to have at hand where you saw that? Because the research that I have seen hasn’t particularly care about whether something is fun or not, but about how you engage with what you are trying to learn. In short, it boils down to use and practice.

In particular, we are talking about trying to remember something that you just learned. This, by itself, is really good for retaining things (memory is better retained when you retrieve it), and also because it is the perfect way to see what didn’t keep to, thus, try to learn again. Teaching and/or explaining to others is a close second.

The (perhaps surprising thing) I remember the most from those is that note-taking during the class didn’t positively correlate with learning things, even though that is what people think of a good student.

I am not going to pretend that boredom can’t factor into it (practice can, often, feel boring). But the better way?

My hobbies boil down to doing things that I have enjoyed enough to put in time and effort into them, with little regard for it beyond working out for me. I could go into more detail, but at the core it is all about it has to do with how I experience the world and how I engage with it, and that these hobbies enhance how I do that and thus make the time spent on them enjoyable, ensuring thus I keep doing them.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things I do:

• Reading, which the to read pile keeps growing.
• Writing, both non-fiction and fiction
• Video games.
• Tech stuff in general
• Every now and then I bike around, because I just enjoy it
• Photography, every now and then

Why did I get into them? Because I enjoy doing them!

I like reading, because it’s fun to read a story, and because it’s fun to read about others perspectives, and because it is fun to learn. I like **writing **because I like putting my thoughts in order, and it helps me think, and it helps me communicate. I like being able to share something with someone else and feel like I managed to get something across. **Photography **also fits into this because it is a way for me to capture what I see (and often, what I don’t see) and share it with others. And, often, it serves as a way to focus me onto what is around me in ways that I never would have otherwise.

Tech stuff? Well, I like gadgets and machinery. In another life, I would have delved into hardware instead, making weird gadgets and one offs. Instead, computer and software are my thing. Video Games are

Biking: because I get to go fast and be active. More engaging than walking. Not as awful as running.

I also recently took a look at Meshtastic, though that has been burning along in the background due to physical constraints. Radio things are fun, though in this case the driving factor was… worries about the world at large.