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Better Late than Never

5/12/2017

I arrived in Lisbon with my friend Alice exactly three months ago, on the 5th of September 2017. 

Three days later, on Friday the 8th of September, we met Andrea and Jara, both from Germany, at the Welcome Day of our faculty, in the very nice (but very far away) polo universitário de Ajuda.

On September 14th, in a hostel in Anjos, we met everyone's favourite Czech boy, Tomáš - with whom, an hour or so later, I became flatmate. 

The next Sunday I moved into my new home for good and I can say that my Erasmus experience really started.
This Erasmus Life Is Killing Us (or The Defenestration of Evora), 14/10/2017, Evora Cathedral roof
I have been intending to start this blog for ages - there were so many things I wish I had noted down before they faded away in my memory, but somehow it was never the right moment. I don't know why I believe that now is the right moment, maybe it's because I'm flying back home for Christmas in ten days or so and I feel like the biggest part of my experience is coming to an end. 

So maybe I should start from Lisbon herself - from this beautiful, windy, romantic, intriguing, city which cannot be anything but a woman, reserved and rough, but at the same time open as she is. Hilly Lisbon, with her narrow streets and embracing terraces on the Rio Tejo, the many miradouros from which you can see the horizon and dominate the buzzing city and feel like the world is at your feet. Each area has their own spirit, alternative Intendente and classic Belém, party-loving Cais do Sodrè and nightlife favourite Barrio Alto; business-centred Marques do Pombal and shopping-lover Baixa, historical Alfama and hipster-y Santos. Lisbon, with her characteristic elevadores and her never-on-time buses; Lisbon, where every pastelaria has amazing pasteis de nada and you can never run out of things to see because every street, every corner has a story. 
Praça do Comercio, Lisbon Downtown 
Elevador da Santa Gloria

Viewpoint from Miradouro de Nossa Senora do Monte
This is the city where, day-by.day, I wrote the adventure that is my Erasmus, where I costantly fell in love with new people and places, where I learned something new about myself every day (or maybe every hour), where I found an other place to call home. I have challenged myself more and quicker than I expected to before leaving Italy, which I guess is a good thing considering how stuck up and un-prone to change I had become lately. I am not exactly happy of all the things I have done (or not done), but this is part of the experience too, isn't it? Sometimes we make mistakes and accepting them and dealing with the consequences is what makes us grow up. 

I guess part of the success of my experience so far is due to my previous exchange in Australia. Of course the two are very different, I lived in a host family in Australia and I was there only for two months, but I am sure that having been through this before - getting accustomed to a different country, to meeting new people everyday and to dealing with everything without the solid bases my native culture gave me - helped me to get the best out of everyday, or almost everyday. I mean, it's human to have some "no days", especially in the central part of the experience when the excitement of novelty is over, but as long as you don't let them become "bad weeks" is fine. 
Anthro-power! The Biggest Concentration of Anthropologist You Can See in Town! 30/11/2017,
 Andrea and Jara's house
Probably at this point I should mention that the AFS training as a volunteer saved my skin more than once, giving me the tools to understand what was going on in my and my friend's lives most of the time (as you could gather from the lines above, pretty much extracted from "The Handbook for the Perfect AFS Volunteer). I think I will draw myself an adaptation curve soon (inside joke for all the AFS volunteers out there). 

So, enough with the philosophy - I'm sure you all want to know something more exciting. First of all, after ten days in hostels and  ten-ish apartments visited, where did I end up living with the random Czech guy met in a hostel? After a long peregrination around the city, my new home ended up being very close to the area where I stayed when I came to Lisbon for the first time one year and half ago, in a neighbourhood called Alvalade that, as ironic as my life always is, is very close to where the central sit of my university (Universidade de Lisboa) is. As unlucky as I always am when it comes to universities building, though, my faculty is in the farthest campus, Ajuda - which, as nice as it can be considering that is almost in the middle of a National park (Monsanto), is almost out of Lisbon. 

ISCSP, the most difficult word in the Portuguese language, or my faculty name...

...and the desert surrounding it
Apart from my Czech friend, my other flatmates are Emanuel, from the island of Madeira, and Clarice, from Còrdoba, Spain. As I still live with my family in Italy, I had never lived for so long with people I grew to call friends - which I know is not always the case with flatmates, but I guess I have been very lucky with them because we get along with each other very well - and we had some very fun moments.

Me in one of the my favourite places ever, Cabo de Roca, 31/10/2017
So, what have I been doing in the last three months, which have been the slowest, quickest, craziest trimester of my life so far? I mainly talked with people, as weird as it can sound coming from "the most social among the anti-socials", as my friend Paolo defines me. I (badly) danced a lot, drank a lot of ginja, ate loads of toasts, watched many movies and found out I have a very little knowledge of cinematic culture and a terrible sense of orientation; I learnt (a little of) Portuguese, re-evaluated the Italian university system (with its good and bad parts) and yeah, I even studied a little.

By the time I finished writing this post it's already the 10th of December and I'm flying back home in nine days. It sounds crazy when I think about it because it feels like I just arrived here, and at the same time it feels like it has been a year since I said goodbye to my family and friends in Italy, but I am happy about it because it means it has been a busy three months.

I think this is more than enough for a first blog entry, and considering how long it is - I certainly don't have the gift of synthesis - probably no one read until the end but you all stopped just to look at the pictures. So, hopefully I will feel like writing a new entry soon, sorry for any error or mistake in the text (please let me know if it is anything massive),

Beijinhos e até pròxima!

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