Boa noite,

I by now have been in Portugal for a few days and already made some awesome experiences. For starters, my flight from Vienna to Lisbon was on the 9th of September at six in the morning. Previously, I had been quite relaxed but after I had entered the air plane, it felt like all the nervousness I didn’t feel before was released bundled in just one single moment… But even then the flight was relaxed and the sunrise was picturesque, symbolising the start of a new act of my life. (Funfact: The woman at the Check-In noticed my AFS papers and told me that she once, ten years ago, also lived through an exchange year in Russia with AFS.)

More than three hours later, at half past eight Portuguese time, I arrived in the beautiful city of Lisbon, where our AFS Welcome-Camp was going to take place. Shortly after I arrived, there were 20 Italians surrounding me with me as the only non-italic-speaker. Admittedly, it went on to be a hell of a lot of fun with them. Italians, you rock.

Two more hours later we arrived at the building, in which the AFS camp was going to take place. From that moment on, every hour more and more exchange students from all over the world arrived there. (There even was a girl from Greenland, which honestly left me quite astonished.) Once the initialising rituals were over, there were 2 days of meeting new and foremost amazing people (plus — AFS-typically — hugging them a million times), experiencing and learning about different cultures, having fun and AFS’s trademark “Energizers”, which I won’t comment farther on for the sake of a never-ending love-hate relationship.

Eventually, on Sunday the exchange students, which had to go to Aveiro — including myself — went there by something called a “train”. And at six in the afternoon at the train station in Aveiro the time had come — we, for the first time, could see our hostfamilys. There my hostmum picked me up to see my older hostbrother play within his band on a local village festival. We went there, met my younger hostbrother, and saw the older one proficiently playing the drums. That first meeting experience was simply wonderful! Afterwards we had a delicious feast with the whole family, which took us nearly three hours and on the same evening we also went to a party, which was part of that exact local festival. They even had got some quite formidable firework over there and of course loud music playing all through the night.

All in all, I just can say that everything’s going perfectly so far. My hostfamily has been super nice and welcoming towards me. Something I really know to appreciate. I hope this year will continue farther in this direction!

Julian

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