Hey gang,

the first few weeks of my adventure in Portugal passed by by now and I finally found a bit of time to process it all a little throughout the course of writing this post. Plus, besides, I think I’m now able to actually give some farther insights — have a pleasant read!

Currently the little me is living in Vagos, a small village near the beautiful city of Aveiro, which one is quite popular with tourists. It’s often referred to as the “Portuguese Venice”, although I personally wouldn’t necessarily agree with that — having been to Venice quite a few times. Still, the whole of it with all its nice canals and backstreets admittedly already managed to charm me quite a bit.

Living in Portugal is very different to living in Austria but I believe I already got used to most of the major differences. Some examples which come to mind when I think about the differences are… that in Austria my hair is brown, here it is blonde (a fact that by now often got me into silly hair-colour-discussions)… that being late is not too much of a problem in here (something I’m definitely abusing way too much)… and that — generally speaking — the Portuguese way of living is much more about enjoying the small things rather than just going for the big.

Next to the acclimatization process, School started 2 weeks ago on Thursday and the first few days there were pretty damn hard — I understood almost nothing and my classmates and teachers in fact don’t speak that much of English. By this day I, luckily, already met a whole bunch of people speaking English fluently and besides that I’m able to make out some words in Portuguese rather than just a constant flow of consonants and vowels. Portuguese has a really unique sound, but in my ears it sounds awesome and I really want to learn it.

So far, everything feel’s weird but also like it’s on the way of turning out the best it could… I’m psyched for whatever the universe will throw at me!

Julian