Hey to everyone out there, wandering the surface of this planet,

first things first — I’m really sorry it took me such a long time to write this fourth blog post. In my defence, spare time is a rare thing over here because there’s always a bloody lot going on in my life here. Admittedly, for the most part it’s really enjoyable though… just sometimes I’d enjoy a little more time for myself, to think, to reflect. Well, I suppose writing is a form of reflecting, so I shall gratefully make use of this opportunity!

Firstly, what defined my past days was the fact that I had quite a lot of contact to home, which surprisingly didn’t give me any homesickness. More it made me think and increased the actual rate of moments, in which I felt like just having had a huge realisation. Somehow, I feel like I now can view many things from a second or even third perspective… a truly great feeling.

Another thing important to me was that thanks to a friend of mine, I had the opportunity to start over again with Muay Thai — thankfully I took and still appreciate it. In my current state of mind, I’m super motivated and look forward to being able to live that little passion of mine!

Next, in my school here, we already had quite a lot of tests, of which most just were not doable for me. At least the English test went pretty well and in the philosophy one I had the opportunity to write an English biography about a famous philosopher. In my case, I chose Karl Marx and the research turned out to be fairly interesting. But all in all — as far as my experience goes, most of the teachers here have just about no idea how to handle an exchange student, so I feel misplaced quite often…

Besides school, there also were quite a bunch of things going on in terms of AFS: We had a super well organized and really amazing day trip through Aveiro with some of the Volunteers from the district. Then, a few weeks later, we had our second AFS orientation camp in Santa Maria da Feira, which was a gigantic lot of fun and also gave us much input in the form of a bunch of reflection exercises, which my brain still is having a hard time with processing them.

Overall, I can just state that I feel like my “life in a year” here is continuing in the right direction and I’m starting to get settled by now. Lately, I already felt like having had some magnificent realisations, which had quite a big impact on the way I used to think. However, even the strangest or craziest emotions I experienced in here didn’t turn out to be negative in themselves and just got more positive the more my mind processed them. Exchange student life, I love you!

Julian