Boa tarde a todos,

much has been going on the past weeks and of course I don’t want it to be kept unshared — so prepare for a wall of text! Whilst I’m writing this my little hostbrother’s running through the house with bloody scratches from one of our cats — crazy you might think, but for me it feels just fine for describing my life here metaphorically…

Besides cats going wild, the first memorable thing which comes to my mind is Halloween. Since I didn’t really do anything special on Halloween for the last 5 years, it was quite surprising to me when my hostbrothers asked me to spend the night getting sweets and playing tricks. At first, I was kind of unexcited but it turned out to be quite enjoyable though really funny.

Other, unforgettable memories are the two weekends I’ve been in Porto. The first time I went with a fellow exchange student, one of her host sisters and her contact volunteer. We visited some of Porto’s most iconic places, grabbed a local speciality, namely “Francesinhas”, for dinner and then caught the train back home. The only downside of the trip was me throwing up in the train, one station in front of Aveiro… It being bloody disgusting, I somehow felt really ashamed. And till this day I’m still not sure if I should accuse Porto’s fatty food for it or not…

One week later, we went there again, that time staying the night, which I spent exploring Porto’s nightlife with a group of exchange students. Also, the weekend was the last I could spend with one of the trimester exchange students, who became a really good friend — so saying goodbye was strange and bound to mixed feelings. On the next day we got to know Porto’s infamous weather — raining all day, we were forced to spend the first half of the day in restaurants and shops. In the evening hours we ate out at a restaurant and on the way walking there something really unbelievable happened…

There was some guy walking through the street asking people for twenty cents, which we saw first on Friday and another time on the way to the restaurant Saturday evening. So that second time I thought about just giving him what he wanted and while I was opening my backpack someone of our group called me out to stop, so I closed my backpack and walked on. Then this guy sneaked behind me, opened my backpack, took my wallet and started running away — I noticed the zipping sound, instantly turned ’round and sprinted after him. Two streets farther I caught on to him and grabbed him tightly by the collar. First in English, then in Portuguese, I called him out to give me back my wallet. I even offered him 10€ for doing so, but he still insisted on saying he wouldn’t have anything. Having his hands deep down in his baggy jogging knickers, I somehow felt like I had to do something and — intuitively — hit him in the face, where the knuckles left an actually open cut. Pumped up with adrenaline and scared of what just happened, I stood there without knowing how to react any farther… Luckily that guy was freaking scared himself and took out my wallet to give it back to me. After receiving it, I noticed 30€ missing. So I checked that man’s pockets but found nothing — probably he stored it in his underwear — and without any idea what else I could do, I just let it be and got back to my group of exchange students, who were already looking for me. I guess I was quite lucky with how everything turned out… Sorry for this long, kind of off-topic story, but I really wanted to write about it for the sake of still not having fully processed it.

After that crazy story happened to me, we had a really good dinner at a small local restaurant, where I ate for free, after telling the story to the staff. Another hour later me and a fellow exchange student from Aveiro caught the train back and arrived shortly before midnight. Summarisingly that weekend is definitely worth remembering!

On the next day of that weekend, Sunday, there was an AFS event, “Magusto”, which basically was planned around eating chestnuts all the time. My hostfamily and I got to the place — a farm quite difficult to find — half an hour late, but still were the first ones to be there. The farm’s run by one of the AFS volunteer’s family, is called KiwiBee and revolves around, obviously, kiwis and bees. So when we came there we had the possibility to dress up beekeeper suits and go visit some cool ass bees, which we took of course. Some people went with us, wearing no suits, to observe what was going on from a distance. Then, really unluckily my contact volunteer got stung under the eye by an evil bee. Luckily, nothing major happened to her and all turned out to be just fine. After that there were more people coming hour for hour and we slowly started to roast the chestnuts over an open fire. It went on with us being stuffed with good food till the early evening, when my hostfamily and I decided to go back home.

Just having had a weekend definitely worth remembering, the week seemed to start off as always – boring as hell. But what I had forgotten was that we were going to have a school trip to the Arouca national park on Monday… I just noticed when a teacher made a phone call to ask why I’m still not at the school. I was supposed to be at the school at half past seven, but it had already been eight so the teacher had to pick me up from home, which made me feel a little bit ashamed. At least the trip was quite relaxing and contained many possibilities to view over beautiful, although crazy windy landscapes. Having forgotten to take food with me, many of my classmates were generous and let me feed up myself for free again. All in all, the trip to Arouca was another memorable event on my growing list of them!

Another thing I’d like to write about is my ongoing school change. After thinking about changing schools for a few weeks because of several reasons, I finally decided to do so by last weekend. Over the course of the following week, I carried out all what had to be done for the actual process of changing and now Monday’s my second first-day-of-school in Portugal. If you wonder… my reasons for changing are the likes of having extra Portuguese lessons for foreign students there, being able train in Aveiro every weekday and having another exchange student in my class (nothing really bad about my old school)!

To round off this post, I surprisingly got a quite fitting anecdote this time: In the maths lessons I had in my now-ex-school, I sometimes had some fairly crazy ideas on how to kill time. Other than, for example, starting to write a book, I sometime challenged myself to describe an exchange year experience with just 3 words. What I came up with reminds of some inspirational quote, but just fits perfectly, although being very general… “Exchange, adapt, evolve!”

Julian