Hello to everyone out there,

weeks have passed, many things have been going on and of course I don’t want them to be kept unshared – so prepare for a hopefully worthwhile read!

By now, the spring season got to fully start and it already turned hot in here — whilst people in Austria still are on the skiing slopes, Portuguese ones are hanging out on the beach! In fact, we already had close to 30°C or, in other words, just what I came here for. Even though I myself have enjoyed the privilege of being already able to go to the beach, namely Vagueira, spring’s start also had a not so enjoyable side for me… my pollen allergy fully kicked in. Well, just as I expected, it’s more bearable in here because of the proximity of the sea, which obviously is not a thing in Austria. And on top my allergy even once made one of my days in form of a random little kid blessing me in a super adorable manner passing by my sneezing self.

Farther, school has been quite relaxed (says the exchange student…) and there even were some Erasmus students visiting our one, hailing from five different countries, namely Spain, Croatia, Turkey, Italy and Germany. The other exchange student girl of my class and I were actually able to join them in some of their activities, which ironically were quite AFS-like. I found it to be super interesting to meet these Erasmus students and be confronted by the huge difference between visiting a country, like them, and actually living in it, like we do.

Also, in the same weeks Wednesday we went to visit Mafra, a small city in the shadow of Lisbon, which is known for its astonishingly beautiful, palace from which the city’s name actually comes from too. In there, without actually knowing, we hung out with our English teacher’s daughter all day and just found out two-thirds in, which was totally hilarious. At first, we were watching a so called “moving play”, which is basically a theatre staged in multiple rooms — in this particular case presenting the story of the book “Memorial do Convento”, which partly has to do with Mafra’s palace. Since the acting was super on point plus the story was kind of interesting too, it turned out to be very enjoyable in the end. Later on, after having lunch at some random coffee shop, we had a guided tour through all of the palace interiors, which also was fairly nice.

Two days later, same week’s Friday, I got to quite spontaneously join one lesson of my school’s so called “German Club”, in which, quite obviously, a group of willing students is in the vigour-draining process of grasping the German language. As an Austrian I have to say it was kind of weird but very interesting though seeing them studying my native tongue.

This ongoing week we’ve had a shared lunch within the frame of our class for which I baked an “Apfelstrudel” once again, in fact the first of two, since I’ll bring another one to the opening afternoon snack of one program I’m going to attend (and cover in the following paragraph). And since we already got to the food topic – after I already had eaten one of my hostparents chickens, I by now also got to eat one of my hostgrandparents cows, frankly with quite a little bit of hesitation after having seen it stroll around the meadow before.

Finally, tomorrow I’m going to travel to Coimbra to participate in an AFS Portugal program called “4 dias em…” (literally: “4 days in…”) for which I signed up for to stay in the city of Coimbra. These four days are gonna be stuffed with great activities and I’m totally looking forward to it!

As always, I hope you’re doing great too — go and have the best day of your life!

Julian