Bom dia,

so by now there had occurred this “4 Dias Em Coimbra” AFS city trip which I briefly mentioned in the previous post. In here, I wanted to fully revise it in its own single blogpost — since I thought it simply deserves it.

Firstly, on Thursday, I arrived in Coimbra’s main railway station after not catching the train, which I originally intended on going on, and passing by the secondary train station, on which I actually was supposed to get out. Therefore (stupidity for the win), I had to wait around half an hour more before getting to meet the first chunk of exchange students, in this case from Porto, once again. After wandering around the area close to the railway station for an additional half an hour, the unproportionally large rest of AFSers from Lisbon came to join up with us. And a few dozen minutes later, we were standing around a table in some building near the famous university, eating our — for the most part — self-made and origin-country-representing snacks. While feasting, we also got to know our temporary four-day-hostfamilys by some AFS-invented “icebreaker activities”, which turned out to be overly awkward though still sweet. In fact, I was staying with three other exchange students, two Latinos and one Thai, in one woman’s house, which already had been home to many previous exchange students from all over the world. She actually was French, living in Portugal, speaking utterly many languages and working as a freelancer translator while owning two companies… yeah, you’re right, that indeed is kind of cool. Finally, later that evening, we had a nice big meal before getting to rest our tired selves.

Next day, Friday, was packed with AFS-activities, starting with presentations about us, our countries and our exchange program in one school of Coimbra. We held them in small groups and fully in Portuguese, which proved to be still quite a challenge for me. After that was done, we lunched in the school’s canteen and then headed off for a nice walk through Coimbra’s beautiful botanic garden. Also, a while later, we went to visit the previously mentioned university of Coimbra, which turned out to be extremely interesting. Back at home again, we had an international pre-dinner snack, consisting of Thai noodles, Viennese “Apfelstrudel” and Argentinian “mate”, which is basically hot water with dried leaves of yerba mate — it’s like tea, just cooler. Plus, while we were sitting there we found out that our hostmum actually had once spoken with Fidel Castro, and we were obviously quite amazed by that. A little later, after feasting once again — this time a French recipe for chicken with champignon sauce and greens — we had the possibility to go out and explore Coimbra’s nightlife, which, just like everything else, got to be quite the enjoyable thing to do.

The following day, well rested after sleeping till noon, we were off to explore the “baixa” aka the downtown of Coimbra in the afternoon. We visited two “repúblicas”, which are basically student homes but with a few interesting tweaks to them. People who live in one actually got to leave their stuff there after moving out, so it gets fairly messy over time. Funny enough, in both of the “repúblicas” we had been to, there each was one dude who casually rolled and lit up a joint while conversating with us exchange students and volunteers. Anyway, the uni students who lived in there were incredibly nice and super chilled. Next, we had an afternoon snack at the previously mentioned, mysterious building near the university, then got back to home and had delicious delivery pizza in there while watching the French version of “The Voice”. On top of all of that, we got to go out a second time since some other exchange students wanted us to join them (well to be more precise — we wanted to too). A German exchange student girl and I teamed up to show those, in our (not-to-be-taken-seriously) words “weak Latinos” how to properly consume alcohol. In fact, the whole night later on was crowned by us four not being able to unlock our home’s door. It took us full thirty minutes trying to get in from all possible sides and calming down a barking dog to realise that we perhaps should’ve simply phoned, which we then did in the end and therefore finally getting our well-deserved sleep.

(These two pictures were taken in the “Real República Prá Kys Tão”, the other one we visited is called “República dos Kágados” and some pictures of it are to be found on my dear gram.)

Sunday, the — sadly already — final day, we had some decently long sleep another time before starting the day with delicious pancakes. We, then, later, sitting around the table having some tasty traditionally Portuguese meal for lunch, got to hear that some train actually derailed and most of the other trains weren’t going because of that accident. In the end, I had to take a bus from the railway station of Coimbra to the one of Pampilhosa and then catch the train home. Luckily, I was able to enjoy the accompany of two exchange students from Porto, who then took another train from Aveiro to Porto.

All in all, I think this honestly has been one of the most enjoyable weekends of my whole exchange so far. Coimbra is a great city, inhabited by great people, which I dead-certainly will be returning to at some point!

Julian