After 5 months in Lisbon, I can say that I’m a real portuguese girl. No I’m joking, I ate a lot of pastel de nata but I’m not yet portuguese even if I fell in love for this country, maybe quite little in size but really deep in term of culture and history. I remember in my first testimony, I joked saying that my main goal would be to try every speciality. It’s an objective still in progress, there is more than one hundred ways to cook the “bacalhau” so it will take me time.
These last 5 months were really intense, I travelled a lot in all the country. The Portugal is very different from the North to the South, about the portuguese language but also the mentalities and the landscapes. I keep a particular memory of Alentejo and Algarve. I had also the chance to travel to the islands of Açores, such an adventure! The EVS leaves you the opportunity to travel in so beautiful places. Travelling is a way to discover yourself, to evolve, to share particular and unexpected moments with friends or even strangers.
I discovered also deeply the city of Lisbon, by day and by night. Lisbon is very rich culturally with a lot of museums, expositions, concerts, but also with an intense nightlife. I still keep some struggle with the portuguese language. The pronunciation is quite difficult to understand for the French girl I am. But with time, the “shhhh” that I only was able to understand, begin to seem like real sentences. To have local friends helped me a lot to improve and understand better this totally new language, which I discover, can be finally very musical and deep in meaning.
I’m feel like at home here because my roommates are my friends and our house, “Casa Anjos” as we could traduce “Angel’s house”, is full of energy, love and happiness. We are used to meet in the kitchen and discuss about our life, our dreams, our goals, our expectations. It’s all about sharing real moment with people as open minded than you but from so different countries and cultures (8 exactly). The EVS community is kind of a family and she is very active. We do a lot of things all together like the Clube de Literatura, the Portuguese classes, the International dinners... Plus, with the people who are part of my project, we must create an exposition about the Human Rights. It’s the occasion to work more together, putting all our ideas in order to create something interesting about this subject.
About my main work with kids, I could say it’s always in evolution. I was supposed to work only in one children’s center but finally I go in two different centers, Vicentix and Fradix. It’s the occasion for me to work in two different social environments, with two different teams, two different tutors. I had a certain time of adaptation, it wasn’t easy every day but now I found my marks and I have really great time in these places.
It’s strange to think that I already did more than the half of my EVS. I’m not the new one anymore. The EVS experience is completely up to you. I choose to discover deeply the portuguese life and now, I’m feel like at home so far from my own country. For the last months I have, I hope to share more moments with my EVS family, with my portuguese friends, experiment more and more things in Lisbon which is still full of secrets. Because at the end of my project, I want to have a lot of good memories maybe to understand better what is to have “saudade”, the portuguese word which has any translation in other languages.
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