Justin’s testimony No.2

Most of the times we focus to much on the things, that went wrong, that make us angry, sad and disappointed, but at the same time when we try to focus on the awesome, the great, the fantastic, we realize we don’t have something to focus on, reflecting the good things seems impossible when we analyze it. Because it is difficult to pinpoint down to the exact moment, when things went from nice to great.

I have been in Lisbon for three months now, if you ask yourself, Justin your first testimony was released in April, can’t you count? Well I can, but i had to spent one month in Germany for my exams which went well, now I can finally call myself out of school. A long overdue thing anyway, at one point I felt, I cannot grow there anymore, so I am truly glad that this chapter has ended.

Maybe I am still in the first phase of the culture shock, but I love it here, despite the fact  that there are large problems.

One of the things that I love so much here is, that I am able to get to know so many people with their own fascinating backgrounds, and facettes of personality, which couldn’t be more different to each other. Not only meeting people though, but also the friendships that I have built here, make my happiness lasting.

It is strange though, there are people, who clearly live in past events, which makes it impossible for us to, if these events were not particularly good from both sides, act normally with each other or make up for it, and see or at least try to see that person, not as it were before those incidents, but as some abstract painting, in which we discover everytime we see it something new. Like the paintings in an art museum in Belém, that I would name, if it wasn’t for the fact, that it’d be advertisement.

Personally I can live with that. I am not drowning in a pool of emotions nor freezing in the tundra of receiving coldness, because on the other hand there are people who live in the future, and if something bad happens, we talk about it, speak frankly with each other what we feel and what we want in the future, and both sides actively listen, and even if we cannot at all moments sort it out, we feel better afterwards anyway.

The thing with being so young as me, 18 years old, only meeting people around the age of 24+, I can learn so much from these people, which is another great thing, because, when I will get back to Germany after my ESC, I will have a different kind of maturity than that of other people my age will have, just because I could observe and learn from a peer group very different to my „usual“ peers. At the same time it means however, that I have the special ability to quickly annoy people because it is such a big difference in peers and that for getting respect I have to work double as hard, which is understandable, but can at times be very ironic.

On Tuesday I went to a standup-comedy thing, by the way i realized, I definitively have to start again writing, one of the performers made some jokes, obviously, also I just realized, that me retelling the joke isn’t really funny, because the joke wasn’t in the first place.

Anyway one last thing, which for me is of paramount importance, that I feel the need for to share with everybody, that I never can ever not stress enough, because its significance for me is so high, and I had to endure so much to get to the point, where I could finally achieve it, I took the Cambridge assesement in March and I have shown level 3* abilities or in other words, english level C2.