Some reflecting

Well, I’m now 4 months into this exchange thing, with only 6 months to go (actually slightly more than that now, because this took me ages to write). Not yet halfway, but I still think saying ‘only’ is appropriate. 6 months really isn’t that long. I feel like it must be about time for some reflections on my experience so far. An exchange is a strange creature. On the one hand it’s a massive adventure, living on the other side of the world, experiencing new and sometimes exciting things. On the other hand, it’s just normal life. A somewhat different normal life, yes, but it’s still going to school, and coming home, and sleeping a lot, and eating food because that’s a thing you have to do and all kinds of mundane normalness. But on the third hand, there’s nothing normal about it. It’s not normal to be this far away from anyone I’ve ever meet before in my life. It’s not normal to arrive somewhere knowing only the most basic of words. It still feels like not quite real life. While I’m gaining a lot, from this amazing opportunity to travel and live a different life, I’m also very aware of the things that I’m losing. I know it’s time to withdraw more from home, so I can not think about everything that I’m missing, but that’s easier said than done.

In the last 4 months I have cried more than I have in a long long time. And that’s coming from someone who cries a lot anyway. Sometimes from sadness, more often from frustration, or just plain my eyes decide to leak without any consultation with the rest of me. I guess I could say that every tear represents a thing that I’ve learned, but that would be too cheesy, even for me, so I’ll leave that thought there. But I am learning a lot. Or at least I hope I am. Everyone always says that the hardest things are the things that you learn the most from. Some days I wonder it we’re just telling ourselves that so that we can pretend the hard things mean something.

Life so far away from everything I used to know can get lonely sometimes. More than sometimes, in fact. On the good days I forget to feel lonely, but it comes crashing back on the bad days. The advice is always that I need to start inviting people out to do stuff. Invite someone to have coffee! I know that it’s good advice, and the alternative is to just be lonely and make nothing of my year here, but it’s not easy inviting someone when I feel so boring. Yes, I can speak Portuguese. To an extent. To a very mundane and repetitive extent. I don’t want to inflict myself on people, but I know that I need to.

This is all sounding a bit negative, but I promise it isn’t all bad. My Portuguese is vastly improving, for one thing. It’s still very much lacking in nuance (I can say ‘shut up’ but saying ‘excuse I’m very tired can you please take your conversation somewhere else’ is more of a challenge) and sometimes it strikes me as odd that the people I’m talking to understand my words better than I do, and I don’t always control exactly what they mean. Despite that, I can communicate, and no longer have to carry my dictionary around everywhere, so that’s getting better. I’ve some pretty exciting travel coming up over the holidays too, so hopefully I’ll get around to posting about that. Life goes on.