The End

Erasmus is over. It was a long year pfff.. and so hard :D.

I still have my thesis to finish but it's OK, I'm on the way to have it ready until the end of this week.

I confess, I'm a little bit scared about next year. I won't be a student anymore and that's really strange.. I've been studying since I'm 6, now I'm 23 (on my way to 24) and studying is the only real thing I've ever done. 17 years studying it's a long time and makes us, students, feel completely apart from the working class.

Where will I work, how's it gonna be, will I enjoy it, are some questions that have been filling my head lately, specially after Sérgio left to Portugal and after the visit of my friends from Prague.

Sérgio left on Saturday morning and my old friends left yesterday morning (now I think I can say that). I gotta say that yesterday's afternoon was quite depressing... I was speaking about that with Miguel, watching some pictures from this year and this melancholic feeling filled my head. This was great when we were the 3 altogether, now it's a little bit strange to be here.

But that's life... people come and go, things happens and we only keep memories, hopefully good ones. I gotta say that that's the case, I have almost only good memories from this year, so coming here was a very good decision.

Now comes the big question - will I stay in Portugal? I don't think so, or at least I hope not. I feel like I've got something to do somewhere out of Portugal.

Erasmus was a big adventure, but it wasn't that hard. I came with 2 good friends and everything was really easy since the beginning. We had this EILC (Erasmus Intensive Language Course) where we met a lot of nice people. After we arrived in Ostrava and we found a bunch of Portuguese people who turned the integration in this city really easy. The French guys were also really important, we spent days, weeks, months together... in the end it felt like a family.

Living in a Student Residence made my life easy as well. It's easy to adapt when you have 100 people living all around you in the same situation.

The real test will be next year. I hope I'll have the guts to leave Portugal. I hope I'll be strong enough to surpass the bitter flavor of loneliness that I'll probably feel in the beginning.

Every time I have this scary picture in my head of being alone somewhere in Europe (or outside Europe, who knows?) looking for a flat, adapting to a new lifestyle, laws, and specially looking for friends, people to spend time with - because we only feel like home when we feel good with the people that surrounds us.

At the same time I feel embarrassed of being scared. I've got a great example of victory in my family - my father. He went alone to Switzerland, without knowing any language besides Portuguese, to a place where he didn't knew anyone... and the worst thing was that in that time there weren't as many foreign people spread in Europe as there are now.

Will it be easy to find a job in Europe? I have absolutely no idea about it... I really don't know if it's easy for a recently graduated Mechanical Engineer to find a place to work in it's area.

I'll leave by car with José (Miguel's brother) and its girlfriend. I think the trip will take 2 days and it's planed to start between the 15th and 16th of July.

So, I think I'll keep posting here from times to times. Some friends from Erasmus follows this page and that's a good way to keep in touch, even if it's in an indirect way.

It's really sad to leave some friends from here. I really "connected" with some people as I never thought I would do in Erasmus. Things are not so superficial as I thought they would be and that's good, I guess. I couldn't ask for more - I had fun, traveled, met a lot of great people, improved my English/Spanish/French... that's just great.

Bye.

Ah, and I leave with you the song that I heard more times during this year. Hope you like it.