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September 2014: my last month in Portugal will start tomorrow.
I arrived here on May 2013 and I spent almost 1 year and a half in this Country, thanks to two different European Projects (both from the 2007/2013 European financial framework): Lifelong Learning Programme – Leonardo da Vinci and Youth In Action – European Voluntary Service.
The first one allowed European people to do an internship abroad, the second one (that’s still included in the new Erasmus+ programme 2014/2020) allowed youngsters aged between 18 and 30 years old to express their personal commitment for a period of time between 2 weeks and 12 months. With Erasmus +, the age limit is set between 17 and 30 years old.

During my 3 months Leonardo internship, I lived in the historic centre of Amarante, a very nice town in the North of Portugal, 60 km far from Porto.
My EVS was in the South and lasted 12 months, during which I lived in Oeiras, a residential city 17 km far from Lisbon.
I had the chance to learn the Portuguese language, to discover the huge differences between the North and the South of Portugal and to get to know new people from different Countries and religions, but, most of all, I had the chance to challenge myself every day.

I decided to leave because I needed to find myself.
I felt lost in a place where I couldn’t recognize myself anymore.
Anyway, after almost 1 year and a half, I can tell that I didn’t find myself.
I didn’t put the pieces together, I don’t even know if there are pieces to put together and I am completely destroyed, but this may be the opportunity to build myself again, since I cleaned all the ruins and, even if I am wandering in the middle of nothing, I know where I am stepping my feet. I can feel the ground, at least.

What I understood is that when we travel to make a journey inside ourselves, this journey never ends. We try to find answers to questions we’d been asking ourselves for too long, but, instead of finding the answers, we just discover new questions which are more important than the old ones. What was important in the past suddenly becomes shallow. We destroy ourselves and build our soul every day. We make trips in the most hidden corners of our soul and mind, and we leave, thinking we saw enough. Then we feel the need to come back to see those hidden corners, under a different light, in different conditions. As the Portuguese writer José Saramago wrote in his book “Journey to Portugal”:

The journey is never over. Only travellers come to an end. But even then they can prolong their voyage in their memories, in recollections, in stories. When the traveller sat in the sand and declared: “There’s nothing more to see” he knew it wasn’t true. The end of one journey is simply the start of another. You have to see what you’ve missed the first time, see again what you already saw, see in the springtime what you saw in the summer, in daylight what you saw at night, see the sun shining where you saw the rain falling, see the crops growing, the fruits ripen, the stone which has moved, the shadow that was not there before. You have to go back to the footsteps already taken, to go over again or add fresh ones alongside them. You have to start the journey anew. Always. The traveller sets out once more.