Week one: walking, pastries and coffee

It’s Tuesday and I’m sat in the Copenhagen Coffee Lab in the “laptop zone”. Lisbon is full of amazing cafes and places to get coffee, but the Copenhagen Coffee Lab is a nice change to all the traditional Portuguese places. Not a nata in sight! (Did I miss a good pun there? Nat-a nata in sight…). It’s nice and open and minimalist, obviously with great coffee and pastries. 

Why am I in a coffee shop in the middle of the day on Tuesday? I turned up for work this morning to an empty office and discovered that today is a national holiday (Carnival – at home we call it Pancake Day)…

This has actually worked out well because I always sleep in on the weekend or days off, so at least I was out and about by 9am! Annoyingly though I have my laptop with me which I don’t want to carry around while sightseeing, hence the coffee shop trip with my laptop for the remainder of the morning.

So I have been in Lisbon for eight days now. It somehow feels like a lot longer, but not because time has gone slowly due to boredom. The first week was very full-on: arrived on Monday at 9pm, got up early on Tuesday for four hours of language class and then three hours of work. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Monday (yesterday) all followed the same structure.

Language classes* have been so much fun. I was a bit nervous about not keeping up because foreign language is not my strong suit – mainly the listening. (As my colleagues and friends back home will tell you, I often have trouble telling what people are saying in English. I think it’s a mild-Asperger’s thing, which I’ll save for a future blog post when I’m more confident to write about it.)

To my surprise not only did I manage to keep up but I loved the classes. It’s been so fun learning a new language, maybe because there is real reason to try hard with it. Not like in school where you know you’ll never need to know the French for “I have one sister and a pet Guinea Pig”.

Before I came, I discussed my nerves about the language with my mum, who reminded me that you don’t need to learn it perfectly as most British people can’t speak English properly. A very good point, I thought. Many people don’t know simple words like their/there/they’re, two/too/to, and they put apostrophes in things like CDs and Fridays.

Yesterday, the last class, one of the girls said my Portuguese was really good which was very nice of her to comment. I am blessed with a good memory, especially for things I see or write (another Asperger’s thing I think). So having a teacher write words on the board and get us to use them in the homework each night really helped me. I have actually asked if I can carry on the lessons one morning per week but need to sort this with tutors/classmates/workplace. 

All in all, it’s been an excellent week. I am absolutely exhausted because I am not someone who can just go home after work when work is in Baixa-Chiado (I can finally say this now!). Every evening I’ve wandered around and headed home for about 8pm. Come the weekend, I walked about 11km on Saturday sort of by accident. I started the day at Crush Donuts (amazing, probably the second-best donut ever – to Dough in NYC). And then I just kept walking and exploring, visiting the areas I came to on my trip to Lisbon in 2017 and trying to get my bearings. 

I think I saw nearly all of the best viewpoints in one day which is a bit ridiculous, but once you get walking you just keep coming to more! On Saturday afternoon, I met a girl from my office back home who happens to be from Lisbon and was visiting family for a few days. It was so nice to see a friendly face and spend some time with a local! She showed me the famous codfish cakes and I ate fish for the first time in two years – looks like I’m going back to pescetarian life while in Portugal. They have some of the best seafood in the world, can you blame me?

On Sunday I had brunch at Leitaria – a cafe I went to with my friend when we came in 2017. It’s close to my accommodation which is mad to think that when we were there, future me would say “you’ll live 10 minutes from here one day”. Me, living in Lisbon? What?

I walked another 9km on Sunday, seeing different parts of the city. Of course on both days I took my new SLR everywhere and snapped far too many photos. I’ll find the time to upload them soon. In the meantime, I’ve been putting photos on my Instagram:

Sunday evening involved a trip to IKEA – turns out it’s only 10 minutes on the bus from my accommodation. The flat comes with communal kitchenware but it’s a bit student-life-y and I wanted my own plates and cutlery, which at IKEA is only a few euros. I ate dinner there too as the cafe is so cheap and opens late!

The mistake I made was not checking that I could get the same bus back that I had got to IKEA. You can’t. It reminded me of my student days getting the bus to IKEA where I had a part-time job, and getting stranded at the retail park when buses were late or temperamental. Google Maps saved me and I found a route back involving two buses in the dark. Luckily I’m well-travelled and good at being on my own / not panicking!

My accommodation has been a bit of a culture shock, going back to a student halls type of situation. Things I’m just about getting used to:

• single bed
• dirty floors
• shared bathroom
• shared kitchen
• living with non-English people

In my few years as a working graduate I’ve become more accustomed to a nice standard of life than I realised! But as the programme coordinator said:

This experience is meant to challenge you in more ways than one. 

Of course living with non-English people is all part of a great cultural experience and hopefully it will improve my language (although one of them who kindly showed me around speaks excellent English). Prior to arriving I did think that I would be living with others on similar Erasmus programmes to me, who were also new and didn’t know anyone.

It was a bit of a surprise to be mainly alone and not with others who were new to Lisbon, as I haven’t become close to the people I flew over with either. They’re lovely and we’ve had fun taking the language classes together, but we all live and work in different places so won’t see each other much now. Of course we could meet up, but they already know each other well so I am sort of an outsider and didn’t really bond.

(This is unusual for the Erasmus+ scheme as I came onto it very late and was offered a last-minute spot. Typically I would have done the training in London with the people I flew over with. However I did my training with some girls coming over in March who I am looking forward to seeing again.)

Again, luckily I’m good at being alone and happy to wander around and eat out on my own. I took a solo trip to Latvia three years ago and it was one of the best holidays ever. Being on your own is a skill, I’ve come to realise. I once took it for granted but have since learned it’s something most people struggle with. Future blog post coming on this topic. 

One last note from the first week here is the coffee. The coffee! It’s unbelievably cheap. I forgot that kettles aren’t really a thing outside of the UK. Our accommodation doesn’t have one, and I can’t get far without my morning strong black coffee. Each day on my way to language class I’ve stopped at A Padaria Portugesa which is a chain cafe they have here. Amazing pastries, and an espresso is €0.65. Ridiculous. And the croissants filled with chocolate and fresh strawberries only bring the total breakfast cost to €2.55. I will probably return to the UK in three months the size of a house – but at least the no-kettle thing won’t be a problem! 

*Language classes are at PortLingua who I really recommend. Here’s me looking like an absolute GIANT on their Facebook page. (Those people aren’t that small, I just have massive shoulders.)

PS – website in progress – proper pages and ‘about me’ / ‘what on earth am I doing moving to Lisbon’ coming soon!