Hi! My name is Joseph Rix and I am a third year French and Portuguese student who spent their year in Lisbon, Portugal.
I cried twice on my first day in Lisbon, all the way back in September. This might seem like a strange thing to start this off with, but I feel it makes sense to let you know exactly how I started my year in Portugal, and just how far I’ve come since then. Because without a shadow of a doubt this was the best year of my life.
I was blessed with the double whammy of having a flat that was both full of Erasmus students (loads of international exchanges and opportunities to learn about other cultures and ways of life) and just a 5 minute walk from my university campus (FCSH at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa). As such, I did a lot of walking in Lisbon, as well as making use of the phenomenal Metro system (I can never look at a Unilink bus the same way again). However, you must be warned: Lisbon is extremely hilly. Like, unbelievably hilly. Some days you will never want to look at a set of stairs ever again. But trust me when I say it is so worth it when you get to a miradouro (or lookout) and the city of Lisbon stretched out below you. It is unlike anything you will have seen before and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
As I was in Lisbon on a study exchange, I got to experience life as a university student in Portugal. It was a pretty steep learning curve to go from almost all of my lessons being in English to none of them, but it really pushed me to improve my listening skills and the sense of achievement I got from finally making a salient point in Portuguese was near unrivalled. As well as this, my workload was fairly light as I only had to do 5 modules across the year (3 in Semester 1, 2 in Semester 2) which left plenty of time for exploring both the city of Lisbon and Iberia as a whole. I got to visit places like the Algarve, Madrid and Coimbra, where I went for their May student celebrations. I would absolutely recommend if you enjoy lots of partying and wild celebrations until the early hours of the morning (not quite my cup of tea!).
If you asked me in September if I would enjoy the year as much as I have, I would have laughed in your face. But this is the real testament to a year abroad: you have no idea what you’re going to get up to. I’ve learnt fun titbits in 6 new languages, danced the night away to Portuguese pimba music, cried laughing at a particularly intense game of Uno, and I’ve done it all with the best people I could have ever met. I have grown so much as a person and I could not have done it without the little Portugal family that I made. There is really nothing like it.
