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Olà!

My name is Jeremy Caldeira, and I am a junior at Western Washington University in lovely Bellingham, WA. This page is dedicated to the upcoming semester I will be spending in Lisbon, Portugal. This will be a unique experience for me, one I hope to vividly illustrate for everyone who reads this! I will admit now that this is my first time blogging. I am not an inexperienced writer, but I am used to writing more formally. So, as I am by no means a professional, please feel free to leave any and all feedback! I will appreciate every bit of it. Even if you tell me that my blog is a painful failure, I will not blink (although I admit that I would probably have to strain to not blink). If you do not like my use of anecdotes in parenthesis (like I just did for the second time) please tell me! I want this blog to be a meaningful reflective process for me, but I also want this to be entertaining for my readers. I pledge to do my best to do so.

Now that all that boring stuff is out of the way, time to get the even more boring stuff out of the way. Who am I? Why am I traveling to Portugal? I have lived my whole life in Washington state, shoved in the far northwest corner of the contiguous 48 states. At times, it has felt like I’ve never left. I’ve traveled extensively through the US, but before college, I never quite made it to other countries. Yet, I’ve always had a desire to travel and study abroad. This interest started when I was 5. I had an unhealthy interest in geography and maps. I would spend hours looking through atlases whilst my peers were playing with Bey Blades, or whatever toy was popular. I don’t know what they played with. My nose was glued in to the map of Luxembourg or some country like that. This obsession became so unhealthy that I started memorizing national capitals instead of  doing my hand-print Thanksgiving turkey in art class. I was a different kind of savant. Needless to say, when one knows the names of all the UN recognized countries (quite an impressive pick-up line) that person might become interested in what those places look like. When that happens, that person (who shall remain unnamed) just might want to see in person the wonders they are reading in print.

Studying abroad is my chance to do this. I decided in my junior year of high school that I was going to study abroad. While the United States is home to many wonders, I was more interested in experiencing what the daily life of, say, a Latvian is like (or whatever country floats your boat). However, I knew from the moment that I wanted to study abroad that I would do it in Portugal. My dad’s family is almost entirely Portuguese. I was interested in immersing my self in the culture of some of my ancestors. Three years after this decision, I have committed myself to a fall semester studying at ISCTE-IUL in Lisbon. I will be studying economics and Portuguese history. I will be living in an apartment in the heart of downtown, allowing me to have an insider’s view on the daily lives of the Portuguese. Thus, I will indeed be a Caldeira in its natural environment.

I hope that my blog will engage you. My true wish is that this blog may inspire you to get in touch with your inner traveler and go make the world your own! That being said, if you know anyone who would be interested in reading this blog, please have them follow it! I’m not counting on many people actually reading this, so the more the merrier! Some of my posts will be more formal, some will be more of a snapshot of a location I visited, or a person I met. I will try to vary the length and type of my posts. There is no set schedule of when I will post, but if you check once a week, you should find at least one new post. I hope to have my first post up by early next week .If you are reading this at a time where my previous statement no longer applies, bully for you! I believe there are many blog entries and posts for you to catch up on (so get to work). Final note: if you haven’t caught on, I write very sarcastically. A good rule of thumb is that anything I put in parenthesis is sarcastic (like this, although this isn’t actually sarcastic, got you!).

With all that being said, I hope that you come back to read some more.

Até a próxima vez,

Jeremy