»Welcome to Portugal«Here I am, a new experience begins…And this time in Oporto. The first impressions are always very important for foreigners and I have to admit that the ones here in Portugal have been until now surprisingly positive… After having been arrived at the airport, where a group of “traditional” dancers offered us typical products of the country, everything appeared to me incredibly organized…something that as an Italian I didn’t expect at all.
Eyes of foreigners are normally more open than local ones and somehow I was very impressed to see how beautiful and special this city is, and how normal and obvious it seems to the Portuguese.
First of all what surprises me a lot, are the big contrasts still existing here. The battle between tradition and modernity doesn’t seem to have found a solution here. It’s like you see a child next to a very old man but it’s missing the link between them. Very traditional aspects still survive in this city: u can still find vegetable gardens in some courtyards of the city centre, just next to the latest shopping mall, old traditions converse with complete new ones…Another aspect that makes this city so peculiar are its houses. Coming from a country where most of the historical buildings are treated like manufacts that no one can touch, here the buildings and its history are still parts of the everyday life so that no one is frightened to change things according to new necessities...
Of course after only two weeks it’s clear you can’t have seen everything or understood all the aspects of one city: but here you get from the first second the feeling that the hole world is like hiding a secret: In the buildings, in the face of the persons, in the atmosphere you can “breathe” around…Persons are for sure friendly with the foreigners but somehow they keep in their eyes and in the wrinkles of their skin the evidence of an intensive life that makes them also very rough sometimes… I cannot say what it is and maybe it is due to the rough weather, to their past (this I will discover) but somehow u get the impression that if you will look better you’ll discover something more behind the surface… The buildings are somehow reflecting this characteristic, too… the many abandoned houses you can find in the centre are source of many treasures that fortunately I had the possibility to see in very few examples…As for the atmosphere even if the Erasmus life is quite isolated from the real life of the city, you can get a sort of melancholy that unifies everything here. I’m not talking about sadness but more about a sort of deeper meaning that maybe with the time I will discover… who knows.
Anyway I cannot deny that this aspects make me very curious about Oporto’s life and I already had the possibility to experience how funny and intensive it can be to live the real Porto life…
Welcome to Portugal… Michele Martinetti
Michele Martinetti é estudante da "Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio" e está a fazer um ano de estudos na FAUP ao abrigo do programa Erasmus.
* parafraseando um programa que passa actualmente na rtp2
