Ate Logo Portugal

"The perfect trip is a circle - getting there and coming home"

On a cold and rainy morning, we took our leave of Lisbon and Portugal, eagerly anticipating the trip home. What were we looking forward to? Pancakes, bathrooms larger then a cupboard, air conditioning, and football just to name a few. Portugal was....amazing, challenging, gorgeous and so many more adjectives both positive and negative.

I think the best thing about coming home from a trip, any trip, is not just seeing familiar faces and places. I think when you return home is really when you can begin to see the changes in yourself. In walking through the smoothened corridors of normality, hints of the exotic and the awareness catch like rough edges. You look at a gallon of milk, but suddenly it's not just milk anymore, it's knowledge that not everyone in the world drinks pasteurized milk, thanks for the gigantic supermarket at which you bought that milk, and wonder at how so many people can enjoy such similar things the world over.

Home is like a mirror, reflecting the dimensions in which you have grown (or shrunk) and showing us how to assimilate new thoughts into old lives.

Ate logo means "until later" in Portuguese. We're sure that we'll be there again later in life, if for nothing more then to relive a time in which we were so young and happy.

Thanks everybody for taking the trip along with us. We'll return in a week with the new Bartnik adventures in Brazil.