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Lockdown in Portugal: The day I bleated at the Butcher
My 3 months of lockdown in Portugal was both challenging and rewarding. The most challenging was the language barrier. Hands down. Full stop. I’ve been traveling abroad as a solo traveler for nearly two decades and my monolingual limitations have never been a barrier. Until Covid-19 happened. I’ve pondered this a lot. Frankly, I had little else to do. I believe what made this experience more challenging was anxiety. Anxiety felt by me as a stranger in a strange land and by those I had to interact with an obvious foreigner during their own personal and collective crisis. Nowhere was this felt more keenly than when I had to make…
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A Stranger in a Strange Land: Lockdown in Portugal during Covid-19 Pandemic
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” J.R.R Tokien, The Fellowship of the Ring Truer words have never been spoken. Yet, like Bilbo, I don’t see these words as a warning – they speak to adventure. Little did I know when I left Florida on March 1, 2020 to cruise for 2 weeks across the Atlantic that I would arrive in Europe with the world having turned upside down. During those 2 weeks, The World Health Association had declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic, most countries…
