MY GREAT ERASMUS EXPERIENCE IN PORTUGAL
My name is Isaac Ares. My Erasmus experience in Portugal was wonderful. This was my first trip to another country by plane so I was a bit nervous. But once the plane was in the air I calmed down and went to sleep. We arrived in Portugal on Sunday around 18:00 and went to the flat which was about an hour away from the airport. As soon as we arrived at the flat we left the luggage and went to look for a supermarket to buy some food for the dinner and for the breakfast for the next day but first we wanted to go out for a drink to have a rest for a while.
The next day, Monday morning, we went to the school where we would be going for two weeks, when we got there we were introduced to most of the teachers who would be teaching us, they showed us around the school and the classroom where we would have our lessons most of the time and they explained to us all the courses they had and also what we had to do if we wanted to have lunch at school. In the afternoon we strolled along the main street looking at shops, exploring Braga and then we went out for dinner.
On Tuesday we started the classes more seriously, we went with one of the teachers that we had met the day before and he explained several things to us, he showed us an electric kart, a skate and a kind of tricycle half assembled and he told us to remove some parts of the skate to finish assembling the tricycle, that day I learned to weld, we could not finish it 100% but we advanced quite a lot. When we finished the class, we had lunch at school , we went back to the flat and then later on we went to play football in a field that was about half an hour away from the flat, we spent the whole afternoon there playing until we were exhausted.
On Wednesday, they showed us some models of final projects made by the students. In the afternoon, we had a relaxing time, we didn’t do anything special.
On Thursday, we used a programme called AutoCAD but they were just starting to use it and we had already been using it for some time at our school so it was an easy day.
On Friday we had a normal class, we did the basics of electronics and had lunch at the school. In the afternoon we went to Porto by train to go for a visit, in the evening we went out to party there and came back the next day on the 7 o’clock train. That weekend we also visited Braga more in depth , we went out for dinner both days and we went to a restaurant specifically to try the francesinha.
During the second week at the school we did very similar things as we did in the first week and in the evenings we all went out for a drink or dinner. I must say that we had to stay quite a few hours in the flat doing the English course because the first week we forgot about it.
I think the trip was super great, if I was given the opportunity to go again I would go back in a heartbeat.
