Since 2010, I have been thinking about possible ways to travel and even move to another country. In the reality that I had, with my mind constrained by the limits that life presented me and those that I created myself, I gradually expanded my mind and created possible paths.
About to finish my graduation from college, in 2012 and at the age of 24, it was October and for the first time I was going to travel by plane, destination Argentina.
The opportunity arose to accompany my, then, boyfriend, to an art festival in La Plata, a city 2 hours from Buenos Aires. With all the anxiety about flying for the first time and using Spanish, which I studied between the ages of 14 and 17 and had never really practiced, there I went.
Yeah, I couldn’t talk Spanish as well as I wanted to, but I loved being on the other side of a border and feeling like I belonged there. The world belongs to us.
It was only 5 days spent between Buenos Aires and La Plata, getting lost in the diagonal streets and loving to discover the new. In this case, I wanted to get lost, using a gigantic paper map, with streets so old but new to me.
Something inside me already announced itself saying that, even though I was afraid of heights, I wanted to fly higher, I wanted to discover other cultures and lifestyles.
As a Brazilian, waking up at six o’clock in the morning every day, having a scholarship at the university, working full-time and going to sleep at one o’clock in the morning, I dreamed: I want to travel.
I didn’t want to take a vacation, I wanted to travel.
It was decided: that same year and once I graduated, I would go to Barcelona, I don’t know where I got this idea.
No, wait, I know…
When I was 12 years old, my older sister had a friend, Márcio, he gave me a keyring, in the shape of a guitar, which served as a bottle opener. It had a picture of the Sagrada Familia and it was written, Barcelona.
I lost the keyring and gained a dream…
Brazil, summer 2012, with all possible adversities I graduated and bought myself a ticket to Barcelona, in European winter.
I went for a few days, just seven, what was a shame, I wanted to live in the Gothic Quarter, I wanted to walk like a penguin, full of clothes, along the beach for longer.
But, I had to leave, it was vacation, I wasn’t traveling.
From Barcelona, on December 31, 2012, I took a flight to Paris and that’s where my 2013 started. It took another seven days to discover the city, walking every day for fifteen hours or until my legs couldn’t take it anymore, I was in a hurry, I didn’t want to miss anything.
Exhausted, happy, and back in Brazil, I didn’t stop thinking about what I could do to create other possible realities for the dreams I had inside me: To travel.
