Homesickness - part II or some other kind of sickness...

Today I feel sick. I know this weblog is supposed to make my friends know how I am, without them thinking I’m collapsing, but today I have to say I feel sick. Not sick in the sense my body is sick, but my mind feels sickened by many things in the lab where I’m working. All I can say is that I look forward to leave.
Sometimes I miss the Netherlands as if it was my home, I already said that. I miss the biking without the feeling of facing a danger beyond reason, I miss being able to do simple things without a car, like going to the movies, or better yet, going anywhere without a car. I miss Dutch people and their cold politeness, I miss what used to be my home, I even miss the rats in the kitchen, because rats are way better than cockroaches. Here there are a lot of cockroaches, which are probably the only living being that I would promptly choose to condemn to extinction, had I such powers. Keeping with the melancholic list of things that I miss, I miss my friends in Groningen, I miss the coffeeshops, I miss meeting Maya in the Grote Markt for another pathetic adventure ;), I miss talking to Saleta in galispaniguese (for those who don’t know, that’s a mix of Portuguese, Galician and Spanish), I miss the long coffee breaks with Aniek where everything from science to hopes and dreams is discussed thoroughly. I miss the sunsets in incredible colours.
But the other day I had a dream. I dreamt I was in a city, living there. The city had hills, converging to the center, and a light like I never found anywhere else but in Lisbon. The sunlight reflects on the white, yellow, baby blue buildings, and on the red tile roofs, creating a warm glow that tells me “you’re home”. And everyone in this city (which I still wasn’t sure to be Lisbon) spoke Portuguese. The little man in the kiosk selling newspapers, the ladies chatting on their way to the subway, everyone I met spoke Portuguese. In the dream I was astonished by this! How convenient, a foreign city where everyone is Portuguese. That’s just what I need. Then I realized I was dreaming about living in Lisbon, and woke up.
Truth be told, I am now so used to being away that it’s hard for me to name what I miss the most in Portugal. The habits are gone, and this is what we always feel that we miss. It was a long process of breaking the old habits and creating new ones, in fact creating a whole new life, from scratch. The only things left now of my life in Portugal are feelings. Feelings for people, feelings for places. And going back to these people and these places is like putting on a pair of old and extremely comfy shoes. You may feel sexier in a new, more fashionable pair of shoes, but these still hurt in critical places of your feet. The other shoes are so worn that they know where to bend, where to be soft, where to be hard. But perhaps you need both types of shoes.
Enough with the shoe analogy. Why am I thinking of this now? I don’t know, honestly, but anyway… I would already feel better if I could go as quickly as possible to my second home (Groningen) and just stuff myself with stroopwaffles, or drown my sorrows in a bottle of Palm. But going to Lisbon and stuff myself with Pasteis de Belem and drown my sorrows in Moscatel would be infinitely better.

View of river Tejo from somewhere in Chiado, Lisboa.

PS- I just remembered now that my dream could mean that I feel like a foreigner in my own country. Buahahhahahaha.