leaving Portugal tomorrow evening. i'll be in Paris for one or two weeks and then my company will send me back to Brazil, this time for a whole year (before this it was 2 months in Paris and 6 months in Brazil).
the thought of leaving for a whole year makes me incredibly sad... i was sort of excited the first time because i had been job hunting for over a year and was anxious to start and travel again too, but this time i'm leaving Lisbon more satisfied, you know. also, being here and in Paris in the summer made me realise just how shitty my life in Brazil was. not just the unreliable weather and godawful infrastructure, in fact i wouldn't care about that if it weren't for the overwhelming loneliness that i feel there.
i live in Guarulhos, a 1.2M person city 10km from São Paulo, but all my friends live in SP proper, and traffic+shitty public transportation make it impossible to go there on weekdays. 5 days a week i have no human interaction after work. my work colleagues are nice and all that, but they're all 40+ and have kids (i'm 26) and we don't like hang out and party and shit. i get the feeling i'm the only foreigner there, as the internationals are usually based São Paulo. before this i underestimated how hard it is to build a social life when you don't have college or work (mine is a small company) to develop it sort of naturally.
on the plus side, spring is just starting there, weather will only get nasty again in June.