Latada Aliados Porto 2014 - Video of the Week

Latada in Porto, Portugal. Avenida dos Aliados. This was in 2014, a main academic event in the city. Thousands of freshmen gather at the end of the week dedicated to them.

Why travel? - Blog Week 1

Why travel? That is indeed one question that has followed me for a long time. Not because I was asking it , a but because I was answering it.

That question bothers me much. It feels personal, like someone questioning your values, or your own ideals. It also makes you feel sometimes missfit.  Awkwardly positioned as opposed to the questioner 's point of view. Why do you travel, they ask me, pointing almost immediately the supposedly high costs of traveling,  the useless waste of time or how our home town is so nice and unexplored that there is absolutely no need to furthermore explore the world. This limited view of the world should be very limited in the number of supporters, yet the number of times I have been asked the question is absurdly high.

Coupled with the question comes the limited view of travelling.  Besides the obvious benefits that are often ignore, such as leaving you home to explore new places, cultures, people, to challenge yourself, to gain knowledge and experience, people refer the checklist benefit. For me that is no benefit, in fact if you travel to complete an imaginary checklist and take photos to post on Facebook I seriously advise you  to just stop, save some money and rethink the purpose of travel. The checklist is worthless, the photos are good for memory keeping but they are no good if you do not experience. If you are in a new place, whatever the place , explore it, live it. Photos are secondary. If you really want to keep it, make a video without caring about it , without the experience becoming the video instead of the opposite.

Portugal vs Germany , in Porto Portugal

The checklists is often followed by the informed opinion of the best places to go, which often are unfortunately not based on their experience but on the highly publicised travel destinations. Nothing wrong with those, but often the experiences that should be seeked are put aside for more worthless photo tours to monuments, with no connection at all to them. The monuments themselves should be visited, but in an exploration route, not a defined strict photo tour.

To conclude, I am confronted with their own realization of how senseless it is to travel with this purpose. It is something you could do at home with Google ! I agree ! True, this is not the way. We should travel for other reasons. One reason, a powerful one, is that we have to learn how to be wanderers. It is hard at first, and I shall talk over the time how I am learning to be one, but it is worth it. A fine pursue , although not an easy one. We are often bound to home, to conform,  to our place where we feel fine. Travel helps to change that, challenging us, testing us, helping us learn about the world but most important about ourselves. And once you start learning about you, things change, and start changing faster, and your safe place on the world no longer makes sense. In fact, you discover it never existed, and it is no longer your place, so you start wandering, both in the sense of travelling as in the sense of learning.

Happy discoveries, see you next week.

Daniel

PhoneBooth by Cheikrew, in Porto Portugal - Picture of the Day

Phone booth in Porto , Portugal. Cheikrew creation.

Porto the place to start

Hi there ! You probably never met us, and I hope this is not the first time you hear about our city Porto. It is an amazing city believe us , and we will do our best to show it to you , along future travels and experiences around the world.

We also hope to share a bit of history of every place we visit, a bit of the stories lived in each place , a couple of our stories too , and maybe some vlogs along the way.

Our plan is also to convince you to be a traveller. Not for the photos, or for imaginary checklists.  We sincerely believe every single place on earth is worth our attention. Every single story is worth at least one minute of our time. We will try to show you the places, the sounds, the pictures , but we really want you to become a wonderer just like us. Porto is our home , yet we more and more progress to be citizens of the world. We do love our town and we sure hope to see you visit it , maybe something we said convinced you, maybe the city itself needs not to convince.

Follow us here or on Google Plus.  We are also setting up a vine account , tumblr , twitter and Facebook account.

See ya !