Postcard from Portugal

later this fall. That'll be a set of travel ori ended conversations to fill your ears while the production team and I embark on the more time consuming process of actually traveling, conjuring dinner parties, and then editing. But in the meantime, I went on a little holiday this summer and I couldn't help but want to tell you about it.

After wrapping up season one I'm Not Lost, I began to take care of all the life tasks I've been neglecting, getting a wheel alignment from my car, submitting receipts to work inhaling tubes of fig Newman's while flat on my back watching old episodes of The Great British Bake Off. I also caught COVID, which wasn't intentional but did end up working in my favor. It turned out that covid antibodies are the biological equivalent of a TSA prejeck. They

allow you to travel with a little less stress. And when I recovered, I helped my then partner move out of our apartment. Yes, another relationship ended. I was single again, back where I started at the beginning of Not Lost. This ending was less sudden and fractious as previous breakups, but that didn't make the undertaking any less heavy. It

was still a breakup stage. Around that time, this lovely incantatory song came out by Brazilian musician Tim Bernardes, and I kind of served as a bomb for all that had been going on. Now. The song's in Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese, so I didn't know what the words meant, but I found it soothing just the same, and after listening on repeat for a few days, I finally put the name of the title and Google translate be Born,

Live Die. With all the had been going on, it was nice to be reminded that there's really only one to do list that matters. So I had Portuguese on the mind in my ears, which was helpful because I was struggling with a new dilemma, where do you travel for fun when traveling is what you do for work. I'd been to Brazil before Sam Paulo, with its tangle of steel, glass and heat at once Ferrell and Cosmopolitan,

and I thought about going again. But I caught win that a friend of a friend recently bought a place in Portugal, and that's a place I've always wanted to go. I love sardines. A couple summers back, my bloodstream was made up primarily of vino Verde. And also, Portugal is just a great word to say Portugal. It feels good coming out of the mouth. And if it does come out of your mouth within earshot of a certain class of Americans, they will say something like, I hear it's

a great place to retire. I heard this from my colleagues, my dentist, even an old friend in la I'm not sure how you retire from being supported by your girlfriend, but that's his plan. To be fair. Portugal encouraged this perception of itself as a poker ratan with wine Country, partially by creating the so called Golden Visa program, which means if you invest a certain amount of money, it

will give you the equivalent of a green card. Now, personally, I found all these people fantasizing about moving to another place they'd never been a little bit distasteful and opportunistic, Like, Okay, invest a little bit of money in a country and voila, you get to live somewhere with low crime, solid healthcare, and beautiful beaches and fresh fish dinners for a handful of euro balby knights. So I decided to check out Portugal.

I bought my plane ticket, and after that I went to a bookstore and I bought a little prank guidebook. That's right, a guide book. I always buy guide books. I don't need an Instagram listical telling me about a town's five hottest restaurants. That's information I can get on the ground. But I do need a concise go to guide that gives me a neat bit of local history and tells me how to operate the metro machines. Some things don't need to be messed with. Pines, ketchup, kissing.

Travel guides are among them. After crawling the gauntlet of airline security, I slumped into my seat on the airplane and opened up to page one of Insight Guide's Portugal pocket guide, and I began to read. Few countries have risen as triumphantly or fallen as forlornly as Portugal, from preeminent global superpower in the sixteenth century with far flung colonies and abundant riches, to brushed off backwater of continental Europe.

Portugal is again an Optimi stick country and society in transition. Sounded a bit like me, global superpower at sixteen. Now I brushed off backwater, but optimistic and in transition. So I'm walking through beautiful Lisbon on a Sunday morning, lots of hills. Even though I was on vacation, I couldn't resist bringing my recorder out with me as I took a walk one afternoon. Besides, I didn't have anyone else

to talk to. At first, I thought it'd be fun to take you along with me while I described what I saw. But I quickly realized that was a fool's errand Portugal covered in tiles blue and yellow, and or its symbols put uniform patterns so that I won't even try to explain. Lisbon has a heady cocktail of architectural styles.

There's Roman architecture, Gothic architecture, Moorish architecture, Manu light architecture, all things you'd be way better off googling and taking a look at for yourself, as opposed to having me google them and pretend I knew about them beforehand. But the buildings are covered in them and they're beautiful. But I can do is show you what Lisbon sounds like. So I recorded some audio snapshots of things I found around town, like this fountain in the center of a

square in the barrow Alto neighborhood. Another familiar sound in Lisbon is the tram. The Portuguese call it the electricode. But the most deafening sounds on the streets of Lisbon in the summer the rolling suitcase armies of taurists click clicking through the streets in and out of their lodgings. Thank you. Oh, and that's a guy who's trying to sell me drugs. I just offered me hash cocaine, which makes me feel good, like I'm still looking young and modern.

I was offered cocaine a couple of times while I was in Lisbon, which honestly made me feel kind of good. I was flattered that these guys thought that I looked interesting, enough and that my social life might be robust enough that I maybe wanted to do drugs because in truth, all I really wanted was a small beer, a salad and an app. Okay, well, maybe I wanted something more. I don't know how the Italian couples like. Did they

press their shirts in the morning. It's like gorgeous couple muck by as lovely as it was the trapes about Lisbon unhindered, I was feeling a bit lonely. Don't get me wrong. Traveling alone has its advantages wake up whenever you want, navigate through crowds with ease, pretend Canadian without anyone calling you on it. Plus the whole opportunity for romance. I mean, I haven't seen Eat, Pray, Love, but I get the gist how you scrambled eggs with red wine.

Of course, there are also disadvantages traveling alone. When you find a table in front of a cafe, there's no one to hold onto it while you run inside to order. Then when you do order, you have to limit the amount of dishes because there's no one to split them with. And then when you're eating, you've no one to talk to the same person you've been talking to you for decades. You barely like that person anymore. You know all their stories.

They get grumpy when they're hungry, and they sometimes pretend they're Canadian for no reason. That person is you or in this case me, Hey in front of an empty shop and the sign on it says in English nowhere. Sometimes, when I was really tired of myself and I wasn't recording and I wasn't reading for leisure, I have a return to my travel guide, and that's where I found this nugget about Portugal's national emotion, Sell Dodd. The presence of absence, a longing for someone or something that you

remember fondly, but no, you can never experience again. Now That, more than the sardines, the fountains, the trams, hit home. Last time I'd been to Europe was the summer before with my axe, who went to Roman Venice. And though I didn't pine for our relationship ending, it was the right thing for us. I was nostalgic for our companionship. How we would people watch, hold bags for one another while trying to unclose, agree in a restaurant order, and

hold hands while waiting for drinks. The guide went on an untranslatable word that encompasses longing and melancholy. Well, I've been walking the cobblestone streets of Lisbon, inhaling the diesel fumes of its buses and trying to use those cafe napkins which seemed to be made of onion paper and stick your face instead of cleaning it. I was accompanied by a unique feeling. It wasn't exactly regret, not exactly sadness, and yet it was a touch melancholic. Perhaps I was

experiencing this untranslatable emotion seldad. There was only one way to find out. Okay, So I'm trying to ask what the word seldad means in English. Yeah, ask the Portuguese. It's the It's the loss of something, a person, a place. It's a feeling. It's a feeling from the heart, very profound. On my way back to where I was staying, I stopped at a bookshop in a train station where I met Maria. Do you know this feeling? Do you have

seldad for anything? Yes, for my childhood, for my sister that passed away from my the place where I where I grew up, grow up. But people say it's not it's not all bad. Oh, it's not all bad, because the sad things make you more understanding, appreciate more what you've got right now, appreciate the present well you learned with soda. Thank you for chatting with me. Can I get your name? Maria, Maria Jose, Maria Jose, non abregado.

So sodad was a profound feeling from the heart, and not all bad either, because the sad things make you appreciate the present more, like a sprinkle of salt and grinded pepper, enhancing the main course. Me being me. After the bookshop, I stopped at a wine shop and I asked the owner, Sergio and his wife Carla, what they thought the word man so that it's difficult to explain

from words because it's a very specific Portuguese word. It's like missing, but more strong, more sentimental, because we are very nostalgic people. It's not ugly, but it's it's here. You have missing about many things, but so that is something more strong, more intense. But it's very difficult to express my words. You've done a good job. You don't know women, they can people just miss you. Man. I'm trying to figure that's my that's the mystery I'm trying

to figure out. So how would you describe what the word meant? Well, it was like miss you, but more intense. It's like missing nostalgia, but more intense. When you call to your mom, mom, I miss you, or I said in puts my things so nuch to us. It's a little bit more intense. But I'm see to a fault. It's like, I miss you. Tell me some of the things that make you feel that way. I have seluch from my grandmother. Then she she roll me what what

was her name? Cecilia? Cecilia? Was she a character like you? Well, she was worse. She'll talk about sex really to you, to everyone, And well, I like, what would she say about sex? That everyone likes it? Like even the animals? That's true. After chatting with Sergio and Carlo about Sadad, we got to talking about life more generally and wine more specifically. We hit it off and they invited me to a pop up restaurant happening at a neighboring shop

the following night. The crowd was very hip, all haircuts and tasteful tattoos. We sip wine that was natural and adolf plates that were small and it was there I met Francisco and his father Pedro, and I pulled them

outside to talk about my now favorite topic. So so that can be well academically translated as this deep longing for something, But because it is a very specific word and concept within within our collective thought, it would it is very It's best described as, for example, when you when you tell someone I miss you, it's like a part of you is missing. And so that because it's a bit more broad, you miss someone, you you have, so that of someone, it's something you have because it's

a feeling. There's some sort of constancy in that feeling. So it's that's that's how I could put It's something that is no longer there, either absolutely or in the shape in which you grew accustomed to or you loved, and then you just feel so that what do you think about that? It's happy melancholy, meaning that there's something good that happened and you you miss, you don't really miss you know, it's not it won't come back again. So it's it's a memory of something you consider it

like a positive thing. Yeah, And usually we use it in in the plural, we have sodas meaning there are a few events that we've shared or something that we keep in our hearts, so that that's that's mother the idea, for instance, when someone dies or someone lives abroad, which is very common for Portuguese. So we missed those people. We have soda again plural, not only in a single form, but we missed when we refer to So that my opinion is that we missed the good moments. It's not

crying about. It doesn't have to be some heavy, heavy kind of relationship or yeah, you meet again the person you had good moments and you had sodas you are killing so that we say so that we are killing the sada, so wiping it out right now exactly when you're in some sort recuperating or getting back that memory that was found to you. And so I'm killing this for the moment, so it's let's let's let's kill So that a funny thing happened while I was talking to

everyone about sodad. I started to lose that feeling. I certainly wasn't missing the United States. As for the lack of companionship with all the mingling and talking I've been doing, that didn't make so much either. So maybe I killed Sodad, and yet before Sodad's body was even cold, a different sort of emotion started to creep in. It's mostly dealing with the past, but because it's something deeply ingrained in the culture and vocabulary. There was this interesting episode a

couple of years ago. I think Namar the football star, he wrote to some girl and it got leaked at Soda As. You don't be winged though, It's like I miss that which we have not lived yet. This is the the football star taxed this to a lover, something something to that effect, and so so it does. It does not always, it does carry that sense of sounds just going to be something in the future. I know I already miss it. I know that this is going to be good, and now already miss it. I miss

that which we have not lived yet. That felt right. I didn't miss who I was before coming to Portugal, the overworking COVID, the felt relationship, but being here, spending time alone, talking to others, hearing about those they loved and missed, it all created sort of a firebreak from my life before and my life to come. In other words, it did what a vacation is supposed to do, and now, after two weeks away, I was starting to miss the

future I had not lived yet. It was time for me to get back to New York and begin making new memories that someday I'm probably gonna miss. This Postcard from Portugal was written and produced by me Brendan Francis

Nuno Bart Warshaw also produced, mixed and mastered it. Thanks to Justine Lang and Deevid Glover for lending their voices, and thanks to Latamilad and Jacob Smith for their notes, and be sure to check out Tim Bernard's His song Nassar viver morej appears on his latest album entitled Meal, Cassas and Visiervas, which translates into A Thousand Invisible Things put out by Psychic Hotline Records, and last but not least, thanks to Portugal, I miss you a little bit, but

I've got stuff to do here before I return