I hope to fall in love

Where do you go if there’s nowhere you need to be?

Love notes from Siel is a monthly-ish newsletter from Siel, who used to live in Los Angeles but is currently traveling around. If you love the notes, subscribe for free.

Dear friend —

How do you go home when you have no home?

That’s the question I’ve been mulling over lately, moving from Mexico City to Los Angeles to Lisbon to Porto to a small beach town in Portugal called Ericeira. All the movement’s made me feel a bit like I’m on the lam, trying to outrun something. But there isn’t really anything I need or want to outrun. 

You’d think I’m used to it, since I’ve been a nomad for more than three years now. But for a long time I still had a foot in Los Angeles and considered Mexico City a secondary home of sorts. It was only recently that I finally sold my car in L.A., and grew less enamored by Mexico City. 

Where do you go if there’s nowhere you need to be? I love exploring new places, but I’ve come to the realization I may also need a place I look forward to returning to — even if it’s for just a few months.

Moving around, you meet a lot of other people who move around, people who like me were born in one continent, grew up in another, made a home in third, then traveled on to a fourth. In Lisbon I went on a walking tour with a guide who was originally from Belgium. She’d been traveling in Chile when the pandemic hit, was stuck there for months, then finally was able to get a flight back to Europe, which brought her to Lisbon, where she decided to try living for a year, then decided to stay.

A lot of people have decided to move to Lisbon recently — a phenomenon that’s creating some tensions between the Portuguese and the expats. Of course many Portuguese, too, choose to become expats. Recently I watched a movie called Where I Grow Old (A Cidade onde Envelheço), which follows two girls from Lisbon who move to Brazil. One finds her place in that new country, with a good circle of friends, coworkers, a handsome lover — yet begins wishing to return to Lisbon. The other’s newer to the city, adapting is a challenge, she cries from homesickness at times, but still wants to stay.

What drives us to stay, and what drives us to go?

Today, I’m off again, this time to Barcelona. I hope to fall in love with it — the architecture, the art, the language, people. Maybe it’ll be the new place I look forward to returning to, again and again. 

Do you think I’ll like it there? Send me tips and recommendations.

Love,

Siel

Wandering through a castle in Mafra, Portugal

Three links you might love:

1. Portuguese history is so rich, with both beautiful and dark stories that for some reason I never learned about in history classes. Did you know, for example, that Portugal had colonies in not only in South America but also Africa and Asia — and held on to many of them until the 1970s? The 2012 film Tabu touches on this legacy of colonialism, taking you from 1960s Portuguese Africa to near-present day Lisbon.

2. Portugal, under the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, stayed officially neutral during World War II — though the country kind of played both sides. By the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, Portugal was siding with the Americans, who ran a CIA-run radio station in a small Portuguese town called Gloria, sending anti-communist broadcasts to eastern Europe. Based on this history, Netflix created a Portuguese mini-series called Gloria — which I found unexpectedly addictive though I haven’t yet managed to finish it.

3. Portugal has many islands and those islands have histories of their own. One, for example, had a bunch of high-grade cocaine wash up onto its shores back in the 90s. That event too is now a Netflix series called Rabo de Peixe, which translates to fish tail, although the commercial English title for the series is Turn of the Tide. I wouldn’t call the series a must-watch, necessarily, but it was interesting to see how hugely the idea of the American dream loomed at this place at this time. 

One Portuguese book recommendation:

Blindness by Jose Saramago (Published in Portuguese in 1995)

In this post-apocalyptic novel, a new disease starts spreading: Blindness. Panic ensues. People are put into quarantine — that are humane-ish in the beginning, less so as more and more people get infected. 

What happens in a pandemic where masses of people lose their eyesight? Since we’ve just been through a pandemic, some of what ensues will seem familiar. But this story reaches apocalyptic proportions: society collapses, animalistic behavior becomes commonplace. There is beauty in this story too, but a lot of what happens is mass hysteria in a dog eat dog world. Pick up this imaginative novel with engrossing prose, written by one of Portugal’s most famous writers.

Subscribe | Ask Siel a question | Recommend a book