Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2025

While everyone is home, I am left alone in Georgetown. I live in an off-campus apartment building, which is now entirely silent. The noise from my upstairs

neighbors walking (actually stomping) is gone. The noise of my next door neighbors screaming at the top of their lungs while playing video games is also gone. All I see on the street are old people who live in the neighborhood or groups of high school girls taking photos; there is no in between. I have actually been exploring Washington, D.C., which every Georgetown student says they will do and never does. I have ridden the Metro (twice!), and I went to the Capitol Hill flea market.

You may be wondering why I am still in Georgetown a full four days after my last final. Well, I am meeting my parents in Portugal! We Jews took advantage of the cheap(er) Christmas Eve flights, and I agreed to stay in D.C. and wait. 

This morning, though, in what may feel like a horrible case of foreshadowing, I woke up with bad pain from a wisdom tooth growing, the last of my six wisdom teeth. My orthodontist told me in seventh grade that I am extra wise, since I have extra wisdom teeth. Lucky me. Since I am leaving tomorrow night, I guess we will just have to cross our fingers and hope that I do not have to get emergency surgery in Lisbon!

Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025

So, I spoke too soon! I got emergency surgery today and am flying to Portugal in exactly five hours. … Only up from here!

Thursday, Dec. 25, 2025

Merry Christmas! After an incredibly turbulent flight and lots of ice and pain meds, I landed in Lisbon. We wandered around the relatively empty city, saw

some sights and a lot of tiles. No shopping was done because of the holiday; the only stores open were tourist shops and one canned fish wonderland, also a tourist trap. Everything we ate was phenomenal, despite the fact that I had to take tiny bites and only chew on one side. 

Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025

We left Lisbon this morning, and what a sad goodbye it was. The food, the streets, the clothes, the pottery — amazing. I have officially become a pottery girl. I

bought two mugs and two plates; it’s been two days.

I come from a family of food lovers, mom-and-pop shop connoisseurs and locally owned boutique store aficionados. Lisbon epitomized all of this. We walked everywhere, despite the very steep hills, which I successfully climbed without getting short of breath (signing up for the Iron Man triathlon now). 

This morning, we rented a car and drove to Evora, a UNESCO World Heritage site. We visited the Chapel of Bones, decorated with the bones of 5,000 people who were buried in Evora’s medieval cemeteries. It was quite disturbing. 

Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026

Happy New Year! And (happy?) first day of classes! I realized writing about what I did every day was pretty boring; it was not my intention to not write at all. So, here is a summary of the rest of the trip. I will keep it brief, because frankly, nobody wants a detailed account of everything I did. 

Some highlights: we visited a monastery in a town called Tomar, and I was so amazed I even wished they

rented medieval dresses so I could run around pretending I lived there. We then visited Coimbra, an old college town founded in the 1290s. The town was amazing, but the university was such a tourist trap that my parents and I were laughing the entire time. We got there for our tour of the library (which cost $20 per person!) at 12:40 p.m., only to discover that everything closes from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. for a break, so we had to wait on the campus for an hour to continue our underwhelming tour.

Then we arrived in Porto, where we thought we would have the most fun, and we booked four nights at an Airbnb there. We were wrong. We spent New Year’s there, where we went to bed before midnight (New Year’s is overrated anyway). I woke up in 2026 and decided it was time to do 10 hours of work for my job rather than explore the city. I visited the bookstore that the Harry Potter library is based on. We paid €10 each to enter, only to be crammed in with over 100 people and find a book selection that looked like it was made for people who never read, 2/10.

Finally, we arrived in Vila Nova de Milfontes in the south of Portugal to see the Fisherman’s Trail, a scenic trail along the Atlantic Ocean’s coast with dramatic waves. I was in awe, so naturally I forced my mom to take around 400 photos of me (I am not exaggerating). My dad tried octopus, a traditional Portuguese dish; I got over my aversion to fish and ate a salmon poke bowl (new year, new me); and overall, I ate phenomenal food. 

I loved Portugal. I cannot wait to go back.