Life at Porto’s Place

GRIP: Wine, Heritage, and Hospitality in Porto, Portugal

Don’t get me wrong – I’m endlessly grateful for Penn and the life we get to live back in the
comfort of Philadelphia, a city so bustling you could never run out of things to do. But something
about living in Porto has rewired the way I see life. Back home, everything feels urgent: fill out
this form, study for that exam, finish these deliverables – oh, and don’t forget to cook for yourself
and actually clean your room while you’re at it. It’s a life lived at a sprint. At Penn, I’m the girl
cutting across campus with t-minus three minutes before class, praying I don’t lose 20% of my
grade for being late. But here in Porto, living on my own, I somehow have triple the
responsibilities I did back home, and yet not a single ounce of that old stress. I move slower. I
take my time. I spend my days genuinely happy, appreciating this city for exactly what it’s
become: home.

Living on my own and taking care of myself has proven to be a larger feat than I had
anticipated. I no longer have Hill and Lauder at my fingertips. Instead, I drag myself to the
grocery store after a long shift and translate different items in hopes this time will finally be the
time I buy whole milk instead of skim. But I’ve found that after a month of this routine, I’ve
learned to grow into it. Making my lunch for work has evolved from bringing the same bland
pasta every day to bringing a slightly less bland batch of pasta that took me a little longer than
five minutes to make. I call that a win if there ever was one.

If I’ve learned anything here, it’s that you can pick up almost anything if you’re willing to feel
stupid for a while. At Churchill’s, that’s been the whole education. I didn’t even know what Port
wine was when I started – didn’t even know if I actually liked wine, or just liked the idea of liking
it. Whenever I messed up, my coworkers never made a thing of it. They’d just correct me
mid-sentence, and tell me to try again and think a little harder this time. A month in, and I can
explain any Port at Churchill’s without faking it. Definitely proud of that.

And it wasn’t just the wine that ended up teaching me something. I’ve also realized how much
the world has to offer. Nineteen years in, and it took leaving to notice. I don’t think America is
constricting exactly, but there’s a particular kind of comfort in staying somewhere familiar that
narrows what you think is possible. You stop noticing the ceiling because you’ve never seen the
room without it. Maybe that’s part of why I applied for this program without fully knowing why at
the time – some instinct that I needed to see the room from outside for once.

Since being here, I’ve made a rule: use every free moment to see more. Madrid, Lisbon, the
Douro Valley, Madeira – and at least three more trips before this ends. I don’t take any of it for
granted. The true change in me has been that I’ve stopped assuming America is the default
setting for how life is supposed to look. It’s one place. A great one, even. Just not the only one.

I’m grateful for this summer in Porto, and I’m not ready for it to end. Thank you Porto for
showing me that it’s more than okay to slow down.