Travel. Southern Europe. Food.

I am Portuguese. But — heads up — I am also vegetarian, which means I don’t eat most of the items on the list below. But, for 27 years, I did, and I am here to tell you about all the Portuguese specialties you must try when you visit my home country.

Portugal has a reputation for delicious food. The country is conveniently located in Southern Europe, and half of its borders touch the Atlantic Ocean, making it an ideal place to try seafood and a healthy Mediterranean diet. This list includes both fish and meat dishes and ends with…

Travel. Western Europe. Portugal.

Lisbon. Portugal’s capital won the World Travel Award’s distinction of Best City Break Destination in 2018 and 2019. The city has seen a steady increase in tourists for most of the past decade.

The sunny weather, the affordable prices, and the incredible offer in terms of culture, food, and activities put this destination on many travelers’ bucket list.

While you can easily spend 3 to 4 days in Lisbon without running out of things to do, if you have a few more extra days when visiting Portugal, you can also consider some day trips to places not too far from…

Bukowski’s words punch me in the stomach every time I read them.

They’re raw, they’re real, and they depict the worst of the human condition. How is that good? Well, it reminds us, the readers, of what it feels like to be alive. And any reunion with our humanity is welcome in this day and age, if you ask me.

As a writer, how can you follow is footsteps to make your readers feel something when they read your words? Here are some pieces of advice directly from Charles Bukowski.

“Do some living and get yourself a typewriter”

The prime example of this piece of advice is Jack…

In 2018, I put my essentials in a backpack and went traveling across Eastern Europe. For 101 days, I crossed the borders of 14 countries, slept in countless hostels, met incredible people, and learned immensely — about the world, travel, and myself.

These are some of my learnings. But one of them is more important than any other: Nothing can replace experience. Reading about other people’s travels is not the same as getting yourself on the road. Still, let this serve as inspiration.

“Better to see something once than to read about it a thousand times”

— Asian proverb

This One Thing Makes the Whole World Yours

I…

“You’re always one decision away from a totally different life”

— Mark Batterson

You have no way of knowing how a decision will impact your life. If you could foresee the future, it wouldn’t be a decision, it would be a choice without risk. But, at the very moment you make it, a decision is like gambling.

Still, you can learn from every decision you ever made, hindsight is a great teacher. But it’s also helpful to learn from other people’s decisions, just so you don’t have to learn every life lesson through experience.

At 32, I still have many…

When I think of the Beats, I imagine a group of cool people enjoying life, traveling, exploring, and experimenting. People pushing the limits of societal convention and the boundaries of their own bodies and minds. People who passed on their knowledge through their writing.

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or Gregory Corso, to name a few, wrote some of the most remarkable pieces of work in American literature.

If you are an aspiring writer, you have something to learn from them. Here are some of the key lessons from their work.

1. Write About What Makes You Passionate

If there is something that makes…

In October 2015, my mom turned 50. She was in our home country of Portugal, and I lived in the UK. I wanted to be with her on that special occasion. But the flights were costly, and I was unemployed.

I pondered: Is it really worth spending $400 on a flight when I don’t even have a job?

But my mom would turn 50 only once in her life. And I knew she missed me like crazy. I had a problem. And I knew the solution. I was just $400 away from it.

Screw it. Nothing is more important than…

I am not rich. But at 32, I live a comfortable life, I own an apartment, and I don’t have to worry about making ends meet. During the last ten years, I have taken time off to go travel for months, I quit several unfulfilling jobs, and I lived life on my own terms, enjoying the freedom that a financial cushion can provide.

I attribute that to some key decisions I made throughout the years. Some I made consciously, others I realized their importance only in hindsight. Either way, there are lessons to learn from all of them. …