Even if I hadn’t been told about this idea of saudade – a feeling of longing or melancholy mixed with hope for finding what is lost that permeates the Portuguese personality – I would have felt it still.

My friend Gabriela, who I visited in Porto, was the first to tell me about it. She said that I would see. That there’s a certain sense of longing that permeates the Portuguese personality that I would eventually sense – despite the cerulean skies, the merrily flapping laundry in the wind and the typically European conviviality around the dinner table.

When I asked her where she thought this longing came from, she said that perhaps it’s because the Portuguese were always travelers. Always explorers in search of something better – or at least something different – on foreign shores.

I certainly sensed her saudade.

When I first met Gabriela in Morocco, she was traveling. Abuzz at the overwhelming sounds, sights and smells of the medina in Marrakech. Visiting her at home in Porto, I found her back to normal life. There were stresses at work, pressure from friends, and above all, a deep longing to return to New Zealand, where she had lived for a year.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt the weight of my own saudade in Portugal.

Perhaps it was the quietness of the cafes in the mornings, where couples sit side by side and speak in low voices as if not to disturb their neighbors. Even at a touristy seaside overlook near Lisbon, it was a busload of Spanish tourists that were gabbing away excitedly and bubbling about, injecting life into what was otherwise just a postcard perfect backdrop.

There is an overall quietness to life here that makes you reflect.

All I do is travel. My mother has always called me a seeker, and it unsettles her to some degree. She wishes I would just find what I’m looking for already, get a proper job – with benefits – and settle down.

The thing is, I don’t really know what I am looking for.

I am just looking around to see what there is, trying to learn a little of everything, and the more I look the more I get lost about where it is that I ultimately want to settle – in fact, the more I wonder if I can settle at all.

In a way, I suppose, it is melancholic, this saudade. Never being fully content where I am.

And there is longing, to be sure – always wondering if perhaps the grass is a shade greener over there. But it is what keeps things interesting to me. Never knowing what I will find over there. Even when the grass isn’t greener, well, at least I know.

- by Terry Ward