Nostalgia...


After 4 more years in school to get my PhD, today I had my last class... Even though I have been rambling in the last months that I am getting tired of school... I started wondering how nostalgic I would feel... and that led me to think and browse about what Nostalgy really is... as it turns out the best word for it is probably Nostalgia (funny how a Portuguese used an English term for something that is actually spelled as in my native language).


Nostalgia is a combination of the Greek words nostos and algos, standing respectively for returning home and pain/longing. Interestingly enough the wikipedia mentions several words that have a similar meaning in different countries... mal du pays in French, Heimweh in German, hiraeth in Welsh, and el mal de corazón (heart-pain) in Spanish... but it doesn't refer to the Portuguese word Saudade... I guess Nostalgia refers more specifically to homesickness whereas Saudade applies to anything we miss...

Up until the 70s the term Nostalgia was actually used for sort of a medical disorder... and there's even reports of people (soldiers) dying from Nostalgia... I guess that's similar too to the Portuguese expression "morrer the saudade"... literally "dying from nostalgia" or "dying from homesickness".

As so many other times in my life (and I've blogged about it), when I was browsing on this issue another funny coincidence happened... this time involving the Portuguese Diaspora! I googled Nostalgy and the first link with photos I got led me to a picture album from a Portuguese guy that's getting his PhD at the MIT... In a world of 7 billion people, only 10 million of which are Portuguese and probably less than 1 thousand is getting there PhDs in the US...what's the likelihood that one of these Portuguese PhD students googles a term in English and finds immediately a picture album from another of these Portuguese PhD students?!... You do the math... 'cause I am just starting to feel that either there's actually several Portugals in the world or the Portuguese are really all alike and hence end up running into each other in the cyberspace as a result of their common culture and living experiences... but in this case?!... browsing a universal term in English is what lead to one of these coincidences!... Anyways... below I am posting the picture I run into labelled "Nostalgy"... oh and BTW to conclude the coincidence thing... lots of the pictures are from the Bay Area and California... I can only conclude with a sentence I once wrote... the world is small and Portugal is larger than we imagine..