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Traveling is wonderful we all say, but it is definitely not for everyone. Among the long list of difficulties travelers have to face, from language barrier and lost luggage, airport sleepover, food poisoning to serious visa and insurance issues, there is nothing that can exemplify more how hard traveling can be than unwanted goodbyes. Needless to say, that It doesn't get any easier with time, or the more you have to do it, as I still remember the one that hurted the most. We were standing on the only platform of a small train station in the south of Portugal, with our suitcases by our sides, looking like the only forneirgs there. I had tickets to the next train going to a small village boarding Spain, and he would go to the airport to fly back to Australia, where we first met over three years ago, when he was working in a pizza shop and I, at the Brazilian restaurant next door. It was bound to happen. We met on Christmas Day and I will never forget the smile he had on his face while he was looking at me. It wasn’t a ‘summer time’ kind of love. We met each others family; spent holidays and celebrations together; we got high lying in the green grasses of Florida; we dove into the freezing waters of Holland in a local tradition for January first; he held my hair back as I felt sick for drinking too much on my birthday when we were living in a Kibbutz in the north of Israel; we moved from New Zealand to Thailand, from Vietnam to Brazil; he tough me how to cook; I tried teaching him how to dance; we worked together; we lived together. There was love. Plenty of it. Nevertheless, being from different parts of the world, our cultural clash was big. Words meant different things. Actions meant different things. What it’s respectful for one, can be disrespectful for the other, and sometimes the damage it’s done before having the chance to explain it. “I am not trying to fight you, I am trying to love you”, he said to me once, and it feels like that can resume our relationship pretty well. It took me too long to understand. As we stood there in this tight hug, tears came down our faces and no words came out of our mouths. There was nothing else left to say anymore. It was time to go. The train will move and so will life. To break apart was extremely hard, as we knew we couId not meet up for a coffee later or crosspath at the local grocery shop. “I am truly sorry about everything that hurted”, we said to each other while pulling away from our hug, “but I am extremely thankful for everything that we have lived.” We shared this most gentle kiss - “I will love you forever” and stepped backwards to our separate ways. Traveling it’s not for everyone. It’s for the brave hearts and strong minded. The ones that are willing to leave the comfort zone, their certainties and judgments. The ones that are open to learn, to readapt, to embrace the new, the different and every experience that comes their way, good or bad, and believe me, there are plenty of both. Traveling changes you, in a way that you would never be able to fit a mold again. It expands your mind and your heart. You become a little bit of every place you’ve been and every special person you met, at the same time you leave a little bit of your old you behind. You become freer. Traveling teaches you so much. Like the power of hello and goodbye, and all about the amazing possibilities in between. It breaks your heart and then fix it all at once, as you leave and arrive. Traveling is for the bold ones, the ones that want more, to feel more, to see more, the ones that have the courage to risk it all because they cannot risk to watch life pass them by without living it at its most.