True Story- Why I decided to move to the Azores exactly 1 year ago on this day?

So many of you asked about how did I ended up mov­ing to the Azores? How does one come to the decision to move there, at all? Why the Azores? Why Sao Miguel, of all islands? These are indeed a lot of good ques­tions. There­fore, on the 1 year anniversary of me mak­ing this decision, I have decided to share a few details with you about the move.

To put it short and sweet I would say: I went – I saw – I loved – I moved.

Before dwell­ing into the details I have to admit, that in my life I prefer good organ­iz­a­tion and thor­ough plan­ning above spon­taneity. I don’t like mak­ing decisions in a rush, instead, I tend to ana­lyze all aspects and angles – espe­cially in case of a decision of this mag­nitude. But this time, things were a little bit different.

Every­body was guess­ing there must have been a love interest, because girls tend to make dra­mat­ic decision listen­ing to their hearts when they are blinded by love. Like in every sim­il­ar story, there was a man – in fact, two men – involved, but in the the way you might think.

I would not like to start this story with Adam and Eve – though it would fit the Eden of the blo­g’s title – but I need to go back in time a little when I start telling the story behind my decision.

Pre­lude

Since I was very young I had an entre­pren­eur­i­al spir­it. My par­ents always did their best to help me in the exe­cu­tion of my sev­er­al ideas, abso­lutely uncon­di­tion­ally. I am forever grate­ful for their invalu­able sup­port. I needed motiv­a­tion to study for my Eng­lish lan­guage exam and I decided to make a lan­guage course abroad, so I ended up going to Aus­tralia. I simply loved being there. A few years later, when I was already com­plet­ing my PhD and anoth­er post-graduate degree, there was a schol­ar­ship to study at an Aus­trali­an uni­ver­sity. I applied, and won this schol­ar­ship. I would like to give a shout out to my friends Aron and Bri­an, who assisted me back then. Hav­ing lived there for sev­er­al years, Aus­tralia has been determ­in­ing factor in my life. I was all set to relo­cate to Aus­tralia per­man­ently, but an unex­pec­ted and grave ill­ness got in the way. After the sur­gery came a long recov­ery peri­od with lots of resig­na­tion, spir­itu­al reforms, learn­ing, and devel­op­ing self-knowledge. Also, my pref­er­ences have changed and instead of noisy and buzz­ing places I star­ted to prefer more relax­ing, calm­ing, and tran­quil options.

Ever since mov­ing back to Hun­gary from Aus­tralia, I have been look­ing for a des­tin­a­tion which fills the void after Down Under – and this is is how I found the Azores.

Dis­cov­er­ing the Azores

In 2016 I traveled to Bul­garia with a group of friends I knew from salsa dan­cing. In a very funny series of events my friends and I met two guys from Por­tugal. So I star­ted chat­ting to one of them, get­ting to know them, ask­ing the usu­al ques­tions. So when I asked him where he lives, he told me: I live in PARADISE. So I asked him: and where is this Para­dise of yours? To which he replied: it is the Azores. Not know­ing where the Azores were, I felt very embar­rassed, but I did some read­ing and got very excited. My newly made friend offered me to be my guide, should I ever decide to go and see the islands for myself. Based on everything he told me, I felt that the Azores might be exactly the place I was look­ing for. But then I had oth­er work to do, and put this on the back­burn­er for a few weeks, until I flew to Lon­don for a con­fer­ence. Then I remembered the beau­ti­ful pho­tos I have seen dur­ing my research of the Azores, and that there is a dir­ect flight from Lon­don to Sao Miguel, so I have con­tac­ted my friend and went to vis­it him in Para­dise. Trav­el­ing there was one of the best hol­i­days of my life – thank the guys I met in Bul­garia, who proved to be fant­ast­ic tour guides. Hereby I would like to thank Patri­cio and Emmanuel for the won­der­ful intro­duc­tion of the Azores. On my second day of being there, I was walk­ing in the city of Fur­nas when I saw a hill­side covered with hydrangeas. The tran­quil­ity and the green­ery mes­mer­ized me, and I imme­di­ately decided: this is it, my new home. Ever since I spend more and more time there, plan­ning and organ­iz­ing my life on the Azores. I feel very lucky for being at the right place, at the right time to make this happen.

The year 2017 marked a major mile­stone in my life, a round birth­day to which I haven’t been look­ing much for­ward to. But since I love hav­ing a good plan, I decided that I will cel­eb­rate this round birth­day on the Azores already. And this is exactly what happened: accom­pan­ied by my par­ents and some good friends we have cel­eb­rated my birth­day on a beau­ti­ful sail­ing boat. I think my par­ents are relieved, that I traded off the far-away Aus­tralia with the much more access­ible Azores.

Exper­i­ences so far

So this is my story in a nut­shell. It might sound very simple and straight­for­ward, but of course there are always set­backs and dif­fi­culties. I find myself day by day in dif­fi­cult situ­ations which I need to solve or over­come some­how. But I think if we set a goal, and we really would like to achieve this goal and do everything we can – then this goal might become reality.

All in all I think I made a good decision. I am not sure I would like to spend the entire year in the Azores – I prefer com­mut­ing between Bud­apest and Fur­nas – but I do enjoy my time there. If you are look­ing at the pic­tures below, you will under­stand me even better.