My love for international travel and cross-cultural encounters began for me while in high school. It was a service project to Portugal in 1990 one summer in which we spent three weeks doing a sports outreach initiative at a Christian camp called Palavra da Vida. Little did I know that it would set me up for a lifetime of focus on Portuguese culture and language that would see me marry an American who grew up in Brazil, then a later move to Mozambique where we would set up a home with our four kids.
My travels in Europe have not been nearly as extensive as I would like. It includes Portugal (1990), a layover in Amsterdam (2006) that would allow us to do a bit of sightseeing for a day or two, a quick 8-hour stopover in the U.K. (2005) and the attendance of a conference in Germany in 2011. None of my visits were optimal picture-taking opportunities, but I’m happy to share some favorites from Germany. (Portugal, the U.K. and the Netherlands were pre-DSLR days for me and any captures I made aren’t really worth sharing).