Good Times

You haven´t really lived until you´ve been sick while traipsing in some foreign land. I don´t mean to brag, but I´ve been sick in the Marshall Islands, Costa Rica, India, the UK, Portugal and now Spain. There is nothing better than spending your nights hallucinating due to a fever and then greeting each bright, beautiful, sunny day with a hacking cough. The last few days in Lagos, the stopover night in Sevilla, and the first night in Granada are all mostlly a blur to me and that´s where Ben will have to fill you in. All I mostly remember is constant thirst, brightness, the incessant need for my eyes and nose to rid itself of water, the sounds of Portuguese, Spanish and French lulling me to sleep and a stupid cough that kept waking me back up.

Nothing but blue skies do I see

Oh Lagos, Portugal - where do I begin? Blue skies, 75 to 80 degree days, bright sun, blue-green oceans surrounded by sandy, secluded beaches hidden by tall, jagged cliffs with caves carved out into the rocks creating paths to more private beaches. And to top it off, despite the huge amount of tourism that goes on here, the locals seem to lack the cynicism that often comes along with catering to large groups of people on holiday. People greet each other with ola´s as they pass one another on the streets, friends hang out in their neighbor´s shops to gab about whatever, everyone is laid back and just so dang friendly. It also doesn´t hurt that everything is relatively inexpensive (our guest house that included a private balcony, shared kitchen all in a private apartment was 13€ per person).
I want to go into detail, but I´m going to hold myself back and sort of list what we´ve done in this town. After wandering around lost for a few hours, stopping at a cafe and getting directions, and finally making it to the lighthouse we were orginally attempting to get to, we decided to follow this trail that wound down into the sea where about 4 guys in little motor boats sat waiting to take people on private tours. For 10€ ($13 per person) we were given a tour of the grottos by this old Portuguese guy. He would talk about the various rock formations and what their names were. He knew a little Spanish and some Potuguese is similar to Spanish, so I think we mostly understood what he was talking about.


Speaking of driving people into cliffs, our second big excursion in Lagos was taking a scooter out for the day and heading out to Sagres, a place once thought of as the end of the world. For the most part, everything went along rather swimmingly...until Ben somehow drove straight into a sign post. I still don´t understand how it happened. Ben says it was the strong gusts of wind, (which I admit were excessively strong), but one minute we were heading straight down the road and about to park the scooter and the next Ben and the scooter were sideways on the ground. Fortunately Ben was driving too slow for too much damage to happen (maybe that´s how the wind ended up taking control) and it only ended up costing us 80€, a smaller blow to our budget than we had been expecting. Other than the mini-crash, being out the 80€ and the strong gusts of winds blowing us about, the opportunity to see the countryside from a viewpoint other than the windows of planes, trains, and buses was totally worth it. Plus, since we didn´t have to get the scooter back until the next day, we got to see the sunset from a place we would not have been able to get to otherwise.
Later that evening we ate dinner with our Canadian neighbors Phil and Sarah (neighbors as in their room was down the hall from ours) at a Reggae-inspired bar/restaurant which reminds me... I am having a difficult time discerning what is a bar, what is a restaurant, what is a cafe and what is store since no matter where you go there is an espresso machine and a full bar with all sorts of hard alcohol. And when I say no matter where you go, I mean no matter where you go. One day Ben and I were looking for batteries and inside was the espresso machine and hard alcohol. We went next door for ice cream and there they were again, espresso and hard alcohol. Anyway, just a digression...
Oh, my time is up...I gotta go.

Pickpockets and Narrow Passages

Carteirista is the Portugeuese word for pickpocket. Our Portugeuse phrasebook lists this as one of the top fifteen words you must learn in order to get along in Lisbon. Ben and I thought this was pretty funny at first, but then we were warned (in a matter-of-fact sort of way) by 1. the guy at the information desk to watch out for pickpockets if we decided to ride the trolley, 2. a random store owner that came out of his shop that directed us to the trolley stop, 3. by the signs posted on the trolley and 4. by three different front desk people at our hostel. Naturally, this put us a little on our guard when considering our options for exploring the city later that evening since we were starving and it was getting dark. But everyone swore up and down that the pickpocket problem was limited to the trolleys so we set out.

The hostel guy told told us it would take us no more than 15 minutes to get to praixa de cebolla (plaza of the onion), a place he heartily recommended. Coming from somewhere like Portland where everything is nicely and efficiently laid out on a grid, it probably would have taken us 15 minutes, but let me take this moment to describe the Alfama neighborhood's streets to you. First of all, it's located on a hill. Second, there's no such thing as an individual house with a private yard. Every home or apartment is connected to the next creating incredibly tall walls that you cannot see over or get past until you come to a point when the house maker said, 'I will end this house here.' Like most city streets created before the 20th century, the paths are narrow. They also meander, sometimes circling back to where you started which often means going up the hill and then back down again. It's as though whoever laid the streets out never thought that anyone using them would ever be in a hurry to get anywhere and would probably never want to leave Lisbon anyway. You would think that with streets like these, cars and trucks, (which I'm going to wager a guess weren't considered in the Moor's 12th century building plans) would not even attempt to try to pass through these narrow streets, but you'd be wrong.

Roughly one hour later we emerged from the labyrinth and came out onto a main road following the Rio Tejo. A city map posted on a bus stop showed us we were probably 15 minutes down from away from the area we originally intended, all we needed to do was follow the main road. Seriously though, I still don't know if we ever made it to the place the guy recommended. We found an area with a ton of restaurants and picked the one with the nice owner standing outside encouraging us to go inside. We are so easy. Just be nice to us after being lost and hungry for over an hour and we'll follow you anywhere and eat whatever you give us.

Ready to Go

I am excited about this latest trip I'm going on. Heading to Germany for a wedding, then flying over to Lisbon, hanging out in Seville for Semana Santa, maybe even dipping down into Morocco after ferrying over from the Rock of Gibraltar. I love to travel. Whether it's exploring my neighborhood, home state, this country or another, I am happiest when I am somewhere unfamiliar, learning something new. I sleep better when I'm not in my own bed. I yearn for opportunities to not be able to speak English and eat crazy foods. I'm ready to give up the distractions of my daily life; no television program to set my life to, no familiar cultural cues to clue me on to whether a person talking to me is genuinely interested or wants to take my money, no apartment to return to when the day is over... I am ready to be reminded about the futility of trying to control life. I am ready to observe and interact with a new world. I am ready to trust in complete strangers. I am ready to rely on myself. I am ready to go.