2009-2010: Permission to Enter

I love traveling. Just when you think you've begun to understand how things work you end up someplace where everything is different.

We pull into Gouveia at exactly 8:20. Right on time. The information desk is closed, so I walk over to the bar and use my broken Portuspanglish to ask the bartender if he knows where we might obtain a map of the town.

"At the hotel," he says in slow, careful Portuguese, "in the center."

Ah, but if I knew how to get to the center I wouldn't need the map. The easiest thing to do in this situation is just pick a random direction, point, and allow the person to correct you. "Alli?" I ask, pointing out the door and to the left.

"Si," he says and motions for me to follow him.

"Where ya goin, Patti?" Trish calls out from across the waiting room. Hobbled by her pack, she can't jump into action quickly enough to follow.

"Not sure," I call back to her.

"Alright." She stays put.

The bartender walks me outside to make sure I see the correct fork in the road. He snakes his hand through the air as he talks. That way, past the light, over a hill, bear right, then bear left.

More or less. It's close enough. We won't end up in the forest, at least.

"How many minutes?" I ask.

"Ten minutes."

"OK, that way, pass the light, over a hill, bear right, then bear left, ten minutes. Thank you very much... I'll go tell my friend."

"Let's take a taxi," Trish says.

The taxi had just pulled out. I saw it leave. Our bartender friend has a brief discussion with one of his buddies hanging out at the bar with him. "They have an address," he assures the guy, then turns to us. "He will take you."

"Really? Thank you... how much shall we give him for that?"

"No, no," he says with a horizontal wave of his hand. And it was true. The man did not accept even a few euros from us for the ride. How that works in the local economy of the Gouveia bus station I don't know. Maybe the people of Gouveia are just really nice, but in any case we decided to buy the guy a drink on our way out.

Gouveia is a small town. We're able to scope out the entire center during a 20 minute walk after settling into the Monteneve Residencial. Having done that, we sit down in a cozy looking bar\cafe on the central square. A glass of red wine on a blustery night in the mountains sounds great.

"No," the bartender says.

"No?"

"No."

"No what?" Trish asks. No red wine?

"I think that's what he means, but it doesn't seem possible."

"No, it can't be," she says. "People drink wine on a daily basis here... with lunch, with dinner... how can they not have red wine?"

I must have asked him wrong, or understood him wrong. The bar is lined with bottles - gin, vodka, whiskey, beer, all kinds of stuff. It just doesn't make sense. I try again, but get the same results. We stand there for a moment not knowing what to do.

"Well," Trish says, "I'll have a whiskey."

"I guess I'll have a beer," I add. But it's just not the same. Cold beer on a blustery night in the mountains.

Later, we pass by a restaurant with the most amazing looking tarts or creme caramels in dishes on a marble counter top. We peer down and try to walk past, but the temptation is too much. We change course and try to find the door.

Where is the door?

We look at every door of the building. None is open. One has a marquis on top and a small sign, mostly in Portuguese, that has hours on it. At the bottom, in English, it says, "Ring the bell."

We look at it for a moment. We can see the dining area through the window. It is close enough that this could be the door to the restaurant, but ringing a bell to get in? We're not sure. But the tarts really did look scrumptious. We decide to go for it. I push the bell.

"RING!!!"

A stout lady answers and looks us up and down, head to toe, then back again, appraising. Are we worthy to eat here? She doesn't seem so sure.

"Are we late?" I ask in Portuspanglish, not knowing what else to say. The silence was uncomfortable.

"Eh?"

"Uh, we just want a tart," I add. "Dulce." Pause. "Dessert?"

"Do you speak English?" she says.

"Oh yes, we do. You speak English... that's great. We just wanted to try those delicious looking tarts we saw through the window."

Silence.

"... if it's not too late."

"Only dessert?" she finally asks.

"Yes, only dessert.... And maybe some red wine."

"OK."

Yay! We are worthy!

We order a creme caramel and a corn pudding that looks just like rice pudding. Both are wonderful. The wine is served in a terracotta pot that could pass for a Mayan artifact like you would see in a museum. We are in food heaven. When we see the last table of diners getting ready to pay, Trish and I decide it's time to get out. No way we want to be the last ones here... that would break our contract. Before leaving, though, we make a reservation for dinner for the following night. Now that we have passed inspection, we want to milk it for all we can.

One of the many, many... many ways the Portuguese prepare cod. From our Night 2 meal at O Julio.

Night 2 dessert... a slab of local sheep cheese and pumpkin marmalade. Delicious!

2009-2010: Christmas in Portugal

Porto was still buzzing when we arrived at lunchtime Christmas Eve. By evening a quiet had descended upon the city. The few people out were running last minute errands, picking up a wreath-shaped fruitcake from the pasteira, cleaning house, or getting started on the Christmas dinner.

We wandered the hilly streets of Porto for a little while. Assuming that we would find nothing open, we had already stocked up on bread, cheese, olives and fruit. We were set, but we wouldn’t pass up the chance to have a glass of wine somewhere if the opportunity arose.

The other half of “we,” by the way, is Trish. Trish was one of my flight students, now a friend and travel buddy. We met up in Lisbon a week ago and have been wending our way north since then.

Lisbon was one of the most interesting cities I’ve been to. Growing up in California, the influence of Central and South America is pervasive. Every region has its immigrant communities from south of the border, and if you grow up in California, you grow up with the artifacts of these communities – the pastry shops, juice stands, emphasis on fresh vegetables and fruits, meat markets – I must be hungry because all I can think of at the moment is food. But it’s hard to grow up in California and not learn at least a little bit of Spanish.

Well of course, Spain and Portugal are the homeland for people from Central and South America. It’s the Old Country. Like Anglos in the United States travel to Britain, people from south of the border travel to Iberia. Nowhere is that more true than in Portugal. I have met almost as many Brazilians here in Portugal as I have Portuguese. And they’ve brought their New World culture with them to influence Portugal in a way that you don’t see Americans influencing Britain… I think. It may be that I’m too much in the middle of it to even notice.

However it is, being in Lisbon felt a lot like being in California to me. They import as many South American fruits and vegetables in Lisbon as we do in the Mission District of San Francisco. The New World is somehow very present. Unless the reality is in reverse, that the Old World of Portugal and Spain is much more present in the Mission District than I ever recognized. I suppose that is more likely, but I haven’t been able to wrap my brain around that yet. That’s what I love about traveling – I always learn as much about my home and myself as I do about the people and places I visit.

In any case, Trish met me in Lisbon and we hung out there for a few days before heading north. She wanted to see Fatima, which is a pilgrimage site for the Portuguese, so we stopped there for a short visit on our way to Coimbra (cu-WEEM-bra), a small university town. Then it was Coimbra to Porto on Christmas Eve.

There are a lot of Catholics in Portugal, but they seem to take their Santa Claus as seriously as they do their Navidad. Santa is all over this place, climbing into chimneys and windows, inflated to massive proportions in public squares. By nightfall Christmas Eve, though, the town was quiet and the santas were still. We happened by a wine bar with the door opened and cautiously poked our heads inside. The sign said the place was open, and there were two people sitting at the bar… we took a chance and went in. Of course, it ended up being some wine bar owner getting a head start on boiling the Christmas codfish. The other two guys were regulars who just popped by for a quick drink and a Bom Natal. He’d just forgotten to turn the sign around, but we didn’t discover this until he’d already poured us a glass.

We downed our wine and continued our walk. The streets were empty, the lights were beautiful, and the river that feeds out into the Atlantic took my breath away when I first saw it.

After Christmas, Trish wanted to buy some port wine for her wife so we hit the port wine caves on the other side of the river and partied with some of the other travelers we met there. Trish’s backpack was already almost as big as herself. Now that she’s added two heavy bottles of port wine to it, my job is to make sure she doesn’t tip over.

Next stop: Gouveia, a small town in the mountains from where we hope to make our way to Madrid. We’re piecing together, however, that crossing the Portuguese Sierras from Gouveia to Madrid is sort of like crossing the Sierras in California… in December. It may look reasonable on the map to use Tioga Pass if you don’t know what you’re doing, but once you get there… another story altogether. So, we’ve got tickets from Porto to Gouveia, and from Guarda to Madrid. Guarda is the Portuguese equivalent of Mono Lake… i.e. of having crossed to the other side of the mountains. Now all we need is that one little piece in between, Gouveia to Guarda… stand by.

Random pictures, the order of which I apparently can't change...

Trish, getting rid of her pack of handi-wipes in hopes of lessening the load, now that she's got 2 extra bottles of port to haul around. Futile.

Port wine tasting with our fellow Americans.

Traditional day-after-Christmas stilt race along the river.

Cool graffiti in Porto.

The Hall of Toilet Seats... we never figured out why this one corridor of our otherwise very tasteful and well-appointed hotel is decorated with wooden toilet seat covers.

Pastries in Porto.

Halfway up the hill to the university in Coimbra.

Pastries in Coimbra.

The only photo I took in Lisbon... looking down the trolley tracks toward the river.

2009-2010: Skin (Cordoba)

Caroline taught me well. She sure did. So well that I almost didn’t bring my bathing suit with me at all on this trip. Why bother?, I thought. I had carried that thing around with me for 4-1/2 months last time and never used it. Not once. Well, I might have used half of it once.

That wasn’t always entirely comfortable for me. The spa in Slovakia was co-ed, and some of those Russian guys were pretty big. Not that kind of big… big as in fat. Chunky. Walls of blubber so vast that I wouldn’t have been able to tell whether they were that kind of big or not, even if I had wanted to. Veritable citadels of flesh obscuring anything that might lurk beneath. They came and went in the mist, and occasionally one climbed gracelessly into the hot tub with me. When in Rome…

My first ever experience with the concept of a nude, co-ed spa was when I was about 20. It was 1984, before the Wall came down and any country with even a remote connection to the Soviet Union was cloaked in mystery. I had overnighted in Vienna en route to an Italian convent that had been converted into a hostel. This was supposed to be a cheap travel summer.

Walking down the Kartnerstrasse, killing time until my sleeper to Tuscany pulled into the train station, I saw a sign that enticed me to change my plans completely. “Come to Budapest,” it said. Budapest? Well, why not? That sounded a lot more interesting than Italy. I’d already been to Italy.

Nobody spoke English in Budapest in 1984. Really. Even in my 4-star hotel, any time I needed to communicate they had to search out the one guy on staff who spoke even a few words. Forget about sentences… articles, prepositions… all luxuries in those days. I had to satisfy myself with more simple, generally monosyllabic constructions, like “room” and “key,” all with the appropriate items indicated on a map or with a pointed finger.

It was no wonder, then, that there was some confusion about the spa. I know I said this was supposed to be a cheap travel summer, but Eastern Europe was known for its spas… massages, saunas, therapeutic hot springs… while I was there I had to try them, right? Anyway, overall it was much cheaper to travel in Hungary than anywhere in Western Europe. So I rationalized.

Anyway, I made my way down to the spa just fine following signs with pictures. When I got there, the attendant motioned for me to take off my clothes, wrap up in a towel and warm up in the steam room before my massage. She pointed to a door. OK, I thought, that must be the women’s steam room.

I laid out on the hot stone slab and relaxed into the aromatic steam. Deep breaths of pine and eucalyptus. Relaxing, thinking how wonderful it was to be in Budapest. I was 20 remember, maybe 21. A naïve girl from California. This may have been the first time in my life I’d had any kind of a spa treatment at all… I had little or nothing to compare it to.

The door opened and through the mist in walked a Japanese man. I will never forget him. He looked to me like he could have been a sumo wrestler. He plopped himself down directly across from me, buck naked, spread his feet out wide and comfortable, leaned back against the hot wall and stared at me. A nice, friendly smile.

What was I supposed to do? I was from the United States, land of the prudes. I had heard of nude beaches. Nude saunas, yes, those too… but only in San Francisco. I wasn’t even old enough to drink and here they’d thrown a naked sumo wrestler into the steam room with me. Was I really in the right place?

I had no idea. And he was still staring at me.

Fortunately, it was almost time for my massage. I didn’t want to be rude, after all. I excused myself and waited the rest of the time outside, traumatized.

In retrospect, of course, this was perfectly normal. Nobody wears bathing suits at spas in Eastern Europe, or in Germany or France or Austria… They don’t have a problem with nudity. In fact, if you do appear in your bathing suit, they laugh at you. If you want to get attention, wear a bathing suit and everyone will stare at you and wonder what prudish, uptight land you come from.

So I almost didn’t even bother bringing my bathing suit with me on this trip to Spain and Portugal. In an Islamic country, things might be different, but the Arab baths in Cordoba aren’t really Arab anymore… now they’re just the sight of a wonderful spa that caters to Spanish and foreign tourists. It’s like going to Calistoga, except that the hot pools are made of solid marble and granite, openings in the ceiling – small circles and 8-pointed stars – allow light to shine in, candles glimmer in the mist, and the massage tables are arranged around the main pool, all out in the open. If you’re thirsty, you hop out and have a cup of sweet peppermint tea, then go back to alternating through the pools – hot, warm and cold.

I felt stupid bringing my bathing suit to this place. I’ll leave it in the locker, I thought, but I’ll have it with me… just in case. I wrap up in my big spa towel and walk into the dark, misty main pool room. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust but… what’s that I see… no large mounds of Russian flesh. No sumo wrestlers languishing on the sidelines. No… here I see fit people, slim people, and every single one of them is clothed. Except for me.

Damn!

Back into the locker room I go, grateful that I’d had the puritanical presence of mind to pack a bathing suit after all. And after a total of 5 months of traveling in 2009, I finally, actually got a chance to use it.

Arab baths at the Alhambra in Granada.

Sangria with free tapas, Granada.

The mosque cathedral, Cordoba.

A little bit of romance in Sevilla.

2009-2010: Que Rica La Vida

Compared to the other places I've been over the past few years, traveling in Spain is easy. It's taken me a few days to get used to that. No unfathomable travel logistics like in Ukraine... here the trains make almost too much sense. No muddy paths laced with slippery water buffalo dung like in the mountains of Vietnam. No warnings of UXOs laying in wait for those who step off the beaten trail like in Laos. No crickets, snake hearts or vodka lattes to try... the weirdest thing I've found to eat so far is beef cheek, which is pretty tame by comparison. Not even problems with the language, as the little Spanish I know has somehow bloomed into a usable form of communication. So, so far, Spain is beautiful and mellow and very, very cool... here's a picture of one of the courtyards at my pension in Granada.

2009: London Family

Next stop, London. I got to meet my step-sister Marisol's new son Orem. He definitely knows what it means to pose for the camera! Also had a grand day hanging out with step-mom Sue, and a couple of lovely evenings with Marisol and her husbad Angus before heading back home via Ireland.

2009: Winding Down (Paris)

After Istanbul I went back to Paris to spend a little more time with Caroline and her family. We went to see Ines and Badis, our friends from the Morocco trip in January, who made us a fantastic lunch.

I took a picture of the hotel Steph and I stayed at when we were in Paris a few years ago...

... and had lunch at Steph's favorite lunch spot while we were here.

Caroline and Alison made me a pretty breakfast on my last morning there...

And we had kind of an emotional goodbye at the Euroline station.

2009: Apex Of the 2009 Pilgrimage (Turkey)

Hagia Sophia was the reason I wanted to go to Istanbul (previously Constantinople) in the first place. It was first a church, later a mosque, and now is a museum.

13th century mosaic of Jesus and John the Baptist.

The Roman Emperor Constantine founded the city of Constantinople in the 4th century AD. He moved the administration of the empire there at a time when Rome and the Western portion of the empire were in decline. The Eastern portion of the empire, what we call Byzantium, was energized and thrived for 1000 years, while the Western portion, more or less what we call Europe, lost its steam and took the long period of R&R known as the Middle Ages.

Islamic medallion with mother and child mosaic decorating the main dome.

Constantine also declared Christianity to be AN acceptable religion, ending 300 years of persecution of Christians within the borders of the Roman Empire. That had a massive impact on the viability and spread of Christianity and therefore on all Eurasian history... if you are a Christian today it is in some part thanks to Constantine. Unfortunately, it wasn't long before the pendulum swung the other way - Christianity became the ONLY acceptable religion of the empire and the persecuted became the persecutors of others.

13th century mosaic of Jesus and John the Baptist.

Sometime before that, though, in the 6th century AD, the church of Hagia Sophia was built in Constantinople to honor the new religion. It remained a church until 1453 when Constantinople was conquored by the Turks and became the seat of the Ottoman Empire. Then it was used as a mosque for the next 500 years or so.
In the 20th century, when Constantinople became Istanbul, Hagia Sophia was renovated in a way that highlights both elements - Christian and Islamic mosaics inside, early Christian architecture with minarets outside. Now it's a really beautiful combination of the two. Just the stone columns are awe inspiring to make it worth a visit - the biggest ones are more than 60 feet high and almost 5 feet in diameter made out of 70 tons of solid granite. I've wanted to see Hagia Sophia for a couple of decades since I first read about it in my history books, so this part of my trip was really a highlight for me!

2009: Ah, Istanbul! (Turkey)

Originally, Istanbul had been my ultimate destination on this trip. I was going to do a tour of Eastern Europe from north to south, eventually ending up in Istanbul.

Somewhere along the way I got so used to being in Slavic countries that I decided to skip Turkey altogether. Caroline and I had agreed that I would join her and her family wherever they decided to spend their Spring holiday, and I was getting a bit tired of traveling alone, so I decided to head back to Paris and see what she had planned. I had a twinge of regret, though, once I had started to make my way westward again, that I was going to miss Istanbul. I've wanted to see the Hagia Sophia church/mosque for as long as I can remember... decades! That was the point of the trip in the beginning... maybe I should have gone after all. Oh well, I thought, Caroline always plans fun holidays and wherever we end up going, we're going to enjoy it.

But still...

Somewhere along the way, Caroline emailed me to tell me that she and her husband had made up their minds. "Finally," she said, "we decided to go to Istanbul."And here we are - or at least here I am - taking a rest after racing Alison (Caroline's daughter) halfway up to a castle along the Asian shore of the Bosphorus.

We found a great apartment here in the center, not far from the Blue Mosque and with a terrific view of the sea from the terrace.

Like when I was in Vietnam, the President has been following me... first Prague and now Istanbul. Obama's recent visit to Turkey apparently inspired all kinds of optimism. This bank used his face to vouch for their loans.

Alison has a mature palate for her age. Her sister Joanna watches as our waiter flambes Alison's steak.

We went inside the Blue Mosque the next day. Beautiful, but full of tourists and some of them being so disrespectful that we couldn't enjoy being there. In spite of three signs in multiple languages saying that women should cover their heads and men should not enter in shorts, some people went in just however they wanted to. Women would even go in wearing scarves around their necks and not bother to drape them over their heads, which would have been easy enough.

It started me wondering why Western tourists in Asia are so careful to respect the exact same set of rules when entering buddhist temples - no shorts and women cover their heads. If you see people praying, be quiet and avoid getting in their way. Simple requests. And, generally, there are no behavior police who stand at the door to remind people. In a temple, no problem... almost everyone complies without being told twice. But in a mosque, it's more like, "why bother?

When we saw some Germans hop a wooden barrier into the women's prayer area so they could sit in the window and have a rest... and continue sitting there, having a lively conversation, even when about 20 women came in to pray... we were so disgusted we had to leave.

With Caroline along the Bosporus

Caroline and her family

2009: Journeys 3 (Prague to Paris)

Getting out of Ukraine turned out to be more difficult than going in, but I made it back to Prague for Easter weekend. LOTS more people than when I visited in January, but the weather is perfect and everyone is out worshipping the sun during the day and enjoying balmy weather at night.

Prague castle at night

Prague Symphony with Mirka

Trains, hotels and even hostels were completely booked during the Easter holiday (I was lucky to get a bed in a slightly run-down hostel more or less in the center of Prague), so I had to get on yet another overnight bus to get back to Paris. Aside from the fact that sleeping on a bus is not very comfortable, I've always had a fear of overnight buses because I imagine the driver falling asleep at the wheel at three o'clock in the morning. I know they're professionals, I know they're used to long overnight drives, but the possibility crosses my mind at least, even though it's never actually happened to me... until now.

I was comfortably dozing, curled up into a foetal position in my double seat (lucked out because the bus was almost full). I must have been dozing, at least, because I don't remember anything, any transition at all between being asleep and being awake. I'm awake now. Everyone on the bus is awake.

Not only awake, but airborne. The first thought I have is "my body isn't touching my seat," and that strikes me as strange. My second thought is to recognize, simultaneously, the furious sound of rough pavement rattling our wheels as the bus swerves onto the shoulder and the startled sound of one of the drivers up front crying out "oh! ho!" The screeching of tires. My mind goes back to the position of my body... completely airborne and beginning to move forward. I grip a railing that used to be in front of and is now passing below. We can't be breaking down, I think irrationally; I've already had my bus breakdown experience on this trip, back in Belarus.

I look out the front window and realize why the tires are screeching - we are careening directly toward the 2-foot high metal barrier that divides the highway. We're not breaking down, I realize... we're crashing. I look at the lady across the aisle from me and her two little girls. She must be terrified for her kids, I think. And then I fixate again on the fact that everyone is momentarily floating in the air and yet completely quiet. Not one passenger makes a sound while one of the drivers up front keeps shouting. I never find out whether it was the guy at the wheel shouting or the relief driver, who had been napping until the bus went out of control.

The entire weight of the bus is now on the shoulder. So many tires rolling over the bumps and divets in the shoulder pavement make a horrific roar that drowns out all other sounds. It doesn't help that the highway is bending to the right. Actually, that's probably what woke the driver up in the first place was the bus continuing straight when the road bent to the right. It takes heavy braking and a dramatic swerve, but the driver manages to miss the center divider and oncoming traffic on the other side. He pays for it, though... even I can feel the back of the bus getting away from him as we swerve to the right across several lanes of traffic. Horns honking, cars maneuvering to avoid us. I remember how important it is not to take turns too fast in a big, heavy vehicle like a fully-loaded bus.

But, while he clearly could do better in the area of not falling asleep at the wheel, our driver is quite amazingly competent at regaining control now that he's woken up. We come to a rest diagonally, across two lanes and a shoulder, but somehow he manages not to hit anything. He must be in shock a bit because the first thing he does is to grab a flashlight and go outside to do a walkaround inspection. The relief driver calls him back in. We creep slowly across to the larger shoulder on the right side of the highway and stop again so that they can do the inspection properly (i.e. not in the middle of the freeway). I look at the clock... 3:07 am.

A few minutes later, with no explanation offered and, amazingly, none demanded by any of us passengers, we pull back onto the road to continue our drive to Paris. I think it's safe to say, though, that I was not the only one who slept lightly for the rest of the night and perked up every time the bus strayed from its lane.