classy joint.

You'd think that when you buy a fancy condo on the water, you'd really experience a step up in signage.  Dower's place proves this theory totally correct.

Some thoughts: what are cupons, and are they as painful as they sound?  Will Bobbi be compensated for her trauma?  And did the people at the engraving shop even notice? 

our days back in 'nam.

How we made it to this happy point, giddily frolicking by the South China Sea, was one of those travel days that really made us wish we weren't the hoi polloi and could travel by jet instead of with the riff-raff.

By the numbers:

Three (3): botched cab rides in which one of the parties left angry and/or shafted

Fourteen (14): hours on a bus getting from Phnom Penh to Saigon to Mui Ne, listening to terrible Vietnamese pop (which has replaced Bolivian pop in my mind as officially the worst music ever created)

One (1): French gentleman with overwhelming body odor on our bus

Hundreds (100s): minutes wasted at the Vietnam border, perhaps the world's most inefficient system EVER created for entering a Socialist Republic

Three (3): hostels attempted before landing in paradise

What up, Vietnam. Let's party. Also, I'm aware that I resemble Lieutenant Dan in this photo, but let me remind you what an adept swimmer he was, so it's not at all dangerous to jump in a pool in such a condition.

malaria: like, totally the best diet everrrr

That's a joke I used to tell before I started getting cold sweats and throwing up my first day in Luang Prabang, Laos, at which point I examined the mosquito bite on my ankle, remembered that malaria has the potential to multiply in your body until your brain cells explode and kill you, and thought, "BALLS. Not funny anymore."

So in a futuristic and surprisingly Big Brother-esque maneuver, Laos takes your temperature at the airport with a little ray gun to make sure you aren't bringing the White Man's Burden of Smallpox back into their country. Since they let me in, I assumed I was a healthy individual. But I think we all know what assuming does, and I spent most of the time in that delightful country laying helplessly on my bed, sicker than I've been since Bolivia and watching the only two English channels I could find: BBC and CNN, who played the same 3 hour loop of depressing reports all day long ("everyone is dying in Pakistan because of flooding!! Everyone is dying in Russia because of fires!!", leading me to wonder if we could somehow meet in the middle here and solve everyone's problems). I felt supremely lame while Amy and Mom were gallivanting around, and forced myself to rally enough to ride a tuk-tuk an hour out of town and see a gorgeous waterfall. I'm not including shots of the waterfall because you know what they look like, but here are my dear family members wading through monsoon water to sit at a picnic table. They're so cute.

Later we rode a boat across the little Mekong tributary that runs through town and had dinner at a restaurant barely carved out of the palm tree jungle. We ate surrounded by crickets and geckos and stumbled through mud under a thunderstorm to paddle home.
And since street food is one of my most favorite things about traveling, here's Ames on the first night, selecting from a huge cart of the world's best noodle/tofu/veggie combinations on the side of the road. A dollar a plate, please. Don't mind if I do.

I still wasn't quite up to par on our last day in town, so as Ames and Mom did some intense hike to the top of a hill that probably would have seemed like an IronMan in my weakened state, I wandered around with my camera to see what I could find. I was rewarded when I came across the same man I'd seen a couple times before, who liked to kick aimlessly at the air and kind of lunge at passerby. "Ohhh, the town crazy," I thought affectionately, thinking of that guy in Seattle who lives on the corner of Boston and Lake Union who always yells about how Satan infects us through the radio. Luang Prabang's resident mentally ill person always seems to have a prop, though: sometimes a boulder, sometimes a full-blown Soviet Union flag. I didn't have the heart to tell him the Cold War was over, but I did enjoy wandering the market with him for a while.

If anyone cares, I don't actually have malaria I don't think, so we can still hang out safely without my body imploding and ruining the festivities. And I won't be doing anymore joking around about malaria being a good diet, I missed eating SO MUCH this last week. Still love you though, Laos!

rules.

Welcome to Laos, here are the ground rules:

No prostates.

No crambling.

wait a second...

Is this statue one of those real-life Rorschack tests to find out how your mind works? If so, things aren't looking too good for me. And to make matters worse, it's outside of Wonkwang Hospital. I'm not making this up.

we just became official south americans.

There are so many things to tell about our last couple days in Bogota, including meeting the oldest and most charming policeman in the country, talking politics and Brazilian hitchhiking with a rattailed cutie in a French restaurant, and in general loving life despite the rain and clouds.

But more importantly, let's talk about how we just spent six months getting super long hair in prep for being cute in Miami only to HAVE IT ALL HACKED OFF at the "salon most famous in the city for completely changing your look." They didn't tell us that when we walked in, and we didn't notice the "Assassin Stylists" decor until it was too late. I'm going to be totally, 100% honest right now, because we're in a safe place I think:

We have mullets.

We have the exact haircut that every hippy Argentine EVER has. I've included this visual in case you don't recognize me next time you see me, and I just really wish I were exaggerating. Basically we are now heading to the most beautiful city in the country, wandering around with Kardashians and whatnot, and I have the same haircut I did when I was six years old. Awesome.

martinis, round two

Here are some things that can get tiring after a while:

*hostel rooms shared with handfuls of other loud douchebags and occasional thieves

*trying to survive on set menus every day ($2 for lunch is so cool, but the human body can only handle so much white rice and fried fish. It's like a science experiment)

*bargaining for beer. Colombian inflation is fairly absurd, so we set our beer range at $1,500-2,000 for a domestic. We refuse to pay more. Since $1,000 pesos equals 50 cents, this is totally reasonable.

After having bread and cheese for dinner on the walls of Cartagena and gazing across the drawbridge to a fancy wedding party, we felt SO. POOR. and realized it was time to start living outside of our means yet again. So we pulled the old Buenos Aires maneuver of finding the fanciest place in town and crashing it.

This time it was a beautiful hotel in the center of old town, where riiiiiiich old people and possibly "ladies of the night" go to drink expensive scotch and wipe their butts with our monthly budget. Acting like we belonged there, Mar ordered a whiskey on the rocks and I got a "martini biche," which I discovered contained mango and black pepper, and let me tell you, those drinks were like nectar from the heavens. Our kind waiter came over to make small talk and asked us what we would be having next. I laughed.

"Abject poverty for two, please."

Sometimes you just have to admit to yourself and the world that you cannot afford even the first drink, let alone another. But have I mentioned that Colombians, with the exception of some select FARC guerrillas and the ladies on Playa Blanca who kick sand on your towel when you refuse to buy a massage from them, are the world's COOLEST PEOPLE? Our waiter laughed at us and then whispered to the bartender, who promptly sent us over two more of our exact drinks, but with more expensive alcohol, on the house.

AH MANG. 72 hours left in this dream world of black guys with blue eyes and more generosity than Ireland and Mother Theresa combined. I'll be over here whimpering the Colombian national anthem in the fetal position if anyone needs me.

robbers, tarantulas, and hippies

The SUPER COOL thing that happened as we were trying to leave Peru:

All my cash, credit card, three sets of presents and the coin purse from our godchildren in Bolivia: STOLEN. Right out from under me. Right when we were trying to cross the stupid border on an overnight bus. When we got off the bus from Mancora, I was massively irritated and the first thought that came to mind was something along the lines of, "Cool, take all my money. I'll eventually go home and earn that all back-- and then some-- and you can stay here in your pitiful 3rd World thievery. Enjoy that." Then I remembered I'm supposed to be praying for my enemies. I struggled with that one and would have ALMOST concluded the Peru expedition with a bitter taste in my mouth if it weren't for a couple of things. Firstly, the kind man at our bus line office who found me an obscure computer (the only one with internet) in the station so I could cancel my card, and who counseled me with such gems as "Money is like water! It'll flow back to you in no time!" and reminded me that I was still safe. It's amazing how good-hearted, well-placed people can turn a situation around. Secondly, Marlo reminded me that we were heading to pure nature to live on Neverland Farm, which would be a perfect time to escape from using money at all and, as she put it, "really focus on a good mental cleanse" so we could start Ecuador on a positive note. Mental cleanse, brainwash, whatever. Let's do it.

We found ourselves arriving in Loja, Ecuador at 5 am, ready to move to a farm but having had the complicated directions stolen as well (maybe the most annoying thing about getting robbed is when they take the things that mean absolutely nothing to them, but everything to you. I met a Canadian girl who had a thousand dollars of things taken from her in the main square of Quito, but the thing she cried most about was her journal). Essentially stranded, we slept in the bus station for three hours until the town opened up and we could get to an internet cafe to REWRITE the 5 paragraphs of instructions. Finally, after two busses into the highlands and a long hike that was no easy jaunt with our backpacks on, we arrived at Neverland Farm.
Let me take a moment to describe what we THOUGHT we would be doing, based on the website:
Drinking farm-grown coffee, smoking farm-grown tobacco, eating farm-grown fruit and learning about sustainable organic agriculture. Not to mention getting our own hippy names (MoonBeam?PeaceWart?) in the process. What we did do was come to understand what it actually looks like to live on a hippy commune. We lucked out and had a vegetarian chef from Denmark cook us all our meals, ate veggies from the farm, and showered in the outdoor rock bath. Added bonus: new litters of kittens and puppies to play with, as well! What we were not up for was sharing an outhouse with tarantulas, finding spiders with weird fangs outside our door, having a leech colony waiting to attack from an unknown location, and having all our stuff permanently damp from the highland forest dew that seemed ubiquitous. I think we knew it was time to call it quits when, in a midnight attempt to avoid the outhouse, I accidentally peed on my Lulus. *Flashback to age 5, when my cousin tried to convince me that it was easy to pee in the woods. I got my grey sweatpants all wet and was mortified when we passed a cute 1st grade boy on the hike back. Since then, I have avoided the squat pee maneuver at all costs, besides that one time in the Bolivian desert where it was either "bano natural" or a UTI.*

So, with our new army of wonderful hippy friends left securely behind in their hemp beds, we made the trek back out of the woods and headed for safer ground in Cuenca, more than ready for a place that wouldn't either rob us blind or make us feel high-maintenance for not wanting bee hives in our living areas. Chau, puppies.

foiled by mother nature!

Here's a cool site: Macchu Pichu NOT being rained on.













And here's my mama, traveling like a champ in Croatia and being super cute in general.






These two were supposed to meet next week. Mom has a ticket to Lima for Friday night and we were all set to do some hiking, see the continent's most famous ancient ruins, and add another country to our mother/daughter travel list. The day after we were going to buy our tickets to Cusco, the rains hit and Peru declared a state of emergency in our next travel stop.


Apparently, rainy season isn't something to joke around with here. Marlo and I are scrambling to come up with Plan B, which will most likely involve doing everything Mom and I do at home (yoga, going on walks, eating a lot and laughing) just... on the beach. Not that we're complaining. Macchu Pichu, we'll see you some other time...

king triton is angry.

Things that encourage people to keep surfing:

1. How fun and welcoming Peruvian surfers are. I had a cheer squad for my first successful set of waves, which is really endearing.

2. Spending an afternoon in a warm ocean being told jokes by two brothers named Carlos and Javier. They are like two compact little elves who barely hit 5 feet, and I feel like a gangly, weak-armed albino next to them. I'm selling this to the WB as a sitcom concept, so don't steal it.

Things that will make someone flee from the ocean permanently:

1. Seeing dead sea lions pummeled on the rocks after the same "red alert" waves almost pulled you under the day before

2. Seeing a drunk guy almost drown, throw up foam and get taken to the hospital after trying to take a dip

3. HUMAN BONES. Lots of them. Washing ashore. Right where you're sitting. Now that, my friends, is what we might call "disconcerting," because someone is probably missing those.

riptides are nothing to joke about.

Pisco Sours: the most dangerous thing to come out of Peru since Shining Path guerrillas.

Ricardo and Omar, of the aforementioned sports television fame, did indeed take us to El Silencio yesterday for a day on the beach. This was a positive turn of events, because hanging out with grownups means you get to do grownup things: in this case, eating mussels and octopus under a beach umbrella and having rounds of pisco sours appearing out of thin air.

I find it disappointing that I'm not as smart as I feel after three of these little time bombs. A list of things we thought were GREAT ideas after baking in the sunshine and enjoying the local moonshine:

1. Buying large fake tattoos of Che Guevara's face. I cannot explain this one.

2. Buying bootleg copies of Precious and that Hugh Grant/Sarah Jessica Parker movie where they have to move to Wyoming in witness protection. Stellar cinematic choices.

3. Swimming.

So there I was, enjoying a nice leisurely dip, swam out into shark territory, and came back to shore only to have my first riptide experience. I literally got repeatedly punched in the face by the Pacific Ocean, tried to escape and got sucked under again. Finally Marlo and Ricardo pulled me out of the stupid waves and I have never more closely resembled a sea monster. I'm still finding sand in my eyelashes (etc).

Later, the doorman at our apartment told us the waves yesterday had also messed up a bunch of the boats in the shipping port, and I felt a little better about my traumatic experience, but OH MY GOSH, everything they warn you about in swimming lessons in elementary school is true! If you run into an undertow in a back alley, give it all your money and don't talk back.

cristo.

The Cristo of Cochabamba: bigger than the one in Rio, very pensive, and dare I say handsome? He was the only redemptive part of Cochabamba (no pun intended), and being there on New Years Eve was possibly the worst idea ever. After rainy days where everything in the city was closed, I left, having been relieved by two Colombian chicks and a bad hostel of all my cold-weather clothes, and threw up on the bus all the way into La Paz. Cochabamba is not high on my list of recommendations in Bolivia.


This concludes my application to write for Lonely Planet as a really nonpartisan, adaptable traveller who likes everything.

marlo.

Whenever my travel partner opens her mouth, I have no idea what's about to happen. As I was trying to tell her about the new Robin Thicke/Cudder jam, she proudly declared:

"Any son of Alan Thicke is a son of mine."

It just doesn't stop with this chick.

the worst dollar i ever spent.

After a night of adjusting to the altitude in La Quiaca, we joined hunched campesinos with colorful scarves securing massive crates and/or children to their backs to cross the bridge into Bolivia. Crossing our fingers that a fistful of money and buoyant smiles would suffice for entry instead of yellow fever certificates (currently lost in the Argentine postal system) and almost all of the 300 entry requirements Evo asks of poor Americans, we were happy to find the border guards in jovial moods. They deemed us worthy of 1. getting our passports photos mocked and 2. GETTING VISAS! Here we are with our shiny new Bolivian visas, so young and naive, with no idea of what lay ahead for us. With stomachs full of coca tea, we set off to the train, which by all accounts leaves every Tuesday.
Our first bad news of the day: PSYCH, no trains till Wednesday! Faced with the choice of staying in the god-forsaken border town of Villazon or taking the bus to Tupiza, we weighed our options. We had been warned about the bus to Tupiza. "It's really dangerous," people said. "Wait for the train, it's much safer." Our response? "How dangerous can a bus be, really?" So for 10 bolivianos, just over a dollar, we threw our packs in the belly of a rickety bus and climbed aboard. This was, perhaps, one of the worst decisions I have ever made regarding my personal safety.
We are used to busses smelling strongly of body odor and unidentified comestibles, and this was no different. However, only a quarter of the windows worked, so we sat three in a row in the baking sunshine as Urux kept an eye on the cargo to make sure no one made off with our backpacks. Marlo and I did the following things pre-departure: read Psalms regarding physical protection, kiss our necklaces of St. Christopher and St. Benedict, and hold hands. These were repeated throughout the voyage with increasing desperation and later were augmented by a few Our Fathers and, eventually, resignation to our fate.
The bus hit a pothole before we even left the city, tossing duffel bags out of the overhead compartments onto the heads of unsuspecting passengers and causing the bus to tilt so far to the left that I had visions of myself under a pile of the passengers next to me. And with this fortuitous beginning, we set out into the desert.
Oh, the desert. It really means business in southern Bolivia. Huge clouds of dust billowed into the bus with astonishing frequency, finding their way in great gusts through the few functioning windows and half-broken skylights, and surrounded the bus so completely that we wondered how the driver could see to drive. Not that it really mattered, though, because there WAS NO ROAD. Nope, just a "suggestion" path through a desert that, although appearing flat, pitched our poor bus around like a ragdoll. The rattling of seats made conversation impossible and I had images of the entire vehicle crumbling to pieces right there in the desert where Butch Cassidy died.
Then the mountains began, which is when I seriously began to consider standing up and saying a few words. Driving through cliff territory with no guard rail and only a couple inches of wiggle room? And all that business we heard about Bolivian bus drivers drinking on the job? TELL ME THAT'S JUST A RUMOR. I felt the bus slow down and peeked hopefully out the window. Rather than seeing our destination, I saw the trail ending in front of us. With a cliff to our right and a river to our left, we apparently had nowhere to go.
Silly American! If there's not a road, you can just DRIVE THROUGH THE RIVER. As Urux laughed "only in South America," our driver took a direct left and drove straight into the water to continue our journey.
This was an unfortunate time to look out the window again. Our route had not been kind to previous busses, and we gazed in terror at another bus exactly like ours, toppled on its side and resting on a gravel island in the river. On the verge of tears and strongly considering getting out and walking the rest of the way, we couldn't move from being paralyzed by terror and having peed our pants.
We finally made it to Tupiza after three hellish hours. We never want to see another bus for as long as we live. This story isn't even funny to me yet, and I need a drink.*

*This was written over a week ago, and we did end up getting some local moonshine to celebrate life. However, completely forgetting that we are in a 3rd World country and ice is a no-no, we got stomachaches from the fruit liquor and are sticking to wine from now on. Also, this story still isn't funny to me.

i'm dusty.

We took a bus from Jujuy to La Quiaca today, but for those of you who are mentally picturing a Greyhound, knock it off. This bus wouldn't go more than 30 miles an hour for the first leg of the journey, and we genuinely thought of getting off and walking alongside it, occasionally patting it on the side like an old mule about to be put out to pasture. When it got up to about 55, we cheered-- until the DOOR FELL OFF. What was supposed to be a 4 hour trip to the border turned out to be a 7 hour pathetic limp across northern Argentina, stopping on roadsides and at mechanics without any hope of reattaching said door.

Now we're hanging out on the Bolivian border, chewing coca leaves and plotting how to not get denied entry and/or robbed tomorrow morning as we head into Evo Morales territory. Stay tuned.

drowned rat chronicles

"I'll laugh about this once I don't look like I have a combover." -Marlo Hartung

Original plan: Colonia, Uruguay. Until people told us it was expensive and boring compared to the utopian Tigre, the town of 500 rivers that look like tiger stripes. "It's a little Venice!" people said. "It's the best kept secret in Argentina! You have to go! They have water-ambulances and water-schoolbusses and water-pizza delivery!"

So on another hot and sunny morning, we hopped on the train with the unwashed masses and headed an hour north to check out Tigre for ourselves.

The clouds rolled in alongside our train.

At first, we laughed at the droplets. Then got a little quieter when lightning streaked above us. Then completely gave up trying to stay dry as every single business, boat launch, and water taxi closed up shop and we were left outside, wading through puddles as deep as our shins and laughing as hard as we could about our luck.

Eventually a tour bus driver swung his doors open, pulled us onboard, and gave us towels and garbage bags to put over ourselves. Then, in classic Argentine style, took pictures on his camera phone and asked us when we would all have dinner together. (Sir, that all depends on how quickly we recover from the whooping cough that I feel developing in my lungs as we speak.)

Finally we found our way to the train station through the tormenta and have never been so glad to see shelter.

Tigre, by the numbers:

1: % of the city observed

2: dulce de leche ice cream cones consumed because we felt sorry for ourselves

0: jungle tours taken

0: steak dinners ordered

0: leather purses found at the Mercado de Frutos

Oh yes. We've been to Tigre. If anyone has any questions about the town, we're your girls.

in over our heads.

Here’s a story about the time Marlo and I decided to get creative with what we call “The Budget.” Let it first be known that despite a few too many empanadas and café con leches, we are doing quite well in sticking to our budget in the most expensive place in South America. Let it also be known that we walk everywhere and that can be exhausting, ok?
We had spent a ridiculous day in Palermo. We wanted to see the Islamic Cultural Center and just happened to arrive there at the exact same time as two busloads of old ladies. These were not your average old ladies; they were exactly who we want to be in our eighties: well-dressed and obnoxious. They had no idea what was going on, and our tour was punctuated with loud questions like: “What happens if you are walking down the sidewalk when it’s time for prayer?” and “What level of heaven can women get to?” (Dear Elderly: get your world religions straight). They also enjoyed barreling into us to get a better view of the prayer room and interrupting us when we were trying to ask questions ourselves. Ok, ladies, just because you speak better Spanish than we do doesn’t mean we can’t have a turn too! Shoooot.
Exhausted by old women, we headed for the Planetorium to see what kind of space show they have (my dream jobs that will never happen, in order of likelihood: 1) paleontologist 2) next Stephen Hawking) 3) Olympic figure skater). It was our lucky day, because an entire school had gone on a field trip to the exact same showing of History of the Universe! So in one fell swoop we went from battling cranky old bats to battling 8.3 million middle schoolers with ice cream cones (and thereby becoming the cranky old bats ourselves). Of course, as soon as the show started and we spent a few minutes whispering about how much we hate kids, we promptly fell asleep and missed the whole thing. We woke up in time to get a rundown of all the planets, make awkward eye contact with a middle schooler who judged us for snoozing and call it a day.
Ok, so knowing about all the extra work we had done that day dealing with various age groups and coming to terms with our own misanthropic tendencies, could anyone blame a girl for peeking into a fancy bar on the way home and thinking, “Martinis would be a good life decision right now”? I think not! With the helpful encouragement of my friend Marlo, we walked into the fanciest bar in downtown Buenos Aires and ordered two dirty gins with extra olives.
About halfway through our drinks, we took a looksy and noticed that we were the only people in the bar not wearing suits, the only people under 40, and the only women.
“What the hell. Did we just walk into a gentleman’s club?” Marlo hissed at me. Wide-eyed, we took stock and saw no strippers, decided to finish our drinks and take our mismatched travelling outfits out of there. This is about the same point in time when we began to realize that we probably couldn’t afford to pay for our martinis. Whoopsy! Real panic set in as we came to new awareness that this was no dive bar and we tried to remember how to say “WE CAN WASH DISHES! DON’T PUT US IN JAIL!”
At this point I’m sure you’re very nervous for us but fret not, I’m not writing this from the back of a kitchen in the business district. Luckily, conversation was begun with two suits at the bar about relative merits of local fútbol teams, and we somehow ended up on their tab. Thanks, business dudes in a fancy watering hole. Sorry for treading in your territory, we shall not make the same mistake twice!

getting mugged on week one? no gracias.

After the infamous “Random Guy Getting to Third Base on a Spanish Sidewalk” incident of 2005, I have NO TIME for people trying to mess around with me when I’m trying to get from Point A to Point B in a new country. It really pisses me off more than most things, because a) I don’t want random strangers touching my lady parts/taking my stuff and b) I think it’s pretty low to try to take advantage of a tourist in the first place. Before we left, my doting father reminded me of the “mustard trick” where the unsuspecting tourist gets squirted with a condiment, and then in the fluster of getting cleaned off also gets cleaned out. And sure enough, some dude actually tried this on us as we trekked down Callao with all of our earthly possessions on our backs. I saw some green slime squirt us from about waist level, and it landed all over—our backpacks, in my hair, on our clothes. This stuff was potent and gave us a headache almost immediately, and a mustachioed Che with a Kleenex magically appeared to help—except he wanted me to take off my backpack and Marlo to not stand nearby. YEAH RIGHT BUDDY! I stole his Kleenex and we moved swiftly on, amazed that someone would actually try that maneuver on us within three days of landing on the continent and also assume that our backpacks were worth taking (if they want my ratty Pumas and cutoff shorts, by all means, lighten the load).

End of story: I was feeling pretty good about not having our stuff taken when we got to our new hostel and decided to rinse the creepy chemicals out of my hair. When I tried to turn on the little hotel hairdryer in the bathroom, I blew the fuse for the entire building. Hi, Buenos Aires! We have an interesting relationship so far!

someone give us a house, please!

Ok, ok, the ghetto is glamorous in the movies but when you accidentally live there in Buenos Aires, it's not as fun. Traipsing all over town to find apartments in legitimate neighborhoods is a) good for the glutes and b) really hard for two girls who like eating cheesecake and sitting down a lot. Today we tricked our new friend Jamil (born on Caye Caulker in Belize, raised in Guatemala City, yoga fanatic) into wandering around with us into Palermo.

Jamil, two miles in: "Ay Dios. I should be doing less meditating and more exercising."

This is Jamil's face after he saw Amy Winehouse in her drogaddiccion phase. Emotion was palpable. It was like telling a kid there's no Santa Claus.

Luckily, covering dozens of miles on foot was worth it. We now have an apartment to live in starting on Monday and the happy memory of a cute little Argentinian boy who gasped, "MIRA... que lindo vestido!" to his mom and swung around to watch Marlo's long dress swish by him. At least someone around here appreciates the fact that we brought cute dresses!

El Gran Regreso

"No sigas las huellas de los antiguos...
busca lo que ellos buscaron."

-Matsuo Basho


Eleven months after I'd waved goodbye to my family at SeaTac, the impending arrival of the only member I hadn't yet seen (the mater) was enough to make me need adult diapers on the eve of the 3rd, when Anita was to land in Dublin. I had an alarm set for 4:45 am and a suitcase full of dresses, and sure enough slept right through my alarm, got a full 8 hours of sleep, and was 3 hours late to pick her up at the airport. Pathetic daughter that I am, I also forced her to wander in the rain and gloom of Baile Atha Cliath for most of the day (though a highlight was at the pub that night, when she sang 'Que Sera Sera' while waiting to pay, and was backed up by a feisty five year old who knew every song on the jukebox from Toto's Africa to the Irish Call and proved it loudly and off-key). Mother/daughter vacay was off to a rolicking start, and by "rolicking" i mean "so tired the morning we left for Spain that I left all my toiletries and my favorite earrings in the bathroom." Ah yes, a good omen to be sure.

Landing in Alicante was a sunny relief from the nonstop rain that Ireland has been calling summer. When the bus closed its doors on our faces at the airport (I mean, what is the deal with that kind of thing?), Mom and I met Ted and Rory, two hilarious Irishmen who had a deal for us: I use my Spanish to commandeer and direct a cab into Alicante, they pay for it and entertain us with Frasier impressions, Belfast mockery, and heavy sarcasm the entire way. I think we came out on top with that arrangement, and we now have a place to stay in Galway. Good omen #2.

As I found my bearings in Alicante's Barrio (which can only be described as loud, seething with people from all over the world, and one of the places I feel most at home), who leaned out of a window and yelled my name but Kyle, my North Carolinan friend and 1/3 of the reason I came back to Spain (the other 2/3 being Carlos, an Albacete transplant who has been previously mentioned as the Sonnet Writing Spaniard, and Eija, my Finnish roommate and defender of my sanity for Autumn 2005). Finding Kyle within ten minutes of landing in Alicante? Definitely good omen #3.



Now the next incredible thing to happen was that my boys Fernando and Javier, who I tutored/nannied when I lived in Alicante, were having a birthday party and their mom Pilar went out of her way to invite us, so naturally it was a crucial component of the trip. Thanks to Carlos, who led us to the biggest and most miraculous toy store ever, I found a sweet remote control car and dragged Mom, Eija, and her friend Jenni deep into backwater Spain: Muchamiel is serious desert territory, where jolly old ladies joke with you as they lean out of their windows, where the dusty Spanish hills are the only backdrop, and where everyone is just NICE. Just seriously NICE. As I awkwardly followed the map I had sketched and thanked God for my Spanish, limited as it was, to ask for directions, we had serious doubts about our ability to find the place. But sweet relief, we did, and had an absolutely incredible time with one of the best families I have ever met: three adorable boys, two parents who would literally do anything for their friends, and table filled with incredible Spanish food and surrounded by their equally wonderful friends. I'd been nervous that the boys wouldn't even remember me (a year and a half is a long time if you're five) but the reunion was sweet and the party was one of the best things I've done in a long time. Life just keeps rolling along smoothly...


One should never live in wait for the other shoe to drop, but so many good omens had to be tempered by disaster. So I will skip all the parts of the trip where we were utterly relaxed on the beach, eating paella and tapas to our hearts delight, wandering amidst the chaos of the mercadillo, and laughing with really good friends until we peed a little. Those were good times, but they weren't as memorable as the event I like to call: More Proof That Laura Isn't Quite a Grownup.


It all started in Desden, our favorite bar, where we were trying to order our old standby chupito Cuarenta y Tres. However, after an unfortunate incident involving some drunk breezy setting fire to the floor, they don't offer them anymore. Our shot ordering was cut short, though, by a boxing match that was about to break out in the middle of the bar (nothing unusual for the Barrio... close quarters and lots of alcohol don't always bring out the best in human nature) and our denim-vested bartender went out with a baseball bat to see what the story was. Hoping for a legit fight to provide some entertainment, we were instead left with a dispersed shouting match and two loud, sarcastic, and generous Brits Simon and Steve, who, with their grownup jobs, could buy three girls' night's supply of vodka tonics without much thought.

*Right. The vodka tonics. Which brings me to my next point: how we make decisions is dubious at times. Specifically, how spending six hours in Alicante's Barrio with old friends and new boys will lead to a reduced capacity to choose wisely.*

Fast forward to five am, when I finally got to make use of the bikini I'd been wearing under my dress all day. Simon and I took a dip at Postiguet and swam out to a raft 50 yards from the shore to play on the slide and the diving board. Swimming at the pre-dawn lull, when the quiet hum of the beach Zamboni-type machine is accompanied only by the comforting repetition of Mediterranean waves hitting the cooling sand, is definitely a good and pleasant thing. Leaving your clothes, shoes, money, camera, cash and credit card on what you thought was an abandoned beach is maybe not such a good idea. It is actually an extremely unwise and immature move, as Simon and I discovered as we emerged, still slightly tipsy, to discover every single one of our posessions GONE. From cell phone to ID. Unwilling to admit out own idiocy and naivete, we paced the beach a number of times and I grilled the Zamboni man in angry Spanish about our stuff, only to be answered with a blank look on his face: "Robados. Estais robados." I chose to believe him, for the time being, but I really think he held our stuff in the back of his cab (including: 5 credit cards from Simon's wallet, my Mom's card and drivers license, my favorite dress, my camera which was filled with photos of situation that are unlikely to happen again and now must be stored in the amygdala or wherever stores memory, because they sure won't appear on Shutterfly anytime soon, my lucky flipflops, and our wide-eyed trusting natures). Yep, the sneaky beach cleaner told us we'd been robbed and went on his way, but I couldn't exactly split hairs with a man when I only had a swimsuit to my name. Instead, we went home: shoeless, trouserless, relieved of possessions as well as our happy buzz. Joder, digo yo.

Noon that day saw us in the lobby of the boys' hotel, on Simon's Blackberry with Visa USA, cancelling our main source of expenditure for the next month through a woman whose retainer continued to disconnect with her teeth, making the verval transfer of a Belfast post-code nearly impossible.
But this is also where the story that was just your typical "idiot in Spain whose luck was up" tale to that point, began to shift. As we shook our heads and laughed together over the night we'd left behind us, a middle-aged woman in a knee-length skirt hovered, wandering back and forth through the sliding doors and murmuring something about a "crisis of her own." My mom, ever the willing party to befriend a stranger, asked "Did you lose something as well?" The woman's answer was not the "room key" or "passport" or "Fendi purse" I expected. It was heavier, and much less fixable than a lost credit card: "Yes," she said, "My husband. He left me this morning. Actually, no. I left him." And that is how we met Barbara, who had, just minutes before, discovered her husband texting his girlfriend yet again and had walked out of their hotel room for good. As one would expect from someone who was on the verge of a broken marriage, Barbara was out of sorts. So this is why, our third day in Spain, Mom and I ended up out to lunch with Simon and Steve, random thirty-something bachelors, and Barbara, fresh off her 50th birthday and facing singledom once more. It was an unexpected yet totally welcome meal, one which allowed a random group of people who were strangers twelve hours earlier, to commiserate over what it actually means to "lose" something and, in Barbara's own words, begin to restore her faith in humankind.




I was so thrilled to leave the chill of Ireland for the balmy bliss of Espana, I didn't think much about what it would be like to return to a place that I had once called home. Coming back to Belfast was a firm reminder that cities, like people, are not static, and it's impossible to come back to the same place twice. However, this proved to be a huge benefit in the case of Alicante: all of my former frustrations and annoyances seemed to have become minor in the year and a half since I left. Even the creepy men who follow you home from the beach and try to coerce you to sleep with them right then and there just seemed funny, rather than the horrendous and misogynistic nightmares they had once appeared to be. Spain and I were friends again, and I left happy.

The return to Northern Ireland for the 12th has been an experience like no other, but description will not suffice unless I have pictures to coincide with the words, and at this point I don't. More to come, but for now we are heading on a little jaunt around Ireland (I'm driving again after a year of being a passenger, and actually think the lefthand side of the road is more familiar than the right, which scares me) and then on to Croatia for a wee dander. So many more thoughts and wonders at this point but will have to save them for a time when my word count isn't already through the roof...