sometimes.

Sometimes it's Friday at midnight and you need to go play.

 Sometimes you end up on the Jose Rizal Bridge taking too many jumping shots because you are overjoyed at the view.  If you live in Seattle and haven't played on the Rizal Bridge, what are you waiting for?  It's the most breathtaking view of the city one could possibly imagine, especially at sunset.  Just look at how happy Dower is!  Look!

Sometimes you end up getting 1 am dim sum in the middle of the International District, the only whities in the whole place, wondering if it's better to order pig skin or cow intestine or both.

 Sometimes your "friends" wake you up at the crack of dawn to go for a walk, only to reward your efforts with even more cracks of dawn.

 Somtimes you just need to keep playing, because it's autumn and the leaves are all waiting to be scooped up and thrown somewhere.

 And sometimes you decide that even though it's only been 7 hours since you last had it, you need more dim sum for breakfast.

Sometimes I wish all days could be sleepless, uneventful, and somehow exactly what I want to be doing.

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!

street food and unrequited love.

-Chatuchak Weekend Market, Bangkok.

lady bulgaga.

I was about to write another sonnet about food, reminiscent of my ode to steak and wine from Buenos Aires, but decided instead to send a direct complaint to the Korean community of Seattle: dear friends, WHY did you not forcibly take me by the hand and sit me down on the floor of a bulgogi restaurant sooner?

Two nights ago, Ames took us to some back alley restaurant and that wound up being one of the most delicious food extravaganzas I've experienced since Peruvian ceviche. I knew things would be good when we walked in and the kids in the play area were so curious about the only white people in the place that they would dare each other to run up and stand in front of us for a split second. We slipped off our shoes and tucked them into the rack at the entrance, sitting barefoot at the entryway until they could find space in the packed restaurant. We finally got placed in the back corner room with two long tables filled with drunk coworkers (Asian Glow: no laughing matter) who got louder and louder the more Cass and soju* they drank. By the end of the night, one bold and intoxicated gentleman waved at us on his way out and called over about how beautiful we were. Amy translated, and then all the guys at the table next to us started laughing that they thought he'd been referring to them.

Here's how it goes down at a bulgogi restaurant: first you sit on the floor and realize how old you're getting when it gets really uncomfortable after an hour. Then a girl comes out and starts a barbecue in the middle of your table and puts a ton of meat on it. Then she brings out the banchan-- bowl after miniature bowl of side dishes that are equal parts intriguing and delicious for a first-timer. Our table was covered with delights like kimchi (pickled veggies with red pepper flakes mixed in), buckwheat noodles, sesame oil and red pepper salad, vinegary soup, peppery sweet soup, whole garlic cloves and onion slices to simmer in oil and entire mushrooms and salty strips of seaweed. Then the baskets full of massive, perfect sesame leaves which are almost too pretty to eat but you have to because by then your meat is ready and the girl has cut it up so you make a little roll with anything you want in the leaf and eat it in one bite and

HOLY SHITE, what is this flavor explosion happening in my mouth?! What have I been spending my 26 years on this earth even doing, if not sitting at this short table in bare feet, making miniature ambrosia packages for dinner?

Bulgogi: the ugliest food name in existence but the most delightful way to spend 2 hours barbecuing with your nearest and dearest. Yes please!

*soju is, from my understanding, the Korean version of sake and "is gross and leaves you with the worst headache in history," according to my sister. However, they give out free samples of it at the grocery store across the street, and I respect a country that allows rice liquor to flow freely among children. Here's to you, Korea!

tongsaeng, onni and omma go to school.

Reunited and it feeeeels so gooood! is the theme song I'd like you to hum in your head as you take a gander at these photos.

Well, after a 12 hour flight alongside every unhappy Korean baby ever born, we finally made it to Seoul and were greeted by my leetle seester (my "tongsaeng"), and no one needs to worry: she is as pretty and cool as ever.

Our first stop this morning was to find out what she's been doing at school all year. Here she is, infiltrating the young, pliable minds of her Koala class with propaganda such as "The Itsy Bitsy Spider."

I suppose now is as good a time as any to start telling you funny kid stories, since I know that's why you're here in the first place. Allow me to introduce you to our new friends, June and Edward, who are the first two candidates to come home in my backpack. Amy informed us today that last week, she overheard a conversation in Korean between these two BFFs that, loosely translated, went something like this:
June: "Did you just fart?"
Edward: "Nope."
June: (crawls over to put his face next to Edward's backside) "Because it smells kind of bad here. I think you farted."
I don't even need to tell you how hard that made me laugh at lunch today, and even though these two didn't understand what the joke was, they giggled along with us with their sweet little faces all lit up. Oh MAN, I think I'm in love again!

So here's a universal fact: kids love cameras. They think you are really cool if you have one and they want to hang out with you. This brings us to the photography portion of the school day, when my Canon got hijacked by rowdy Korean 6 year olds. Here's a photo montage:


practicing their SLR skills in front of the mirror with Miss Amy's older sister ("onni").









lunch, as interpreted by Joon.










Mom ("omma"), as interpreted by Alex.








Checking out some shots of Bolivian kids their age with no idea what they were looking at. Perhaps you have noticed that I look like a bag lady in this photo-- that's because I'd just escaped from the Meysun Beauty Salon, which consisted of two aesthetics-minded boys who ran up to me and said "PLAY?!" only to promptly lead me to the plastic set of salon tools.
Here they are "curling," "drying," and "brushing" my hair and also putting on a full face of makeup with the plastic lipstick. Here's a quandary: how does a 6 year old Korean boy know how to do eyeshadow and eyebrow shaping? Not to mention paint his own nails for real? That's something to think about.







To conclude, an avant garde idea: does this pensive child look like he was born a chopsticks expert? It would appear so.














But closer review proves otherwise. Apparently you can purchase beginner chopsticks, like training wheels for Asian kids, that have little finger holes and spring-lock action. Does it get any cooler than that?!

nutrition, volcanoes, and chicken trucks

Our last stop in Ecuador has confirmed that we absolutely love this country. We were fortunate to spend the weekend watching another friend of a friend, Kenji, work his PeaceCorps magic with a group of native kids from the outskirts of his village of Cotacachi. He runs roughly a million programs aimed at environmental education and protection, and we tagged along with his gang of teenagers to see Volcan Cuicocha and one of the only crater lakes on the continent.

We rode in the back of a truck up the mountain and made friends with the kids with questions like "If you could eliminate any one food from earth, what would it be?" Food is a universal, right?

Not really. Here is Jefferson, age sixteen. He wears clothes that would fit the average American 5th grader and before we made him our pet, guessed him to be about 9 years old. Kenji gazed at him sadly when we asked about his story.

"He's from a wonderful family from one of the communities but his growth has been majorly stunted by poor nutrition. He has been raised on rice, potatoes, and water. They don't have milk or fruit, and very rarely meat, to supplement their diet, and it shows." Kenji brings the kids fruit to try to combat their malnutrition, but it can't replace widespread education about how to grow the area's original crops again.

Here are some really beautiful faces. I think the kids (and for that matter, the parents) in the Otavalo area are some of the most amazing-looking people we have seen so far.

Jessica carries the heavy solemness that seems to characterize so much of the countryside. The girls are shy ("Feminism does not exist here!" insists Kenji when we make a joke about having a girls-only truck to head to the volcano. Machismo isn't always obvious, but Betty Frieden definitely hasn't yet hit the bookshelves). They were tired, and seemed to be inside their own heads for a lot of the day. I wondered how much was due to their personalities and how much

could be because there were two gringas around.

We've loved Ecuador and could spend months in any one spot... but "the road north" calls us...

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.

mercado central, or; will i be murdered while buying cinnamon?

Here is the Mercado Central, the heartbeat of Sucre and a stark contrast to the prepackaged predictability of Safeway. No two visits are ever the same, and I can never decide whether to be thrilled or terrified when I walk in.

One afternoon we went to explore the spices, wide-eyed at the stacks of bright saffron and curry in sacks the size of 8 year olds. Entranced by the range of colors, I grabbed my camera to document the pointed towers of flavor and was rewarded promptly with a furious 70 year old woman, who shooed us away with a bitterness I assumed was reserved for the gringos alone. It wasn't the first time I'd heard about the strange fury that fruit vendors can possess. Vlad, a Romanian transplant from California, told us that as he examined avocadoes once in the vegetable aisle (paltas, which we were disappointed to discover taste like anise) he was furiously maligned by the old woman at the stand for stealing her products. She embarked on an extensive, detailed rant until the woman one stand over kindly guided him to her selection of paltas and allowed him to inspect them without suspicion. Lifting your own fruit becomes a crap shoot-- you run the risk of being given older, bruised produce if you don't choose your own, but could also become the victim of a screaming Quechua matron if you do.

I understand that the art of photography isn't always appreciated by the subjects, a lesson that was reinforced with my spice section ostracism. I am a slow learner, however, and assumed that if I avoided catching people's faces in photos I could avoid their wrath and still document the impressive piles of their wares. I was sadly mistaken, and almost suffered a concussion while trying to snap this shot of the potato sacks. Right after I took this picture, a furious woman rose up from behind one of the bags with a massive papa in her hand, which she wound up to throw at me while screaming, "POR QUE SACAS FOTOS?!?" I understand that one would be tired of tourists snapping shots of you as an example of the "natives in their natural habitat," but what these women don't understand is Western awe at the sheer amounts of everything in the market. It's something quite stunning when one is accustomed to small portions of plastic-wrapped food that get replaced daily in the supermarkets at home. We can't help but take pictures.

Later that day, however, we discovered that the anger of mercado merchants extends to their own, as well, as two women fought loudly in the meat section until one was disgraced enough to wander away like a defeated buck who had just tangled horns with a much-stronger peer. "We just wanted to buy some butter," we marveled to ourselves, since grocery shopping at home rarely holds the possibility of deep human emotion (unless you are at the Trader Joe's on Roosevelt and run into my favorite bald gay man JoeJoe, for whom running the sample table becomes a wild, loud affair involving everyone in a 30 foot radius and stories from Gay Pride parades a decade ago, while you drink six Dixie cups of coffee in succession and stand riveted to his one man show).

Getting back to the mercado and some things I would like to change about it: the dog issue. The health department would have an absolute coronary at the goings-on of Bolivian perros. They wander freely, peeing liberally underneath the meat stalls, mere inches from the whole pig heads, chicken feet, and heavy racks of cow backs dangling from wires. Our legs turned to jello when we were on the scene of a roaring dog fight, because apparently it's normal in Bolivia to allow your Rottweilers and other attack dogs to wander amongst humans. More than once we have mentally drafted a leash law amendment to add to Evo's new constitution.

Conversely, your market experience could be a delight that leaves you marveling at how wonderful the world can be. Marlo and I have been lucky to find a fruit woman who cuts us thick samples of peaches and plums and mangoes and apples while regaling us with scary stories of La Paz, and thanks us for being loyal to her by tossing extra limes into our bags. We found a potato woman who, instead of yelling at us, asks us about traditional American holiday meals and begged us to teach her how to make baked apples. We buy cunape every day at exactly 4:30, when the little balls of yucca and cheese come out of the oven like clockwork (and never a minute sooner, an unspoken rule), and the sweet couple in the bakery section always laughs when they see us coming, since our order never changes. We buy butter from a lovely woman who gives us advice on how to stay safe in Bolivia, and homemade pasta from another woman who thinks our relationship with the kids from the guarderia (two of whom often are present for mercado adventures) is "just really beautiful." The world's most wonderful people can be found at the mercado central, once you find out who to avoid. Grocery shopping is a potent mix of sights and smells and the absolute inability to guess what will happen that particular day. And I think, besides the amounts of dog urine and fly colonies one has to dodge to get to what you need, I will really miss how alive places like the market are.

soo yummy.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for the donations to Ciruelitos! What generous friends and family we have, we are so grateful! Here's a little one chowing down on the chicken, rice, and potatoes you bought for him this week. I love how he goes from loving it to exhausted to loving it again! Sometimes you just gotta take a breather!

We are still putting every dollar to good use here, and it's not too late to throw in a little bit! Happy one week countdown to Christmas from sunny Sucre!

bolivian babies: now on your christmas shopping list

Check these adorable kiddos out! No, you can't buy the babies as gifts, but you can help them have enough to eat between now and February. They get food, you don't have to adopt them, everyone wins.

Here’s the deal: Ciruelitos Guarderia is a little nursery/daycare in the valley outside of central Sucre that is funded by the Bolivian government 10 months out of the year. Unfortunately, the government cuts off funding for December and January, but the kids have nowhere to go because their parents are mostly poor workers who get ZERO days off. The women who run this place are absolutely the most lovely people you will ever meet, and decided to keep working without salary in order to keep the kids in a safe place during the days. Fox Institute, the language school Marlo and I are working for, has raised enough to pay the women almost as much as they normally make, but there’s no money to feed the kiddos. Marlo and I are working on getting them set up for the next two months with at least enough food for the roughly 30 kids that spend their days there, but we can’t do it by ourselves.

Dear friends: what better time than the holidays to help people out who don’t have very much?
The upside of donating to Ciruelitos is that literally 100% of your hard-earned dough goes straight to the little ones. Seriously. Marlo and I go to the market with the girls who run the place, they haggle for every last boliviano, and literally work miracles in feeding so many kids with so little money. You have my personal guarantee that your cash will be spent on weird food that Bolivians like.

Examples of how far US dollars go:
--$10 will buy enough red meat to feed the kids for a week
--$7 will buy enough chicken for a week of soup
--$20 will buy enough vegetables and pasta for the week

In conclusion, don’t forget that God’s wrath knows no bounds and He is reading your mind right this second. That’s right, we would be so grateful if you'd just click “donate” to the right there and give us a day’s worth of latte money so everyone can have a Feliz Navidad.

Sincerely, your local nunnery

public love affair

Dear Marlo’s Birthday Dinner,

I did not know what true love was until I met you. Thank you for opening mine eyes.

Provoleta, remember when we didn’t know each other? When you were just being an appetizer of fried cheese and I was doing my thing and our paths never crossed? I now consider those days the Dark Ages. I want to get my PhD in the art of frying cheese and my final thesis will be a book of sonnets dedicated to you.

Oh papas fritas, I’ve known you for a long time, but your face is more beautiful when you crowd out all the table space that would otherwise be dedicated to green vegetables (I used to be really into green veggies, papas fritas, but I’m leaving them for you. I am). You are large, in charge, and ready to party. I respect that.

San Telmo wineries, the consistency with which you have delivered vino tinto to me time and again has not only earned my trust but also my love. You’re cheap, but not in a trashy way, don’t get me wrong. I can’t imagine a dinner without you and don’t even want to think about what it would be like.

Marlo’s Birthday Dinner, these are all side qualities that don’t mean as much to me as the main event: carne a punto. Oh, super rare steak, where do I even begin? You are the size of my head, you are so rare I want to ride you home instead of in a taxi, and remember when you put on that chimichurri sauce and my taste buds wept openly? That was a little embarrassing but worth it because I think I’m in love with you, bife de lomo. I really do.

And just when I thought our chance had passed, you went and saved the best for last! FLAN WITH DULCE DE LECHE that was like unicorns and sunshine leaping directly into our mouths. Fairly certain I saw angels blow kisses onto every delightful spoonful.

Marlo’s Birthday Dinner, at the end of the day, I’m just a girl, standing in front of a massive feast, asking it to love her as much as she loves it. Run, no, roll away with me! We were meant to be!

Un beso,
Laura

last tango in san telmo

Sundays in Buenos Aires would make one wonder whether all 3 million inhabitants are just figments of Argentine imagination; the city is silent, cafes are closed, even the usual rush of cars that defies lane-use and traffic laws seems to be mellowed out.

But if one were to wander into San Telmo, the artsy quarter just south of downtown, Buenos Aires would burst into life again. A vibrant street market is centered on the Plaza Dorrego and trickles out along the brick streets in all directions, winding its way through antique dealers leaning out of their stores, tango dancers who have taken over entire intersections, old men standing on boxes singing their bow-tied hearts out, Rastas selling pipes and dread beads, sheets covered with mate bombillas (some original, some with Homer Simpson's face... how that character became an international icon is totally beyond me), photographers selling prints and bedraggled moms selling the cheap plastic stuff you can find in any city in the world, tourists being loud, tourists being quiet, men pushing carts with popcorn kernels for a quarter, and the sex of Tanghetto pulsating throughout it all.

Buenos Aires comes here for Sunday, and if you don't follow suit, you'll have the whole city to yourself... but would you want it, without all of this?

"Quien quiere bailar?"

relativity, family-style

Alzheimers homes don't smell very good all the time. The conversation isn't always quick-witted (although sometimes it will surprise you). And they can be both wrenchingly lonely and quietly encouraging at the same time. These are all things I thought about as I sat on my grandpa's bed on Saturday, filing his nails and making him eat his sweet potatoes.

My mom's father Eugene is 92 years old and, according to her, "a 7.5 out of 8" on the dementia scale. Generally my mother goes to visit and take care of him alone, which I hate, but she goes cheerfully, which I admire. This weekend, the three of us trekked over together. Part of me thinks I was going to say goodbye to him, and a smaller part is a little hopeful that I was. He just seems to be outliving himself, and it's a difficult thing to watch.

In April, before my sister left to begin her life as a Faux-rean (that sounded better in my head than it looks written down), we went over to spend Grandpa Gene's birthday with him. It was an event that was exceptional only in its unexceptionalism. We sat at a dining room table. We chatted about our day. We laughed and wished birthday wishes for his upcoming year. It was as if we had been catapulted back in time, years ago, when his wife and my grandma was still alive and we sat conversing idly at a table about nothing and everything at once. You know, like families do.

Our food arrived: chicken breasts for us and unrecognizably-chopped-up chicken breast for him. "You've gotta be kidding me," he muttered to himself as he poked at the plate listlessly.

I have to say the following things about my grandpa: he can be one of the most crotchety, cranky people I have ever met, and he is universally popular no matter where he goes. Grace, the sweet Mexican girl who works at the home, came in repeatedly to make sure my grandpa had whatever he wanted. Rather than eating dinner, he drank three hot chocolates in a row, with whipped cream, brought to him by the doting waitress who wanted to make sure everything was perfect for him.

"He's a very special man," Grace grinned affectionately. "I want to be sure to show him extra care. I don't have parents, and I don't know what it's like, to have to take care of someone older."

My dad, as he does at any mention of a life story, tuned in. "Oh no. What happened?"

"They died when I was eight, in a car accident in Mexico." She placed more bread in front of Gene.

"I have five kids of my own now," she smiled bittersweetly, "and I wish they could have known my parents." She left to get more hot chocolate as the three of us sat, a little stunned, feeling the need to observe some silence for her decades-old loss.

Yes, it is difficult to watch someone you love grow old and lose track of the person you once knew. But Grace reminded us that even those things, when viewed correctly, are blessings: my mom still has a dad. We have had a grandfather who, 20 years ago, shaved his mustache so he could kiss us goodnight, and who taught us how to dance and drink McDonalds coffee and play Pavarotti on his record player and take long walks in his apple orchards and cook an egg in the microwave and love your spouse immensely. I'm grateful for everything his years have contained, and especially grateful for the fact that he has gotten so many of them.

keeping time.

I've never worn a watch, but I used to like keeping track of my comings and goings by the expiration dates on milk cartons. It brought me a secret joy to have something as tangible as the spoiling of food as a marker of my time before the next adventure. Watching the days tick down as the extra sharp cheddar in the fridge door got older, little by little, was like a paper-chain countdown in my head.

The cereal in my cupboard now has dates well into November. I grin a little at breakfast when I remember that by the time this cereal is stale, I will already be 7,000 miles away.

I love the little arcane mental quirks that keep us company when no one is looking...

In Portuguese Time, I'm Still 19!

Three years ago on my birthday, I called my mom at midnight to lament, in a panic, the loss of my teenage years. This year, in order to prevent a similarly ugly scene from taking place, Marlo and I packed up and headed to Portugal to take the sting out of the transition to old-ballsdom.

Let me preface this travel tale with the fact that, as we stood at our door, backpacked and ready to go, we made a verbal checklist of necessary items: bikinis, check. Skirts and dresses, check. Money? No check. Right before we walked out the door we realized: WE HAVE NO MONEY. But we left anyway, armed only with our charm and our willingness to eat bread and cheese for days on end.

After a brief stint in Dublin, during which we met a couple of awkward Canadians who explained to us why Guinness is not, in fact, a friendly drink, we spent an agonizing morning coming thisclose to missing our flight to Porto. In the past six months, I missed a flight out of Paris and Marlo missed one to Dusseldorf, so we were appropriately freaked out that we’d repeat the mistake and have to invent an entire week’s worth of adventures so no one in Belfast would ever know we'd never left the island. Fortunately, the travel gods smiled upon us and we were first on our flight. This gave us plenty of time to make friends with our extremely groomed and delightfully feminine “air host” Fergal, whom we took as a good omen for our trip (side note: the other guy was named Fabio. This is not a joke, people are actually named Fabio!).

Important thing to note at this point: Marlo and I, stubbornly insisting that our week would be a 5 day beach holiday during which we predominantly drank sangria in our new bikinis and allowed muscle-bound men to fan us with palm leaves and feed us peeled grapes, were in for an abrupt and unkind awakening when a hostile rain greeted us in Porto. Unfortunately our stubbornness had translated into a ridiculous insistence in packing only “breezy” stuff, meaning we had to sludge around in long dresses and sandals when the weather called for super-traction boots and waterproof tents. We slid around over Porto’s polished tiles for a while before hopping on a bus to Lisbon, crossing our fingers that the beach dreams would not be dashed in the City of Seven Hills...

Interesting Randomer #1: Mar and I commandeered the entire backseat of the bus to sleep on and silently breathed death threats on anyone who would dare join us, the tallest African we had ever seen sat down between us and gestured that his long legs wouldn’t let him sit anywhere else. Fair enough. Joao was from Guinea Bissau, spoke three languages (none of which was English, but one of which was Spanish luckily), worked for USAID, and currently runs a reconciliation program in Guinea Bissau from its base in Lisbon. Our chat was grounded by my limited Spanish vocab related to conflict work, but Joao was our second good omen and kept us good company for the longest bus ride in the world.

(I need to add at this point that whenever I travel, I imagine myself teleporting from city to city rather than taking normal human transport options. A couple of four hour bus rides will nip that habit in the bud no problem and force a girl back to reality: you can’t leave Dublin in the morning and end up on a Portuguese beach by evening. Scientists have proved it impossible. Don’t ask what kind of scientists, it’s just a fact, ok?)

Landing in Lisbon was a test of the kindness of Portuguese strangers (just like any place where clueless American girls pop into… we’re sorry about our politics, but we’re just here to hang out) and they really pulled through in the clutch. Half the city aided in our hostel-location scheme and as soon as we put our bags down, we decided to find the beach for the last few hours of sunlight. The good news is, we found water. The bad news is, we also found Lisbon’s shantytown and had our dinner on the three-inch stretch of “beach” along the river with one bum peeing on a rock behind us, one sleeping in a box, and another getting wasted out of a paper bag ten feet down the line. Needless to say, we felt right at home and jumped into our newest plot for how to save the world: opening a halfway house, preferably in Portugal. When we got home we found a half-nude Australian on our deck, who turned out to be Nick, our new travel buddy. Nick had just returned from hiking to base camp at Mt. Everest, his buddy Dylan just finished a volunteer stint at a Millennium Village in Kenya and they’d decided to meet up in Egypt. The four of us bonded the first day, and our breakfasts in Lisbon usually involved a few hours of drinking coffee, dancing to the Rolling Stones (the middle-aged guy working at the front desk: “Mick Jagger is my adopted father!”), and finding out the life stories of every single person in the hostel.

Interesting Randomer #2: As we wandered the glorious castle overlooking Lisbon, we met a guy selling those little wire toys that monks supposedly make to tell the story of the universe. Henry from Germany was more than happy to delve into an intense conversation with us, focusing heavily on Brazilian domestic policy, Austrian/German/Dutch linguistic idiosyncrasies and cultural anomalies, Hitler’s secret occupation of the castle and how happy he was to find friendly faces. We rediscovered our dreams of busking on European sidewalks until age 40… or at least painting and writing about every city we go to and selling our “art” to survive in rundown hostels.

Our Aussies cooked us dinner the last night in Lisbon (core ingredients: garlic and eye contact), and we made a vat of sangria (really good wine for €1? We’ll take four) and ran around the Alfama*, listened to jazz, and met Eduardo, the most aesthetically appealing Italian/Portuguese guy currently in creation. Drunk Marlo, when realizing our friend Ashley from St. Louis had swooped in for the same kill, launched a tirade verbalizing the “glaringly obvious” fact that Eduardo liked men. Whoever requested sour grapes, your order is up!

*THE ALFAMA: Lisbon’s major earthquake in 1755 destroyed most of the city, aided by the fires that followed it, but a decent-sized area just below the castle survived the destruction and is now the oldest surviving part of Lisbon, and one of the most unreal neighbourhoods I have ever seen. It’s all jagged brimstone, broken down shops, and unique sights and smells. Not to mention the most killer view in the city.

Interesting Randomer #3: Nobuku, a Brazilian Japanese guy who thought Marlo and I were God’s gift to comedy (no, he wasn’t drunk… we don’t think…), laughed uncontrollably at every “joke” we attempted and repeatedly suggested we get our own TV show. I offered Nobuku obscene amounts of money to follow us around as our promoter, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be and we headed out to Porto; having gained two Aussies but not the Brazilian fan club we’d always dreamed of.

*Story paused for a puke break*: An old boyfriend once used the delightful term “vomit chorus” and it has never applied so fully to my life as it did the day we went back to Porto. Food poisoning is a really good way to NOT see a city. On the plus side, however, my stomach has never been so flat. On the down side, our bikini dreams never came true, so no one can verify that. Moving on.

By the time we made it outside, I fell in love with Porto. The four of us went wandering around wine cellars and sampled port, laid in the sun and hiked up and down the steep hills until hunger drove us home. We cooked the boys dinner, discussed African development, and passed out embarrassingly early that night due to our total inability to deal with the heat and early wakeup call the next day. Overall, a pretty anticlimactic ending to the trip that was meant to contain 4 days more beach quotient, 1 day less puke quotient and a freaking ton more muscled men with palm leaves, but what can you do? Our dreams of sun, sand and sangria were only fulfilled by one third, but Portugal… we’ll be back.