To begin, the usual disclaimer: I am pretty terrible at keeping up with this blog. (Sorry, Grandma.) I would say it’s because nothing happens in this sleepy little town, though that’s not true — small wonders every day, new discoveries of flower-covered paths, lots of cow-spottings, late nights with Leffe in friends’ apartments where everyone speaks better English after a few bottles are empty. New recipes discovered while singing badly in my kitchen. Afternoons balanced on the windowsill to catch some sun and watch the cats sunning themselves on the sidewalk.
A few weeks ago our (third) two-week vacation began, and I went in search of the sun. After winding our way through the French countryside with two doctors and a salesman, I stepped out of the BMW into the packed streets of Bordeaux and directly into the arms of one of my closest friends from home, who lives there in a gorgeous airy apartment, and we spent three days eating biscuits and drinking wine and watching Portlandia together while it rained. We talked about the future and the past, and I hugged her a lot, and for a while we sat by the sea. My rain-soaked little heart warmed.
On the Wednesday I navigated the tram system to meet my first in a series of covoiturages to take me to Madrid. Bertrand, sixty years old and his first time driving someone else, was a little stiff at first but once we started talking about the chorus he sang in he came to life. For an hour we talked about their performance of Verdi’s Requiem, and I told him the story of Jewish prisoners singing it in Terezin for their Nazi captors. When he dropped me off at the station in Hendaye, on the border, he awkwardly gave me a hug and told me to come see them sing sometime.
A guardian angel named Katie stopped cleaning the apartment she was cleaning so that she could drive me, a sodden and lost stranger, all around Hendaye in the hopes of finding a bank that would accept my finicky card, and refused to accept any form of payment. I reflected on the kindness of strangers as I dripped on the tram from Hendaye to San Sebastian, across the border, and tried to understand the Catalan announcements. The second covoit was a flowing of Spanish and English, stories about working in a hotel in Donostia, recommendations for Madrid, and a stop for food at a rest stop in the middle of the breathtaking windswept moors of northern Spain.
Successful navigation of the Spanish metro and finding my favorite ginger-haired friend from home and Paris in the hostel and then went out for welcome tapas and sangria with two lovely Brazilians, where we all stumbled through language barriers but managed to laugh a lot anyway. Madrid pulses at night — the energy is tangible, infectious, helped not a little by the cheap and free-flowing beer and vinho tinto. It is a spectacular city. By day we wandered the streets, tried all sorts of pastries, took too many panoramic pictures that didn’t do the place justice. By night we explained the rules of Kings in four different languages, and argued about dress colors at 5 am, and made friends easily just by smiling.
Madrid was especially touching for me because one of my favorite books is largely based there, and so I could finally put colors to place names I’d only imagined before. (Got more than a few suspicious looks for spending too much time outside the Atocha train station.) Some new friends from the hostel, my friend, and I wandered down (after one false start) to the giant Rialto park, where we awkwardly stood in line between two slobbering couples to rent a rowboat. That afternoon may have been one of the more sublime of my year — playing musical chairs in the rowboat, “accidentally” splashing zealous couples, drifting with our eyes closed in the sunshine as strains of a jazz group along the banks married with the sound of water and Spanish everywhere around us. At one point we all very confusedly watched a Jesus impersonator photobomb a baptism. In a huge glass structure, we watched light refract off photo lenses and took a picture all together and tried to frame that moment as much as we could.
After a last night with a friend from a writing camp that I hadn’t seen in six years, tightly packed into one of the oldest bars in Madrid eating ham and watching the dusty bottles gleam, I hopped on an entirely unplanned bus to Lisbon. My original plans for the next few days had fallen through; my friend from Paris had gushed about Lisbon nonstop; and, helpfully, our two hostel friends were both headed that direction. So I borrowed Dave Eggers’s A Hologram for the King, charged up my iPod, and spent 8 hours flying through the Spanish & Portuguese countryside behind two extremely amorous elder people. Spain is scrubby, craggy, and the towns we passed through were sepia-colored and had bony churches and at one point I saw a giant tomato on a pole in the middle of the intersection, because why not. Signs on the autovia warned us about horses and tractors. We passed roofless houses, walls tattooed with graffiti, and black warnings against dictators and corruption.
My first night in Lisbon we drank cheap wine on the rooftop of our (stellar) hostel, and my Australian friend from Madrid and I went out for dinner and learned Nepalese for “thank you” from the waiter whom we let believe we were married. We talked late into the night, about life and travel and how we should live. He left early the next morning, and after a long sleep I went out by myself to explore Lisbon — which meant I went directly to the nearest coffee kiosk, along the wide river, where I drank a double espresso and a Portuguese waiter sang along to Katy Perry. I tried to practice my three-word Portuguese vocabulary to impress my waiter, who thankfully ended up speaking perfect English so I didn’t have to embarrass myself too much.
In the afternoon I went up to Sintra, which is where I could believe in magic. Sintra is a UNESCO World Heritage site that looks like it was conjured out of the earth — the Moorish castle, the green trees everywhere, the colored houses and the breathtaking views no matter where you turn.
I (foolishly) believed that you could walk to the top, but after an hour of uphill walking had to concede defeat. I followed a garden path all the way down again, discovering a greenhouse that looked like it had been built by fairies, and three roosters who were indignant at my intrusion. I bought a pastel de nata as a present to my calf muscles and listened to a man sing high and sweet as the sun lit up his fingers on the guitar.
That evening I met the perfect-English waiter with a kiss tattooed on his neck, and we went to a Portuguese cafeteria where I understood none of the words but devoured all the food and he chatted with the waitress in this lovely, almost savage, language. We wandered the city, still colorful even at night, where you could hear fado straining out of some restaurants, and we finished a dark bottle of wine on stone steps and I slowed us down to take pictures of all the gorgeous graffiti. There’s nothing like exploring with a local. He took me up to a “viewpoint” to watch the city swallow the sun. Sunset evenings in Lisbon might be the best part of Portugal. In the hostel, we were offered free glasses of wine at sunset, spectacular colors washing over everything, chatting in different languages and different accents, easy with each other in the way that you are with people whose time in your life is naturally limited.
During the day, the sun soaked me and I got to explore. I took the ferry to the other side of the vast river, and wandered alone along the coast and had a completely unintelligible conversation with two old Portuguese ladies, where all of us just ended up pointing and chortling since no one understood anything. I spent a long late afternoon on the beach of Caiscais, watching children chase pigeons and wandering among the boats, and on the train back got to see another charring sunset over the sea. Why anyone would ever choose to leave Lisbon is beyond me.
And in the inbetween I napped on sunny balconies and played with dogs and tried to lose myself in the city. I missed my first flight because of my apparently poor estimation of travel time, but I wasn’t that broken up about it. So when I finally had to leave, it was after a breakfast in the sun and a long time spent looking over the city, and after many, many mental promises to myself that I would come back.
And now there’s only about a month left before this adventure is over, and the next one begins. Sometimes I wonder how much I’m really understanding these places that I get to go — they’re bite-sized at most, and I want to know all the flavors. In a dream world I would never have to leave Lisbon, in a dream world I could one day move to Madrid or to Vienna or Zagreb or any one of these wonderful places that I’ve dipped my toe into. I don’t like the idea of a perpetual traveler, of skimming through places to check them off a list. I want the marrow of the places that I go.
It will be very hard to leave Europe. But I suppose I’m lucky in that my next adventure is already on its way, and moving to rural Africa will no doubt have all of the challenges and experiences and moments of wonder that I am hungry for.
So for now, reveling in the spring that is coming to France — learning as much as I can from my students before I leave them — looking forward to barbecue and corn on the cob and driving again when I get home. And already making plans for camping along the Portuguese coast. Why ever stop moving?
P.S. cheers to YOU for making it all the way through this monster of a post.
Emily Wolfteich 
