Where to Buy Korean Food in Barcelona

Before reading this post, watch my vlog about the Korean supermarket in Barcelona to see how to get there, what the store looks like, and some of the products I get when I'm there:



Before I came to Barcelona, one of my main complaints about Lisbon was always the lack of Asian foods, products, and stores. Lisbon has a lot of Chinese immigrants and, as a result, a handful of Chinese grocery stores, but if you want anything outside of the Chinese sphere of food, you'll be pretty hard-pressed to find it in the Portuguese capital. After much sleuthing, I discovered that Vietnamese food—a staple of where I grew up—essentially does not exist at all in Portugal, there is very little Thai food, the selection of Japanese food is sparse and westernized, and Korean food is limited to a small number of products imported by the Chinese grocery stores and one (1!) food court with an experimental Asian cafe that offers two (2!) Korean dishes. All to say nothing of the rest of Asia, which as you can imagine is sorely lacking.

So as I was preparing to come to Barcelona, I made a note to take advantage of the city's greater size and more international culture and find all the foods I love and lacked on the other side of Iberia. There is just one Korean grocery store in the city, a bit to my disappointment, but it offers a complete selection of ingredients you need to make your favorite Korean dishes, including some pre-made dishes, but more on that in a second. There are other, more general Asian that have some of the same products in the center as well, so you're never too much for want of options. It is not, however, the same as beloved Hmart or Pacific Ocean Market (in Colorado, where I'm from) of home, gigantic supermarkets filled to the brim with generous hours. Where those supermarkets are more comparable to local Alcampo or Carrefour in size, instead, Han Kuk Market and the myriad other Asian grocery stores are more comparable to smaller-format stores like Lidl and convenience stores, on the smaller end.

Getting back to the Korean market itself, though, the products follow some trends. Everything is labeled in Spanish somewhere on the product packaging, but if you don't know what you're looking at and can't read Korean to figure it out, you might have a harder time identifying things than you would in English, as much can be lost in translation. This can be particularly true with the pre-made products, like kimchi, which are often just transliterated from the original Korean. The products themselves also tend to be Seoul-centric in origin: for example, the soju is exclusively Seoul soju, so if you're looking for things you know from other regions, talk to the workers and see if they can import them for you to the store, or take the Seoul alternative. The workers themselves are friendly and speak good Spanish, but I haven't talked with them in English so I can't confirm if they also speak it. If you're ever in doubt, they'll happily help you with what you need as you're shopping through the store. When you pay with a card, you'll be given the option by the card system to pay in euros or your home currency, which can be helpful to avoid conversion fees.

The homemade kimchi tends to be medium-high in spiciness and on the fresher side of fermentation, but they have many different kinds and amounts you can buy. I've seen regular kimchi (baechu kimchi) in small (around 300g) and large (around 850g) boxes, cubed radish kimchi (kkakdugi), and many others each time I've gone. It's well-made and tastes good, but keep in mind that it's fresher than you may be used to if you eat it home-made and let it ferment more! They charge per kilo, so if you want a little more or a little less, don't forget to let them know.

So to wrap it up, my summary: it's not Hmart, but it'll do in a pinch to satisfy your cravings for Korean food at home. Alimentación Coreana Hankuk can be found on Carrer del Marquès de Sentmenat, 91 just a short walk away from metro station Entença (L5).

What is Home to a Traveler?

I have travelled, if not extensively, at least an appreciable amount around Europe now, enough to have a sense of cultural preferences, things I like about traveling generally, things I dislike about traveling, and where I could or should plan out my list of next places to visit for the first time. I’ve reached a point of getting to know the countries of Western Europe in particular to such an extent that I’ve seen three different types of places emerge: the places I love and could easily see myself living in, where I feel in tune with the culture and (probably) speak the language; the places I like to visit, but don’t appreciate on a profound enough level to consider moving there under normal circumstances; and everywhere else, from indifference to active hostility. What is it about the places in the first group that makes them different?

My first reaction is to say that it’s a gut instinct, that you just experience it, a certain feeling whether upon arrival or after a short time spent in a place. You connect with the particular energy of a city when you enter it and just know that it’s right for you. That, however, is not too satisfying to the inquisitive person asking why? So I’ll elaborate on it with a little bit about each of the three places I’ve come to accept as such and why.

1. Lisbon

Lisbon is home. It is the city I actually call home, where I have my legal residence, where all most of my possessions reside, and where I study and (look for) work. It got to be that way by accident, but I made a conscious decision to come back time after time, because it has a very familiar mixture of provincialism and cosmopolitanism that I connected with quickly coming from Denver, with the advantage of an extremely mild southern European climate that doesn’t know or understand snow. Lisbon has many layers despite its small size; it is strikingly beautiful at a glance but a further look into the nitty-gritty of it reveals plenty of ugly faults. It’s a city where walking the streets gives a strong sense of opportunity, a sort of “what if?” that I resonate with, seeming to always spend my time wondering more about the future than living in the present.

2. Paris

I have often described Paris as akin to visiting relatives: it’s a home you can always go back to, but too much time in it at once gets frustrating. Once you’ve taken your time to tourist your way about the city, it opens up different faces of itself to you in neighborhoods you wouldn’t have had a reason to visit if you wanted to see any of the innumerable landmarks, museums, or other points of interest to visitors. It’s less expensive than the touristic side of the city can make it out to be, and has just as much of a diversity of people and lifestyles as a city of so many millions ought to. I learned French from an early age and get on quite naturally well with French culture; I’ve never particularly experienced the supposed snootiness or arrogance of Parisians the way they’re famed to be. Quite the contrary, I have made many close friends who constitute a social base that lets me feel at ease and at home in the city of lights.

3. Barcelona

Barcelona combines the things I like most about Paris and Lisbon in one city while being a microcosm of political issues that I study academically. I find the city easy to access and not lacking any of the creature comforts that I am accustomed to from the other side of the Atlantic, though linguistically it is still more inaccessible than Paris or Lisbon. As a linguist of sorts, the challenge of diving into a new linguistic surrounding is a positive point, as life feels more dynamic when everything is a discovery in how to go about the routines of life differently. Barcelona is less overwhelming than Paris and larger enough than Lisbon not to feel like an overgrown village, with modern and well-functioning public transport alongside a pedestrian-friendly footprint. Had it not been for Lisbon, Barcelona would probably have become my “other” destination outside of Paris.

Despite being well-known and large cities with considerable touristic volume (less so in the case of Lisbon), all of these cities have something that works for my rhythm of being. They’re different from the places I simply like but wouldn’t live in because in each there’s a personal element—be it the cultural similarities of Lisbon and my hometown or the southern European cosmopolitanism of Barcelona—that distinguishes them from the crowd. I’m inclined toward southern Europe perhaps because my linguistic knowledge propels me there, but also because over the long of time I seem to have adapted plenty of its mannerisms considered typical. Quite the opposite is true of many people I know, yet when comparing notes on why the conclusions are much the same: the places you could call home might be different from where you came, but they resemble it (or are diametrically opposed to it; the principle of side of the same coin applies) enough that their choice only seems natural.

Where would you call home if not for where you’re at now, why?

The Travel Bug

A lot is written about traveling, so much so that it has its own genre. I have been loth to define exactly which genre of writing I'm pegging myself into on this blog, with the idea that tendencies can emerge that I can hone in on gradually. If I put myself into a box, my natural instinct is to figure out any way possible to get out of and destroy it. Yet I do my fair share of travel writing on this blog, lifestyle-ish, travel-related, personal to a certain point, all as it may be, and today I wanted to share with you some of the things that motivate that nomadic itch that I get that seems to be a fundamental part of me.

I read a flippant comment on social media the other day about how people who feel the need to travel all the time and get away are insecure in themselves and maybe if they just calmed down and did something about their problems they would feel fine staying put. That graphic, in nicely-done typography, set in a relatively well-stylized overlay as is common these days, really stuck with me, not the least of which being because it came from someone who spent the better part of a year living abroad, traveling frequently, and professedly enjoys the experience herself. While I don't disagree that traveling to escape from problems is a bad thing, it was such a strong message of needing to stay put and that it was shameful to leave your rightful (in this case, original or current) place. The negativity was biting and the message was less of a call not to pretend like every indebted Eat, Pray, Love excursion is going to solve all of your inner problems and more of a call to make people feel bad about themselves. I don't support that.

My personal story is one of a persistent resilience in the face of any mental or otherwise personal problems that I come across, and that makes me a bit of an odd fellow. So the message of working on myself before seeking out other things is not entirely lost on me, but I can only appreciate it from a distance of knowing what the end result is like, and not of having had to spend lengthy amounts of time in the trenches. I am quite fortunate in this regard.

Yet traveling, for me, is a world entirely outside of my problems, it doesn't change my ups and downs, nor does it cause or affect them in pointed, specific ways. Traveling and moving to a new country has allowed me to simply experience that aspect of being human in different places and allowed me to gain the perspective of other cultural responses to the same nagging questions, the same doubts, the same jubilation, the same loneliness of establishing yourself in new surroundings. Traveling, fundamentally, is just the act of existing in an unfamiliar, or even a familiar but different, place in the world from where you are most comfortable. Everywhere else, whether it be one city or multiple places, is home. Making the decision to travel, whether by necessity, for work, spontaneously, frequently, or infrequently, is a decision to go outside of your personal comfort and accept that you will be thrust into new patterns of thinking, that you will have to deal with all of the frustrating things that accompany the moments that make us marvel and go in the first place. Not everyone is out to have an Eat, Pray, Love experience, but those who do need not, by any means, be shamed for it—much less from others who have exerted their own right and ability to do precisely that. Not all those who get away each weekend to discover somewhere new are doing so because they have problems to confront, and not all those who stay in a static world of a 100 kilometer radius their whole lives have successfully managed to become paragons of mental health.

The travel bug strikes a lot of people. Most people, I would offer, probably have experienced it to some degree. Others, like me, seem to have been born with it. My motivation stems from a curiosity about all things, new or not, and the desire to understand them better. My motivation stems from wanting to see aspects of the human world that are not available in my American, anglo-centric place of origin. My motivation stems from the pursuit of sensory input, for the pure creative aspect of it, be it aesthetic, gastronomic, or otherwise. What is yours?

Barcelona Takeaways

While I'm still editing and posting Barcelona vlogs (though I do have other videos coming up after that!), I thought it appropriate that I should give you something a little bit more substantive about my thoughts on traveling to the Catalan capital.

1. I have never been to a city with so many French Bulldogs in my life. Why does everyone have a Frenchie in Barcelona? I don't know, but they're adorable and they are everywhere. Everywhere.

2. Despite (technically, obviously) being a part of Spain and everyone being able to speak Spanish, Catalan is the obvious preference and if you attempt to speak it in favor of Spanish, people brighten up a lot toward you. Capital of Catalonia goes without saying.

3. Without throwing my opinion on the matter into the ring, there's a lot of tacit support for Catalonian independence, whether it be flags or posters on storefronts that support the perhaps-upcoming referendum on precisely that. There is not a single neighborhood that lacks it, nor did I observe any part of town that was visibly toward the other end of the spectrum.

4. Barcelona has something of a reputation for being party central (though pales in comparison to Ibiza), though the atmosphere seems more mixed. The swarms of people around the city on New Year's Eve who didn't count down to midnight, didn't shout at midnight, didn't do much of anything except be present is a good symbolic representation of this. It is certainly no Brazilian city.

5. Tourist attractions are astonishingly expensive when you have to pay for them, but the city as a whole doesn't come close to the astronomical costs of Paris or London or Scandinavia. It's pleasantly accessible if you're not there just for the sake of touristing. Or even if you are, and don't like to just see the same churches and museums that everyone goes to on every pit stop of every famous large city.

6. Catalan is, as a language, not just some peculiar dialect of Spanish. It's different, and it's confusing to the ears just as much as the eyes if you have never encountered it before but otherwise understand Romance languages fairly well.

7. Gaudí was probably a hallucinogenics addict, or so it seems when you look at his buildings popping out of the otherwise conservative urban forms surrounding them.

8. The effects of the crisis are not immediately visible. There are very few shuttered storefronts, the shopping centers are all full of people buying things, and countless different banks are absolutely everywhere. It's quite the opposite of the situation in Lisbon.

9. Legal holidays are taken very seriously, so if you didn't know or forgot that there were three days of holidays in a row and didn't stock up on food, you're going to have a hard time not eating out and spending a fortune. Even the supermarkets in shopping centers close. There are always small immigrant-run convenience stores open to flout that general rule, though.

10. The best part about Barcelona is getting out of Barcelona, because you have accessibility to everything nearby. Mountains, beaches, two other countries, Valencia, it's all within a couple of hours at the very most.

Hitting the Road Again

I apologize for the lack of a post, video, or anything else either Tuesday or Saturday (my tentative new schedule for content), so no excuses about it, and here we go.

Many people travel for some, if not all, holidays. My family and I never really did that when I was growing up, except for the Disney World trip on one of my first spring breaks that instead turned into us going yearly to visit relatives in an altogether different state. This year, however, being my first entirely on my own and coming from a different place in the world as well, I examined my options and thought about where I would want to and could go. I decided on Barcelona because I wanted to visit somewhere I hadn't previously, somewhere I had enough friends that I could stay with them and see the city from a more personalized perspective, it's one of the lowest-cost flight destinations from Lisbon, and because it's not nearly so cold during the winter as other destinations. Sorry, Paris, but I hate snow and temperatures that are in the single digits Celsius. So I'll be going for not quite three weeks, including spending New Year's Eve in the Catalan capital.

The idea that has popped up with one of my friends is to rent a car—it's apparently a cheap endeavor in Spain, so long as you return the car still in Spain—and get to know all of the environs of Catalonia, the region being sufficiently compact in size to take the time to drive around without spending a fortune or necessarily needing to spend the night away from home. If this happens, I'm hoping to also be able to see Valencia, since I'm unsure of whether I'll have the interest or equivalent amount of time to spend in Spain again, let alone appreciate it. I'm just not that roused by Spanish culture, the language, or the collective history, to be frank. I wasn't particularly moved by Madrid when I went to it, although it's a fine place, and that's a good summation of my feelings toward the country. My interest is primarily in regions that have stronger conceptions of independent identities, like Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. But then we would be getting into the social politics of what Spain is as a unified country and other things I'd rather not discuss on this blog, at least at the moment. Suffice it to say, I have tended to have more interest in other places. So that being said, the opportunity to take some time and really get to know a region of the country is a welcome adventure, because it is out of the ordinary for me and will be something I am entirely unfamiliar with; I speak no Catalan and have difficulties understanding it in writing, I understand Spanish just fine when spoken or written but do not speak it, and we have the aforementioned cultural reference regarding the country itself.

That idea is similar, coincidentally, to an idea that I've had in mind for a long time but for some very obvious reasons have never had the opportunity to do: renting a car and doing a road trip, Iberian-style. I would love to be able to get in a car and get to know much more of Portugal, go through Galicia, see the Basque Country, and beyond. Portugal is somewhat surprising in being a place that really requires a vehicle to see and do everything on offer, alas. That trip will be quite some time in the making, until then, Catalonia will be a sort of test run.

So in the spirit of moving around and seeing and doing new things, of course I've taken my blogging and videos into account. For you, the half-dozen or so readers I get consistently, I have a couple of questions: do you prefer reading posts or watching videos? If you prefer writing, how would you like to see Barcelona incorporated on the site? If you prefer videos, would you be interested in watching vlogs from Barcelona? Let me know in a comment, a personal message, an email, a tweet, whatever way you feel like contacting me.

Portuguese Grannies

Often I will take my headphones out of my ears for the sake of listening to the transient noise around me, the murmurs of conversations happening in a now mostly understood language, the hum of cars going by, and so on, for the sake of feeling somewhat more connected to my surroundings and getting a grasp on the reality of everyday life lest I feel incredulous that I am experiencing what is happening presently. I am something of a natural eavesdropper, always fascinated to hear the banal details of peoples' everyday conversations, the intrigue of all the women that the bros around are chasing after or the nothingness of milestones accomplished by young mothers' firstborn children. When I'm not disparaging them for bumbling around, old ladies seem in particular to have the most interesting insights, and as I was sitting down to have a pastry and a coffee one day, observing two chatting grannies, it led me to reflect.

What I realized in that moment is that I have a fascination with the idea of what it would be like to have a Portuguese granny—or really familial roots of any sort here, to be sure. A granny in particular, though, because the matriarch of the family seems so rooted in Western culture as the maiden of all particularly good memories of childhood, a fount of sagacity for our young adult selves, a dose of perspective lost in decades before our generation, and occasionally, unmatched wit.

So as I observed the grannies sitting together, friends of many years, or perhaps family, having a snack and chatting about among themselves and the young café attendant, the thought struck me that I had never fully considered the idea of cultural roots and the formation of a cultural self. It is a concept that stems in large part from the family matriarch for the simple fact of her having passed on her cultural understanding, language, cooking skills (or lack thereof, in some cases), and so on—all of the things that combine to give us a sense of who we are in relation to the place we are from and why it is like that.

They do not speak English, and a naive part of me still has a bit of a shocked reaction to an upbringing in a less connected world where my own language was not so widespread, the influence of my native culture that spread along with it so prevalent. The grannies, then, in their own way, offer an insight into what it means to be a part of a certain culture, they retain the knowledge and manner of the path taken by the country to establish itself in the current age and provide for the younger generations in the best ways seen fit for the task.

As an outsider, the fascination comes from wondering what it would be like to be a native member of the society you've voluntarily chosen to stay in, what it would be like to have the language you spend half your time speaking in but in which you still don't feel fully comfortable, to have relatives to pick you up at the airport after a trip or people to visit in a different part of the country when holiday season comes around and all of the activities and traditions that come along with that. It is also the fascination, in the inverse, of wondering what kind of an impact residing for so long in a foreign country will have on the same process you have gone through in your native country; how the act of acclimating and acculturating might somehow twist and bend, or perhaps mold and transform your own "cultural DNA", if such a thing truly exists.

Yes, I speak perfect English, but what of the day that comes when someone tells me they thought I was Portuguese for the sake of my speech and not appearance, or the Portuguese person assumed to be British for the authenticity of their accent and various mannerisms? There seems to be a fluidity about culture for those who have stepped outside of their own, who take on multiple cultural identities in a way that those who stay in their home cities and countries do not seem to have.

Given the expectations of those left behind, I am left to reconcile that I will just have to continue spying on grandma at the bakery, pondering my own thoughts while my own family is somewhere else quite far, doing and speaking of equivalent things, each in their own particular manner, pertinent as they are to where they are and where they are from, as though they truly belong there.

New York

I'm not really sure how I managed to make it so long without getting to New York, that epicenter of cosmopolitan travel, that city of hopes and dreams in the eyes of so many, that almost mythical "it" factor that few succeed in describing well; New York City, the ultimate destination for someone as nominally well traveled as I seem to have become. Yet I hadn't, and so upon invitation to spend a few days in the city with accommodations accounted for, I couldn't turn up the offer.

Owing to its size, New York is many things to many people, and there are as many opinions about how the city is, what is good or bad about it, and what you should do there as there are people there at any given moment. It is the realization of the cliched American melting pot, a break from the comparative homogeneity of cities elsewhere in the country from east to west, a reminder that we can somehow manage to still be American even without segregating ourselves into cul-de-sacs and sports utility vehicles. New York is perhaps jarring to the content suburbanite but feels immediately familiar to the aspiring urbanite, the young professional priced out of the exact center of his home town but who passes most of his time there anyway. New York is your home town's downtown on steroids, regardless of the borough. It seems to never end, and what you make of that says as much about your background as of the city itself.

What is striking about New York is precisely that it is not striking; the immediate familiarity gives it a sheen of Anywhere, USA coating the sidewalks, the potholes, the peculiar beggars hollering down the streets, the tables of small and pretentious Manhattan restaurants that serve mediocre food. In fact, there is nothing remarkable about New York except that it is a city that makes an art of compartmentalizing, a place where you are free and have the resources to do and be whatever you would like at any moment you would like to, so long as you know what that is or at least have a decent reason for doing so. I suspect many of those who don't end up liking the city never figured out why they were there in the first place, they just expected New York to happen for them.

New York is a fine place to visit as a foreign tourist, but is designed in a way meant to be utilized and enjoyed to the maximum by Americans, newfound or taken for granted as birthright. It is not a museum of a city, the love at first sight that comes with the decorative lattices of Paris or the avant-garde edginess of Berlin. No, New York envelops you and lets you digest it before you decide what to think of it, before you decide what your purpose for being there is. New York will spit you out if you come to lack that purpose, moving onto the hoards of starry-eyed newcomers eager to take your place in it. The city is not boiled down into a Disneyfied garden, instead you are expected to know where you are going before you go there, right down to the paucity of signage in the subway. It is the quintessence of American dystopia, the idea we all seem to buy into of stark individualism and aggressive money-chasing while on the same hand forcing the less stellar reality into an unavoidable collective. It's fine dining on every cuisine you can think of and twenty minute waits for your subway train to arrive to take you to your underpaying job in a different borough. It's two-faced and unapologetic about that. The magic of New York, it seems, lies in its brash disregard for any imposed sort of order.

Your Train Will Depart Shortly

So it is that I find myself having departed what I have come to refer to as the terra lusófona, the "Portuguese-speaking world", for want of my experiences being limited exclusively to Portuguese people, regardless of the fact that the time spent is, in fact, in Portugal.

I arrived in France, Paris to be more exact, less than 6 hours after finishing the process of packing my bags, loading all roughly 55 kg of luggage into a small car, bidding goodbye those in the old apartment I actually got along with, rushing to check in for my flight, and managing to get through Lisbon's airport security in approximately four minutes. Partly because I left much of my packing to the last minute, and partly out of concern for the weight of my luggage, I had to leave many things behind in Lisbon, left with as amigas at home or in a bag for me to reclaim from a different friend when I return (god willing) in the fall. Emblematic of everything, but actually of nothing, this post will not be a droning elaboration of melancholy, how I feel my life is fractured, or how I somehow left a part of myself in Lisbon. I've expressed all of those sentiments before.

No, instead, what actually has happened is that I haven't had any time to stop and strangle myself in my thoughts, to be overly sad about those left behind, to ruminate about the future, or anything of that sort. The primary thing I've been preoccupied with is the state of my bank accounts, horrifyingly low as they seem, but that's a matter best left off of this blog. I arrived to Paris and schlepped my heavy luggage through the RER, falling down from the unbalance that comes from exhaustion while trying to get my bags off the train and continue along to the metro to get to my friend's apartment. I managed to arrive with surprisingly little difficulty, despite the Parisian metro lacking much by way of assistance for those with baggage or disabilities (the same thing, by the view of some), only to receive the details of a train I would need to catch to Nantes just a few hours later in the afternoon. I was so effectively drunk from exhaustion that I forgot to pack underwear to take with me for the following two days, a very sexy reminder to be perhaps better organized in the future. The point of all of this is that my time is currently being spent so very much in the moment that I find myself doing nothing in particular much at a time, always seeing someone or doing something at the last minute and without hesitations or regard for how it will look in retrospect.

This is the most important lesson from the close of the spring stint in Lisbon, the idea that one must quite simply shed all preconceptions and accept that things happen to much of an extent the way they will happen, without need of being forced or thinking about them too much. Wrapping my head around this concept has not been an easy process, and to say that it was a particularly festive spring, full of merriment and gaiety is to speak utter nonsense. It has been difficult. I have gone through the (admittedly cinematic, at times unnecessarily dramatic) experience of letting go of love from a distance, of losing my social circle and my previously established notions of sociability for an extended period, experienced more of the regrettable poverty that the country finds itself in, and even the weather, as if to say fuck you express its solidarity, has been abnormally awful this year. I am not painting the full picture, as there have been moments of being up as well as down, but the trend was much more downward this spring than upward, as it had been a year ago.

I feel much more at ease as I do what I'm doing in Paris this time around than I did in March, perhaps for the simple fact of having digested all of what happened leading up to now. I managed to finish a book I had been reading for over a year and moved onto another. I am speaking both French and Portuguese without lowering my level or forgetting too much of either one. I have been simply enjoying things to the maximum extent that I can, because perhaps at last that is where I am supposed to be, enjoying my actual vacation for what it is. The sense of calm that had come over me has transformed into a persistent, even insistent tide of good energy which is allowing me to focus my creative energies and think more about the things I want for myself in the future and how to realize them. I'll write a different blog post about that.

I'll miss Lisbon, but I left lacking a particular sense of sadness or melancholy for leaving. That city has become so utterly familiar to me that when I walk around it, it just feels like home. I feel a certain command of the streets, regardless of whether I know them, the kind that only comes from when you have so utterly absorbed somewhere into your sense of being that it is forever a place of home for you. Even my Portuguese has become something I could confidently call fluent, if on the lower rungs of the relatively subjective scale of fluency. I have no fear of chit-chatting with baristas or waiters when ordering food, I do and get what I want when I want it, and I no longer translate things into English in my head. Those left behind will either be there when I intend to be back, or are good enough friends that I have full confidence that I will see them again in the future, in some other new place worth exploring. Até mais, Lisboa.

Seasonal Sentiments, or Move Along Now, Plenty to See Here

Spring seems to be dying hard in Portugal this year, as yet another mixed week of shitty rainy and chilly days thrown in with sunny and hot days worthy of going to the beach and the month at last being June has come to pass. For my own sake, I hope the warm weather comes to stay, as I have been banking on being able to wear the tank tops I decided to purchase and am being driven progressively neurotic in the same way that the weather itself needs a Xanax.

As to the actual content of this post, a brief conversation recently with a friend put into glistening perspective the very real fact that, indeed, someone else always has worse problems, and that personal blogs have the tendency to be navel-gazing whiny introspection on the non-issues that seem like such big deals to the audiences we all seem to lack. I try to make light of that in this blog but have the circle-fulfilling awareness that I end up doing the same thing as I have just disdained, writing as I do to bitch complain about things when and in the manner in which I do. Alas.

Yet as my time in Portugal this time around winds to its overwrought conclusion, the main impression I'm left to digest is that this spring in particular has been marked by difficulties more than great progress, a consistently muddy patch of winding road. Each epoch is different and needs to be, and so it has happened that everything seems to have been processed through a filter of conflict and resolution this spring, that being the theme to all aspects of the most important things going on in my life. It has been a time to take a break from the imposed, if fleeting, institutional order to life that college represented and dig into myself and the root of my character and how I can transition from having an external structure to the way my life is run to having to create that structure and order for myself in the actions I choose to undertake and the direction in which life will head now that the fundamental building blocks have been at last put into place. Not only in an academic sense, but in the nature of my relationships with others as well–the cozy bubble of undergraduate life being what it is, social upheaval has been quite natural to the overall uprooting I have felt over the course of these months.

There have been ups to accompany the downs, although admittedly the downs seem to have taken the more dominant share of things. I have learned to desire the United States at the same time as my Portuguese has at last become conversational, if not on the cusp of some kind of fluency. Living with someone who has come to be a good friend has also showed me that the tensions of living with friends can sometimes boil over into incidents that may not be reparable. I have felt liberated and free to do to my heart's content what I choose on my own path at the behest of no other while spending months reeling from the manner in which a very profound connection and relationship has all but shattered beyond repair, and certainly beyond recognition. The necessity of all of these things happening as they are and have is becoming increasingly clear the closer to being in retrospect they become, yet I am still not there, and as such the processing lag continues to be a persistent stressor much as any of the other things left unmentioned here do as well. I may have finally chewed through what I bit off, but my jaw is sore.

On Life as a Gringo

There is an irritating but persistent manner about Portuguese people that due to the fact that I have (somewhat) blonde hair and an accent, I must not speak Portuguese very well and need to speak in English to do very easy things such as repeating the fact that yes, I really did say that I just want a coffee, stop making me repeat myself, thank you. It is not for want of talking loudly enough or enunciating myself clearly, it is as simple as the idea that those two things combine—especially, nay, to a degree of magnitude more so as the summer months approach and tourists begin to arrive en masse—to form the metaphorical equivalent of a neon sign on my forehead that flashes "Gringo!" every time I open my mouth. It's not that I mind speaking English, to be sure, but it's an obviously disrespectful assumption made automatically even while I am speaking perfectly decent Portuguese. Sometimes I quite simply did not hear what they said, others I was not paying attention. Sometimes I am bewildered by the fact that they didn't seem to catch the simple thing I ordered, others I am just annoyed by the useless necessity of repeating myself. Mostly it isn't personal and it would be more courteous to repeat what was said in the language we had otherwise been using. This is something perhaps more grating the longer I spend here and the ever more banal such interactions become, in which I can not lay any legitimate claim to having "off days" that would preclude me from being able to function in the world of food or other service even to the point of bantering somewhat. I may be lazy, but the language, at least to that extent, is all up there in the 'ol cabeça. Similarly, I often hear comments like "oh, how do you know so much Portuguese, do you use Google Translate?", "you look a little red today, did you go to the beach?", and so on.

It is a manifestation of a cultural insecurity, the collective doubt as to why someone would want to bother learning Portuguese here in the first place, much less spend an extended period of time here, doubt that someone who doesn't look like the prototypical Generic Portuguese Person speaks their language because the country is small, doubt that this person conforms to cultural norms as a result, doubt that this person is more than just another grating fair-skinned, lighter-haired insensitive tourist. I have never experienced anything similar anywhere in France or francophone regions of Europe except when in groups of several people where the language being spoken was English, there they opt instead to simply repeat themselves or explain themselves in a different manner. I suppose the weather makes up for it.

Cultural Identification

One of the hardest things to come out of the experience of studying abroad during my undergradutate career and living as a non-committed adult in Europe again thereafter has been the concept of reconciling what exactly the purpose of traveling this far and spending such prolonged periods of time away from my home country is. Coming from a country so large in which it is possible to live without considering the existence, much less the differences of, other countries and customs, to living on a smaller continent with a multitude, to a great order more, of cultural identities and differences is a lesson in what exactly an American cultural identity is and can be. To put it more simply, regional differences aside in the United States, there is a certain strength in the connected and continual nature of American culture throughout the entire country, and it is possible to grow up in the United States without perceiving that you belong to any specific culture whatsoever; the "default" exists so widespread around that it is easy to overlook how it is unique relative to others. A good example of this is the way in which we mistakenly tend to believe that our standardized accent, the "neutral" American accent featured in most news media and without extreme variation in large swathes of the country, is in fact "accent-free". Nowhere does this seem more obviously untrue than outside of that native context, in other words, in a place where what is taught (if not used in common practice) is a different variety of English. Relative to myself, as it were, is a creeping sense of assuredness in myself and my place on foreign soil.

I have spent a lot of time trying to "become European" by way of transforming my appearance and mannerisms so that at first glance I could be mistaken for a generic person from an unidentified European country, usually ascertained as from the north or east, and to a large extent that has worked. More importantly, though, this has been as an attempt to overshadow that which distinguishes me as obviously American. When I speak either French or Portuguese, I speak with good accents, noticeably foreign but hard to pin down as to their origins; I spend much time training myself to hear and emulate the sounds of each language both because I'd like not to sound like a philistine and because I find it one way of acknowledging that I make an effort to assimilate myself into my surroundings. Yet despite all of these things, my Americanness persists, and bit of it trickle down even so far as into my accent — the way I vocalize vowels tends to be more open and approximated than native French or Portuguese really allow — and it doesn't take much time to divine where I come from upon meeting me. Yet the reflection that has grown on me in my most recent months here has been to more fully own and embrace those things which make my American self come through. I have long since shed any pretensions of "becoming European", but what has happened in a more accelerated manner recently has been an acceptance of my role as The American within my social circles and managing the expectations that come with that against the reality of who I am when presented with the prospect of meeting new people.

Contrary to what we tend to fear when going abroad, my overwhelming experience has been that of interest and excitement in my cultural background as opposed to conceptions of ignorance and assumptions of folly. As opposed to sharp criticism, I find much more friendly comparison, regardless of where people come from. Instead of needing to exchange my culture for a new one, shedding the past and transforming myself into something new, the essence of what I am writing here is that I have come to realize a multicultural existence in which I am obviously foreign in any country other than my own, but my personal background is closely linked to a multitude of cultures, languages, and customs, and that is what I have to contribute regardless of where I am. It seems so simple once you reach a conclusion, doesn't it?

Fiefs at Their Core

Each day I spend in Paris is ultimately comfortable and I feel naturally at ease with myself and my surroundings, not to mention the social element involved. But it's gotten me thinking about how in some ways, I feel split between three quite distinct places and the circumstances that surround them. My home by birth and raising is Denver, and it is there in which I feel the most naturally at ease socially, as though what I do and the friends with whom I do it come naturally and with such ease that I think very little about it. I am firmly based in a social manner there, and my closest friendships and most tumultuous love affairs have happened there. Lisbon in certain ways is analogous for me to Denver, with the distinction that it represents a certain exertion of agency in my surroundings and a greater intellectual and spiritual effort to allow myself to adapt and become a part of my surroundings. What I have done by birthright in Denver has come to happen for me by choice in Lisbon, and the choice to call Lisbon home has had a profound impact on how I see myself as well as the trajectory of my future; the connection I have established with the city weighs on my considerations for how I should proceed with the next stages of life, slowly as that image is becoming clear. Paris, on the other hand, is mainly a city of aspirations and projections for me. I have not had the opportunity to experience how my life might work as a resident, but the moments I have been accorded on its soil have proved among the most satisfying of my life, in which I connect more fully with all of my senses than anywhere else. I have been aided by linguistic ease more so than in Portugal, and I have never experienced anything other than open embrace by Parisians. My experiences in Paris embody the way I feel like I should be living my life, tastes of which I enjoy in both other locations.

Yet I am coming to arrive at the conclusion that I'm fully satisfied in none of these three places, and that in place of full-on fulfillment, only the mixture of the group collectively seems to provide me with a sense of realization. I feel most myself, most enamored with my life, and most in tune with my thoughts and feelings when I can comfortably hop between all three places; transience appears to be the glue of steadiness and consistency that I crave deeply in my life and mistakenly pursue. The symbolism of these three places is that of interconnected fiefs, a micro-world of fully globalized commerce that manages to retain individualized identity and expression. They bicker with each other, their relations freeze at times, one grows in emphasis over the others, yet they are all bound together. The silver lining in my hesitance to decide between any of these places, between any of the potential options that abound in each one for what I could be doing in six months, a year, however long, is that I consistently manage to preserve those options. Perhaps that is the most important thing of all.

Parisian Redaction

The original draft of this post was written at 2:30 in the morning as I awaited the time to pass so that I could board my KLM (via Air France) flight to Paris by way of Amsterdam, cost covered by an exceedingly generous French man who has an exceedingly French manner of interest in me. Life could be less interesting, I suppose.

Twelve days in Paris. I'm not sure what I'm more surprised about, the fact that I am actually able to go back to my favorite city more than once this time around, or the idea of being able to spend an appreciable amount of time in which I won't feel rushed to "do" the city the way that I tend to otherwise. June should prove to be more of that, and yet, here we are in March. Last year at this point, the only major trip I had made was with E to Porto, and that doesn't count for nearly as much in terms of great travels because we stayed in the country. It was worthwhile, but not as life-altering as each time I step foot on the polluted trottoirs of the City of Light seems to be.

Stop short of calling me a believer, but in some ways the timing of things is nothing short of providence. While I had spent some time recently ruminating about the problems revolving around my intimate life, time has changed things quickly and I find myself in awe at what I'm doing. I have never felt more in the moment as I do sitting here in Paris, wondering how this happened and planning what I will do for the rest of the day. Instead of worrying about particular or petty details of anything at home, whether in Lisbon or Denver, I am taking in the things I appreciate most in a city that facilitates it readily. I am professedly a bit tired of my thoughts as well, similar as they tend to be, revolving around Portugal, my future, my intimate life, and all the rest that comes along with those, so taking a leave of absence feels like just what I needed at just the moment I needed it. Intellectually, I have been digesting Portuguese at such a steady pace that I can easily say I speak and understand at a much more advanced level than when I arrived, but it still stands that I have hit a point of operating on autopilot leading up to flying away, and a detour in a different linguistic paradigm is encouraging me to continue building upon both, rather than losing track of myself trying to bend my mind into speaking perfect Portuguese. I'll speak good, if imperfect Portuguese and French, and they'll both get better bit by bit. I understand better now what most people mean when they say that taking a year or however long off was the best decision they had made between undergraduate and graduate studies—I feel a resurgence in my intellectual creativity as well as my overall creativity.

In the meantime, though, I have nearly two weeks to try not to spend too much money, take photos, revert inwards while subjecting myself to the ultimate form of outward expression, and take the most out of life. In Portuguese, the word is aproveitar. In French, as I noted so many times in the past on this blog, the equivalent is profiter. I am grateful I have been able to experience what those words mean in their respective cultural applications.

A Fortnight Later

Or not quite. I haven't quite caught up to myself in mind, body, or spirit, as the saying goes, so every time I feel like I have something to write about, it turns out that it's one of many little things brewing for later.

What has not happened in the first ten days of me being here has been a magical renaissance of the Portuguese language in my brain, rendering me capable of conversing with flawless fluidity despite any technical errors of usage. I feel a certain disappointment both from others and from within myself that I have not inched closer toward that, but I have habit and a comfortable English-speaking situation to blame for it. What has happened in the first ten days of me being here has been that I have been very hospitably received, seen a handful of friends, and tended toward laziness and avoiding people while I allow myself to breathe in the air and remember that I should take advantage of the moment while I'm actually living in it, not some time thereafter. What has happened just now is a run-on sentence. All bases are covered.

I feel a certain tension in the air in trying to figure out what exactly I want out of how I'm spending my time. For others, it's just because it's winter, which means rain and cold, and some friends are in similar situations as I am. The truth is that I don't really know what to do with myself with so much time lacking structural responsibilities, so it's being passed more idly than it otherwise probably would. I have drawn a blank trying to decide how to feel about that. None of which is to say I've been idle—I somehow manage to get out of the house each day and see people or do something. I have spoken more Portuguese either by necessity or by choice than perhaps the last time I was here cumulatively, and I expect that to continue, yet I feel no great pressure to lose myself studying verbiage or drilling conjugations into the automated part of my memory. I rediscovered a love for food upon arrival here, as I find that most things taste better, regardless of whether the food is strictly Portuguese cuisine or not, and I have been reveling in it each time I meet with someone, yet I feel no great desire to overspend for the sake of gastronomic pleasure. The pattern is the same for any given thing I've partaken in. There is pressure from all sides for me to settle one way or another, and I'm not really there yet.

When I walk down the street, with its familiar calçada, bumbling pedestrians, whining motors idling in traffic, the unique scent of the city, I stir from within and feel at home in Portugal. When I attempt to translate that stirring into a more cogent thought process, it disappears. Please excuse my cultural dissonance.

Soliloquy on Becoming like Every Other Adult

"Aren't you so excited to leave? I can imagine it must be so incredible!"

Those are the words that come almost verbatim out of the mouths of almost anyone I describe leaving for Portugal to, at least anyone who isn't in my immediate circle of close friends. When I go on to express that I have mixed feelings about it, and that I'm still trying to just get through the bureaucratic process of graduating before it will sink in, I'm met with ambivalence or surprise that I'm not positively shitting myself more excited about it. The truth, as I have learned it, is that not to have mixed feelings about something is not to have analyzed it and thought out the full context of whatever that something is. The other truth, as I have learned it, is that red tape and bureaucracy are things that will never end in adult life, not after college is "over", and especially not when you're moving to another country that has enough of its own problems to be welcoming in more potential economic liabilities.

I wrote about this before, but the point of this post is that I can be forgiven for a downtime in my pursuits of interests while I'm in the middle of a sobering reality check that involves all aspects of life, from finances to relationships. At the same time that I've reconciled my relationship to my own country with my desire to get out in the world, I've become aware that, despite my youthful years, time is not as abundant as it seems to be; instead of thinking about figuring out what I'm doing with myself, it must simply be done. The amount of things that need to go right and align themselves for what I intend to do in Portugal is staggering, and yet, it's not a degree of magnitude worse than what I had previously gone through to spend a significantly shorter period of time there. Anything I have to do after I've actually arrived in the country seems the easy part.

The world of undergraduate studies is a cozy bubble, which I find coddles the friendships and contacts you build and makes it easy to live in a world of the temporary—a space in time where you know things will, for the most part, not last, but where the day of reckoning is far enough away that you don't have to worry about it. Now I'm worrying about it. Moving away from the comfort of going to and from class, working short hours, and seeing people with flexible time schedules exacts a huge strain on even the closest of relationships, and part of leaving is also facing the idea that some of that strain already existed, it just wasn't brought up, because college life reduces its importance. There is tension constricting the amount of socialization I can bring myself to do and which others can bear to put up with, knowing as we all do that at some point I'll be on another continent and unable to communicate and build connections with the same ease, grace, and thoughtfulness as naturally occurs in person. I'm forced to consider my place in an intimate relationship. This process of bursting the bubble of college life to move onto other pursuits is a solemn note in accepting that when you're putting yourself out there, you really are on your own doing so.

When I stop and think about it, things are going the way they should be. But tell that to the gray hair that popped up in my eyebrow.