Traveling Reconsidered, or Contemplations of Position

I have made the decision not to travel quite as extensively outside of Portugal during my remaining time of this particular stay in the country for myriad reasons, the likes of which have been discussed introspectively on this blog to give it its very purpose for existence. I'll explain: because of the way my stay has worked out, I have been hesitant to solidify plans to travel, whether for weekends or otherwise, because life has happened at a pace too fast for me to ever quite get settled into anything other than the fact that I am no longer capable of waking up at a decent and respectable hour of the morning, preferring instead the latter portion of that period of day closer to what some might consider lunch time. In other words, too much is going on that I find myself ill at ease with adding so much more stimulation in the form of visiting entirely foreign places in languages I know nothing of and meeting (yet more) people I will connect with for a weekend in person and a lifetime online, all indeed because I am seeing, doing, and feeling so many things in a way that is remarkably similar but in the same place. The temporality of these months has made itself readily apparent and I am fully aware of it – there is no need to add to it. Going back to the United States will not be an easy process, however long the duration of my stay there, and the difficulty involved is directly inverse the amount of chaos and rooting that is taking place here.

To speak of all of this is, of course, not to overlook the fact that a kind of rooting is actually happening here and that I am working out the details of going through the process of turning what was originally a sojourn into a complete relocation to a country I had not previously expected anything from, much less a connection and opportunity as significant as this one. Part of the significance of this has sunk into me in the recognition of the need to discover the entire country and not just Lisbon, however lovely it may be, because the impression of a city may not necessarily be the same for the rest of the country you expect to reside in on the long term, but also because Portugal is a small country in every sense of the term and there is no particularly good reason not to see each region of it. Instead of a grand tour of the Iberian peninsula, I will instead have an interesting and sufficient tour of the western portion of it.

Such is all of this that I found myself at the beginning of March in the middle of what would turn out to be an unending upheaval playing host to a friend who, given the fifteen years of our friendship, is more of a sibling in spirit than just a regular friend. She came for ten days, being possibly the only person I could entertain without needing respite for such a period, and we decided to visit Porto as well as allow her to let Lisbon sink in amid all of the wonderful things it has to offer tourists and locals alike. Despite the fact that we are very similar, both generally speaking and by virtue of time spent and having been more or less raised together, we are as different as any two given people are from each other. In traveling together we bonded over those very differences, which as we have gotten older and somehow managed to begin to become semblances of adults have also served to strengthen our senses of self and the character necessary for any fully grown person not to be just a parrot of those around them, helpless and hopeless pieces of grey Silly Putty who interest no one and excite yet fewer. So I found myself thinking about these things, observing how she prefers to relax and take a moment to breathe when going somewhere for the first time as opposed to doing all of the touristic things you can pay insignificant sums of money to have sit in photos on your coffee table compiled in a neat, artsy book anyway. As has become clear on this blog, I prefer to run at a frenetic pace — sometimes literally, as even my parents could not quite keep up with me on the Paris metro — taking in and seeing and doing as many things as I can cram into any given period of time so that I can take the full bite, chew, and digest at some other, later point in time.

Thus, in some sense, I have adapted her approach to my stay in Portugal, taking a moment to breathe and allow myself to simply enjoy the things in the country I was intended to be in instead of running around to as many somewhere elses as I possibly could. The rest of Europe will still be there when I get back, whether it has imploded in on itself in more abstract ways or not in the meantime. So we went to Porto and didn't cram each and every possible thing one could do in the city into the three days we decided to spend there, deciding instead to focus on the historical center of the city and the river. We had to figure out just as well what there was to do in the city as we had to actually do it. Luckily, we stayed in a hostel, so that process was made simpler than it otherwise could have been, and yet it still happened. We took a walking tour both on our own and with a guide, ate a whole host of things including a pizza that had three entirely unexpected layers of meat underneath the cheese topping and of course the famous francesinha Porto is known for, did a tasting of Port wine, socialized with people from across the world, stared at pigeons, managed not to get charged for one of the dinners we ate, and did at various points nothing at all. We were relaxed about seeing the sights of the city and we were also trying to be somewhat frugal (although that went out the window with an unfortunate pack of sunscreen and after-sun lotion in Cascais after we got back) and we enjoyed all of it quite as thoroughly as it should be. I know that if I had been on my own, I would have felt more driven to see and do more, but I felt a most different sense of satisfaction out of the trip having gone with someone else and done differently. I intend to step back a bit and enjoy the rest of Portugal similarly – Coimbra, Évora, Albufeira and beyond.

Missing from this charming view of the Ribeira area of Porto is the blow-up doll (or just sexualized mannequin) prominently affixed to one of the balconies on the streets leading there.

This is the ungodly meat and cheese calorie-bomb confection known as the francesinha — "little French girl" in Portuguese — that is a specialty of Porto and claimed all across Portugal as a national dish.

An Elaboration of Previous Sentiments

Sometimes things happen in life that take the things you have spent some amount of time thinking about, be it large or small, and shift those very things into being the point of reference from which you begin to accept that the things you wanted — or did not want — have become the situation in which you find yourself. What is less predictable is when these things happen as you are exiting a club at 6:30 in the morning, your body confused by the fact that you are still drunk but the sun is out anyway, paying absolutely no attention to the fact that you have still not managed to schlep your way home and crawl into bed before becoming hungover later – or at the very least, thirsty and feeling vaguely disgusting, as though it were some sort of personal affront. It doesn't matter though, as you all look out onto the sunrise from the miradouro, in awe of the beauty of the previously unknown hour of morning, in the company of a group of people with whom you feel perfectly comfortable to be and do just as you naturally would, throwing all reservations to the wind.

Such is the irony of that moment that the individuals involved are together in a happenstance, temporary manner, some less so than others. The general idea, however, is that the course of where things are going has made way to allow for a sense of social comfort and awareness makes room for the ability to think about those all-important life decisions talked about previously on this blog in small part. Despite the fact that a good friend and many others I am acquainted with here are in the same position as me, staying for an extended but short period, and that even some of my lovers in the city are trying desperately to leave the country for better working prospects elsewhere, my sense of social stability in this particular moment in time allows me breathing room to reflect on life and the opportunities being presented in it, to make the decisions necessary to carry through other decisions that up until this point were hypothetical things that I spent time wondering about but not having a realistic or pragmatic sense to take completely seriously.

The city itself, moreover, has become utterly familiar much in the way that Denver has, despite the fact that I have yet to see or do absolutely everything that there is on offer. Much can be said of both places, frankly. It is in just such a way that Lisbon has come to feel like and, really, be home, a place where I live in the comfort of familiarity and knowledge of my surroundings without so much as being able to be completely familiar or know everything or, indeed, most things about the city and the country. I'm able to become more intimately familiar with the city as the stress of not being completely familiar with how routine, day-to-day things work here versus how I am accustomed to doing them in the United States fades and my perspective on the use of language amid all of it changes. I have begun, in small part, to scratch beneath the surface of how the city lives and breathes, what places there are to see, what things to do, what foods to eat, and so on. Progress comes in many forms. Those who know me well understand similarly well that I feel best and am able to excel in the things I endeavor to do when I am engrossed in a routine in a setting I hold no antipathy toward. It is no coincidence that my greatest productivity upon returning to the United States last summer happened sitting outdoors over espresso in the most urbane environment Denver has to offer. It is perhaps also no coincidence that I had been unable to take full advantage of the time when my classes were in limbo and I felt as though everything was in a state of upheaval.

I don't yet know in specific detail how exactly what I have in mind to do after graduating will happen, but I have a general idea and I've got the feeling that it will come to happen much the same way the rest of the things are now.

Chatter and Prattle, or the Part of the Journey Wherein You Stare Idly at Nothing

I sit on my new bed bouncing gently on the flimsy IKEA springs, my eye drawn to the bits of color scattered about among the stark whiteness of the walls, so modern as they are, exhausted in mind, body, and soul, for reasons apparent only as they reside in the puffiness of my eyes and the lines underneath them. A couple of days have passed in anticipation of having plans, inhaling eagerly in anticipation of the numerous things to be done, and then failing to exhale as something unravels each time and the thrill of being among the company I prefer to keep is delayed a day or two or indefinitely further. This is a normal part of life, but it is contributing to my exhaustion as I end up doing plenty of things but none of them as I had planned originally. I am generally too much of an organized person accustomed to planning things out, highly amenable to consistency and put under stress to its alternative, so the lesson is perhaps to chill the fuck out to breathe and allow that life sometimes happens without you holding the levers.

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I don't believe there is any Vietnamese food in all of Lisbon. Certainly there is none that I have come across to speak of. I need my fix of pho! Portuguese readers, all 2.7 of you: fix this. Or at least provide assistance so that I can.

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There is a tangible strain in my interactions and relations with people from home. I kvetch of boredom and draw blanks, struggling to remember my connections to the soil of the other side of the large pool of water separating us, but my antipathy to the university and general disconnect from life at home at this point is such that the process sits at more of an ebb than a flow. I'm not so terribly bored, really (although I am irritated by the boredom forced upon me by virtue of the ongoing scheduling circus), nor do I not want to share or listen to what's going on, I just find myself recounting blankly when the appropriate time actually comes. There are also worse problems to have than claiming a sense of dullness to the inevitable regularity of life as it happens here in meeting new people and living through the daily adventures that come with being in a culture still new and a language still alien, as a certain endearing fellow put it to me recently.

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Having moved, I find myself quite joyous at having all of the creature comforts I expected to be living with upon arrival but instead got used to living without at the old apartment, an almost perverse happiness at living on a baseline standard that is by no means unreasonable. I do, however, like the feeling of being more connected to smaller things in life; the joy of simply being able to make a stovetop espresso is more satisfying than it may appear in writing to be. It is just as well that the apartment itself is stark – both in its blank, undecorated white walls and unvarnished angular design and its grand scale. It is magnificently large, enormous by any standard, and in combination with its cold modernism, we the occupants are left to make of the space that which we desire. This means interacting with each other frequently, in our case, eating and studying happily in the common space, and generally establishing a sense of life as though the apartment were some sort of canvas upon which to do so.

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I have determined the extent to which some of my friendships in this city have begun to run in realizing that I can have heated conversations with noted differences about things highly sensitive without it ruining acquaintance afterward, which is remarkable in and of itself but all the more so given the short period of time. I've also developed friendships with very different sets of people, which is proving to be highly appealing as I am able to have a wide range of people with whom I can exchange ideas and contacts, blather on about anything and nothing, and rely on to be able to get out of my house and go do whatever the hell it is there might be to do at any given time on any given day. I am also not alone in the various nightmarish bureaucratic goings-on left still to do as a result, for which I am completely grateful.

The wheels keep turning and we're moving...somewhere. Think of it as that point of the road trip when you're driving through Kansas and you realize that you've been doing nothing but staring at flat, idle landscape for several hours and all of a sudden you have to use all of your energy to put yours eyes back into focus.