Homeless Kevin Heads Karefully Into Hong Kong III: Kevin Goes to Lisbon

6/8/10: Lisbon, Portugal

You didn’t think I could stop with only two masterpieces in the Homeless Kevin series, did you? Like Jason Bourne, Mission Impossible and a moderately hungry customer at an all-you-can-eat buffet, I’m back for a third and final time. Let’s cut right to the story, because like Lord of the Rings III, it’s a long one.

Sneeze. Cough. Cough. “I think I’m dying,” wheezed Zhou when she woke up this morning. “I’ll get you some cheap medicine,” I replied. I made a quick run to the nearest pharmacy, knocked out Zhou with some drowsy pills and then headed out the door, excited to have the whole day to myself.

In a bit of a rough start to the day, I immediately got lost among the hilly Lisbonian streets that put even San Francisco to shame. I was definitely somewhere on my map, but it lacked the detail necessary to help me out, so I simply pushed forward into the unknown. As it turned out, my first stop ended up being some church or nice-looking building or something.

Fortunately for me, once I found this I knew that I was very close to the flea market that I was trying to get to. (Funny how whenever Zhou’s not around I do the one thing I enjoy least: shop.)

This market was known as the Thieves’ Market, but if it were up to me I would have named it the Garage Sale of Crap, because I’m pretty sure the local merchants simply put down a blanket or table and try to sell off all the junk they don’t need anymore from home. (Of course, the Thieves’ Market could be a reference to the fact that they steal the junk from other people’s homes.)

Of course I didn’t end up buying anything here, but I did manage to take a picture of me in front of some famous Portuguese tiles.

From this market, I strolled over to a series of lookouts over the city. The first one I came to was described by our hostel as the most thigh-punishing, but worth the climb for the view. I took one look at my massive thighs and knew the climb wouldn’t be a problem. Check out the payoff:

Not too shabby, but at that point I wished there was some blue sky to brighten things up. Oh well. I then headed down to TPV’s baby cousin: non-thigh-punishing view.

I’m sure by now you’ve noticed my indigenous iPod earbuds from Hong Kong have made the journey all the way to Portugal. I didn’t want to wear them two days ago in Madrid because I knew my senses needed to be on high alert for pickpockets, but here I was able to bring them out again. (The music du jour? Matt Wertz in the morning and Michael Jackson later in the afternoon.) Anyway, my travels then took me the long way to St. George’s Castle (as seen in the background of the picture from the first lookout), allowing me to pass things such as streets decorated for the upcoming holiday,

flower pot-lined staircases,

and even red doors.

Unfortunately I forgot my student card and didn’t want to pay full price to get into the castle, so that excursion will be saved for another day. Right about this time though, my stomach began growling, so I decided to make my way back to the hostel to check on Zhou. On the way though, I popped into another large church, this one with quite intimidating dark front doors.

Zhou was still fast asleep in bed, so my adventure continued into the afternoon. But first, lunch from the same place we ate at yesterday. This cafe had a tourist menu, but I chose to go with something more local and more unknown, and I was quite relieved when I was served some sort of delicious meatballs and mashed potatoes. If only Zhou were here to share my triumph of the lunch menu…

After lunch I boarded Tram 28, a cable car that one reviewer on TripAdvisor described by saying, “if you do anything in Lisbon, take this tram ride!”

The ride itself was decent, albeit very herky-jerky, but there was one problem. I thought it would do a big loop and drop me back off where I started, but instead it finished somewhere a ways off my map. And I really didn’t want to pay to get on another tram back into the city. What to do?

After taking a minute to sum up all my inner creativity to avoid paying the extra 1.40€, I figured out a solution: follow the cable car tracks back!

These tracks eventually led me back onto the map, where I stumbled around aimlessly past a plethora of gardens, churches and interesting architecture. I passed the time climbing up spiderweb ropes on the playground,

stopping by the Palace of the National Assembly, where some important people were arriving to a symphony of trumpets and a gaggle of cops,

and enjoying the view of one of the city’s touristy funiculars. No, I did not get on this one.

Toward the end of the day I thought about throwing some Smart Cars into canals, but then thought better of it.

As my day was nearing its end, I found myself in a small mall close to our hostel. Of course one store called out to me in particular:

Surprisingly there was nothing there for me, but while sniffing the new shoes (I love that smell!) I got to thinking about this blog post. It came to me that one place had tied the last two posts together, even though they occurred half-a-world apart. It’s really the only thing that unites people from all over the world around one common goal. I quickly headed upstairs to the food court, where I knew that one had to be waiting for me. Even though it was now 4pm, this place was still quite crowded, but crowds are something you grow to love at this food haven. I waited in the back of the line, and just a few minutes later I finished a great day in the perfect way: with an M&M McFlurry.

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Puzzles for Postcards

Rhyme Time! Solve all three of these European geography triple rhymes.

The soft, warm jacket one’s brother’s daughter bought outside the Parthenon
A dwelling for Travelocity’s mascot near the Colosseum
A country in the United Kingdom Fedexes small, sharp objects it bought at Home Depot
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Picture of the Day: My favorite picture from my romp around the city today.

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A Play in Three Acts (Thank Goodness Amy is Here)

5/23/10: Lima, Peru

Act I

One of the main reasons I’m glad Amy is here is because I can once again participate in the group conversations. No more pretending to care about which baseball teams are leading which divisions. No more speculating about the future of the Cleveland Cavaliers. No more forced lukewarm statements of “Yeah, I completely agree, LeBron is the best basketball player ever to live…” No more of that – now we can talk about books! Just as an example, here’s a sample of a conversation we had last night while looking at our hostel book exchange shelf:

Z: Hey! The Chase by Louisa May Alcott!
A: Weird.
Z: I’ve never heard of it. I thought I had read all the books by Louisa May Alcott.
A: Apparently not.
Z: reads the back cover aloud. Amy, you know what? These characters’ names sound like ones that Anne of Green Gables would have made up before she became a good writer.
A: You’re right, they do! … Hey…why did Stephen King review a book written by Louisa May Alcott?
Z: That is weird. I don’t know…
K: Bronson Arroyo! Bronson Arroyo!
A and Z stare confusedly at K.

Ok, I made that last part up. I just didn’t want Kevin to be left out of the conversation.

Act II

Poor Amy had to sit through an administrative day in the life of Zhou and Kevin. Luckily, she’s already learned how to sit patiently while other people do really boring things because, after all, she is a college student. Anyway, we were trying to plan the next segment of our trip, which is Spain. We will be flying to Madrid and we had planned on taking the train to Barcelona for four or five days as well. Then I looked up train ticket prices from Madrid to Barcelona, and that plan went out the window. So then we looked up flights on Ryan Air and Iberia and we came up with a list of five cities we could fly to for a few days. They were: Barcelona, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris and Marrakech. Then the three of us each ranked the cities separately. Then the discussion began. It went something like this:

Z: Well, if money is no object, definitely Paris. I love Paris.
A: To be honest though, I only ranked Paris so high because of the food.
K: I think Paris is too expensive. And Zhou, you’ve been there already.
Z: That was ten years ago!
K: Hey, let’s go to Amsterdam!
A: What’s in Amsterdam?
K: I don’t know, I only want to go there because of the Guster song.
Z: Ok, Amsterdam’s out.
A: Why don’t you guys just go to Barcelona like you originally planned?
Z: Yeah Kevin, why don’t we just go to Barcelona like we originally planned?
K: I want to go somewhere else. We’re already going to Spain.
Z: That makes NO sense.

And on it went. For hours, it seemed. But we eventually did decide on a city. Ready? Guess where we’re going in a couple of weeks? Lisbon!

I’m just as confused as you are.

Act III

Today we flew to Iquitos. We flew with Peruvian Airlines, and the flight was so packed that when we checked in that there were no seats available together, so we had to sit one behind the other, in middle seats. Now, I know I’m going to sound like a spoiled brat when I say this, but I always sit in the window seat. And that’s just how it is. What? I like to look out the window.

I once read somewhere that the person in the middle gets to use two armrests. I remember this very distinctly because 1) I had never heard of that rule before reading it and 2) what a great rule! It only makes sense, right? The window person gets to look out the window and sleep against the side of the plane. The aisle person gets to get up and walk around whenever they feel like it without having to dance around other people’s laps. The middle person gets nothing except the opportunity to feel that their person space is being completely invaded by the two large people sitting on either side of them. They should at least get one extra armrest as a consolation prize! Anyway, I’ve never really had a chance to test how widely known this “middle person gets two armrests” rule is because, like I said, I always sit in the window seat.

Folks – people DO NOT KNOW about this rule. I was quite indignant that both ladies sitting beside me immediately took possession of two armrests each and then promptly fell asleep. And the thing is, the issue isn’t even the armrests themselves. Because I don’t really like armrests. 1) They’re a bit too high for me, 2) I am self conscious about my abnormally long and skinny arms and think they look even longer and skinnier in that awkwardly unnatural position and 3) airplane armrests are not comfortable. So here’s the gist of the situation: I don’t even like using armrests, and if I had never read that the middle person gets both armrests I probably wouldn’t have even noticed that both my armrests got taken, but I still spent the entire one hour and forty minute flight plotting on how to take my armrests back.

I never succeeded.
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Puzzles for Postcards

Rhyme Time! Solve all three of these triple rhymes featuring recent NHC visiting family members.

A hip hangout for happy fathers
Throw a brother an “All Day Strong” pain reliever
Let a tiny Irish sister go into the wild
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Picture of the Day: Hanging out by the Pacific Ocean.

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And Here They Come Down the Home Stretch!

5/3/10: Puno, Peru

It’s funny how life works. Three years of your life may revolve around one giant adventure (read: our round-the-world trip), but eventually it all has to end. I’m not saying our trip is over yet, because we do have nearly two months left. However, today marked a bit of a landmark for me personally – one that says, “Hey! You, living that fantasy life! Pretty soon you’re going to have to get a job and float back to reality!” (That was a metaphorical landmark yelling there. It wasn’t like Machu Picchu or the Eiffel Tower or anything.)

Today was our last border crossing by land. (Bring on the sarcastic sympathetic groans.) In the first 24.5 years of my life, I crossed approximately four borders in a vehicle – twice into Canada and twice back to the States. Today’s cross into Peru made 19 land border crossings in the past eight months. Think about that. That’s more land border crossings than Miley Cyrus is years old. It’s more than the number of wins the Detroit Lions have had in the past five years. It’s more than the number of people in the Gosselin and Jolie-Pitt households combined, assuming both parental relationships didn’t fall apart.

But that isn’t the sole reason why I feel our trip has hit the final stretch. For the next month, we have every single day planned out. We know exactly where we’ll be staying, what we’ll be doing and who we’ll be doing it with. For nearly the entire trip, we couldn’t see more than four days into the future. A lot of the time we didn’t know where we’d be the next day. But for the rest of May, we have nothing to plan. It makes me feel like we’ve already done Machu Picchu, Colca Canyon and the Peruvian Amazon, and the only reason we’re going to do it again is to show our family members what a good time these places provide. (Dad, Steve and Amy: you’ll love them!)

And once May is over, we have about a week in Spain, two in Egypt and one in England, then we’re going home. And you know what? I’m ok with that. Even though there’s a million more places in the world we want to cover and we’re getting used to life without work, school and the need to shave, there’s only so much traveling you can do at once. On the road there is no balance in life. There’s no family, no home, and no routine. When I think about the past eight months, I’m actually quite amazed that we were able to pull off what we did. We haven’t spent more than six nights in a row in the same room, and we only did six nights in one place twice. And both those rooms were dorms, where we couldn’t spread out and make ourselves comfortable.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m seeking anyone’s sympathy. (Really I’m just filling space on the blog for a day where we didn’t do anything.) As I write, I’m realizing how unique this trip is. I suppose I’d always thought we could do it again when we retire – only for that trip we’d stay in nicer places and do more high-priced things. But there’s no way we’ll ever do this again. So for the next two months, I’m going to make sure I enjoy every moment.

We already had one good omen to usher us into the last leg of our trip: the border crossing today was by far the easiest we’ve had on the entire trip. Too bad there’s no more of them.
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Puzzles for Postcards

Rhyme Time! Solve three of these four alphabetically-themed rhymes.

An additional member of a frat
Slang for the low-down or gossip on the upcoming Dave Matthews show
The opposite of imprecise fiction
What Casper is when he has a bunch of people over for dinner
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Picture of the Day: Our hostel is located at the top of a huge hill. The only benefit of this is the nice panoramic view it provided.

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Some Moai and a Sunset…Two Bits

4/12/10: Easter Island

We came to Easter Island with what we thought was a pretty large stash of food: 16 chewy chocolate chip granola bars, six chocolate chip cereal bars, six fruit and yogurt cereal bars, one package of spaghetti, two packages of spaghetti sauce, three cans of tuna, six apples, three pears, three peaches and one large box of instant oatmeal. It ended up that this only fed us for five breakfasts, one and a half lunches and two dinners. In hindsight, we really should have just brought over the entire Santa Isabel grocery store, but I suppose we wouldn’t have been able to squeeze it under the seat in front of us on the plane.

On the island itself, the prices at the grocery stores are extortionist, so for the last few days we’ve eaten out at either Cafe Hitu (great “french fries Hitu”) or Taku Vave (really good fish). Not that the restaurants aren’t extortionist as well, but at least eating out means you don’t have to do your own dishes. Today was our last full day and we visited Hitu for lunch and Taku Vave for dinner. The really sweet owner of Taku Vave gave us the gift of a shell necklace for “coming so much” and the really nice cook at Cafe Hitu nearly gave us both heart attacks with his food. It was great.

Since we had spent the entire morning and most of the afternoon indoors, taking care of some administrative things – writing, napping, reading, sitting – we decided that we’d go out to take advantage of our last day and catch an Easter Island sunset.

Looks like we weren't the only ones with this idea.

Or were we?

It’s funny, everyone was there with their big cameras to get pictures of the sunset, but let’s be honest here – if you’re not actually in the picture yourself, everyone’s pictures are the same. I mean, we all flatter ourselves that the picture we took ourselves are “better,” (and of course mine are the best) but really, they all end up looking pretty similar. Same sunset, same moai silhouettes, same clouds. I suppose this vindicates my mom for all those years of telling me, “Get IN the picture. How else will you know you were there?” How else will you know indeed? Quite the philosophical question.

Now that we’ve finished going over the events of the day, there are 2.1 other things I’d like to cover in this post: the absence of smooth transition sentences, plastic bags and gas burners.

Absence of smooth transition sentences:
Please see the sentences two sentences prior. Done.

Plastic bags:
When we first started this trip, we found we never seemed to have enough plastic bags, so we started to hoard them. Back then, plastic bags were like gold, only they were worth a lot more than they weigh. (Think on that for a minute.) We would save the ones we got when we shopped at grocery stores and we would lament the loss of a particularly good one if it wore out or if one of us accidentally poked a hole in it. Kevin even got to the point where he started designating particular bags for particular items and would look put out if I handed him “the wrong plastic bag.” As in, “Where’s the computer bag? That’s not the computer bag – that’s the sandals bag! Hey, hey, don’t put the computer in there!” I suppose the man has a point. Who wants to put their neoprene-encased computer in a plastic bag that has been used to hold sandals? Crazy people, that’s who!

As you may be able to tell, the entire plastic bag situation had gotten of hand. Our stash of plastic bags had grown to its limit. Every time I stuck my hand in the big pack to look for a clean shirt, I’d end up fishing out three empty plastic bags first. So I finally decided to do something about it. I gathered up and went through all of our plastic bags one by one, threw away the flimsy ones and neatly folded up the rest and put them in – a plastic bag. And no, the irony does not escape me.

Our bag of bags.

Gas burners:

In Charlotte we had gas burners, but they were the self-lighting kind. I really took that for granted before but now that we’ve been on the road for seven months, I can really see the genius in it. For us, lighting the gas stove is an adventure each time, one that often ends with a foot-hop/flinched hand/shout of “ow!” But I think I’ve learned the trick to it, and it is this: NO FEAR. I’ve gotten to the point where I can light one without looking like I’m trying to feed a crocodile, but Kevin is still a bit jumpy, so I offer to light the stove whenever we need to use one. Kevin watched me light one this morning in a relatively calm manner and said, “How come whenever I light it it’s like a fireball explosion?” Just remember, everyone: NO FEAR. The stove can smell it.
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Puzzles for Postcards

Rhyme Time! A No Hurry Curry first – solve two of the following three quadruple rhymes!

Insist upon an impromptu gymnastics maneuver where one balances on their palms
Fill out in an orderly manner a piece of paper to illegally help you ace your exam
Chew on an overly luminescent bulb that shines while a baby is sleeping

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Picture of the Day: Shanghai is only 8,200 nautical miles away.

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Patagonia, We Some Want!

3/24/10: El Calafate, Argentina to El Chalten, Argentina

The mountains here in the Patagonian Andes remind me of Jackie Chan. They may not be the biggest things in the room, but they’re powerful and impressively built, and they’ll kick the butt of anyone who tries to stand on top of them. Plus I bet they too could somehow make a Chris Tucker movie good.

Today we arrived in El Chalten, a popular stop (pop stop) on every backpacker’s tour of Patagonia. Because I am curious about all things historical, I looked up the meaning of El Chalten and found that it translates literally as “a small city built at the the head of numerous hiking trails.” Boy, does it live up to its name. There are about 568 different hiking paths that start in El Chalten (perhaps not coincidentally this is the same as the number of points Evan Turner scored this year), the most famous of which leads up to Mount Fitz Roy. This mountain is only 3,500 meters tall, which would legally qualify it as a less than a midget in Nepal. However, it looks more menacing than a freckle-faced kid with a slingshot.

There are two other trails that we have learned about thus far that I feel should be shared with you. One shorter trail leads to a good lookout for condors. I wouldn’t find this all that exciting except we met an American here in the city who said that seeing a condor flying in the sky from a half mile away was “the highlight of [his] life.” Now I don’t care how boring your life is – if a bird flying that far away can be the highlight, then it’s gotta be good.

The second trail would require a multi-day hike, but it takes you to the biggest glacier in South America. You heard me right, the biggest glacier in South America. I had to reconfirm this tidbit with the lady at our hostel, because after trekking on Perito Moreno yesterday, I found it hard to believe that anything could be bigger than that. Unfortunately we won’t have enough time to see this glacier, but just thinking about Perito Moreno again makes me want to post a bunch more pictures from it.

I’ll leave you with a conversation Zhou and I had today about how much we love Patagonia. While it isn’t the flashiest or most famous region we’ve been to, it definitely ranks up there as one of our favorite few places in the world. Zhou went as far as saying that if someone asked her where to go for a nine-day vacation, she would tell them Patagonia. I then went into deep thought for about 20 minutes and came up with this slogan: you can’t spell “Patagonia, we some want!” without the word “awesome.”
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Puzzles for Postcards

Rhyme Time… Special Edition! This week only people who have never won a puzzle can reply (and don’t even think about pretending you haven’t won – we keep a list.) In addition, there is space for two new winners! Solve either the first two rhymes or the second two to win your postcard. (Zhou wrote these, can you tell?)

Teeny-Bopper Edition Rhyme Time:

Miley Cyrus’s alter ego’s yellow fruits
Taylor’s Christmas presents

Winter Attire Edition Rhyme Time:

What a baby cat might use to keep its paw warm
When your neck-warmer vomits wool balls
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Picture of the Day: You can tell we forgot to take pictures when I’m including one of Zhou in a rocking chair… from yesterday, nonetheless.

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