The Best City in the World

I really, really like London. Have you noticed yet?

But then, today was a good day. Not a spectacular day, just a good one, and you will find out why momentarily.

Yesterday was a walking day. I decided to go on the walking tour of London, which I've never done before, and since the meeting point was at Wellington Arch, just on the other side of Hyde Park, I decided to start my day with a nice stroll. I mean, how far can it be?

Hint: Hyde Park is REALLY BIG.

Because I was clever and left lots of time, though, I actually did have time to go slowly and enjoy the walk, although the pleasure was somewhat curtailed by the fact that it was really bloody cold. I smiled at swans, chuckled at coots, giggled at geese, and bought a map. (A pocket London A-Z, for any Sherlockians. Also, it said £3.99 on the back, but the guy gave me 30% off with no explanation whatsoever. Must be my feminine wiles.)

At the Arch, I met up with the gaggle of my fellow tourists and we all set off in a herd together to hear about London. Pretty much everywhere we went I'd already been--two or three times--but I learned a couple new things anyway. I learned, for instance, that some German guys once camped in the back garden of Buckingham Palace because they thought it was Hyde Park, and that a drunk Irishman (insert your own witticism here) once broke into the palace, thinking it was a hotel, and had a conversation with the Queen. (If you want to LOL a bit at the security guards, here's the Wikipedia page.) Also, it takes a crapton of money to get into and maintain membership in the Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall--if I remember correctly, there's something like a 15-year waiting list to get in, and you have to be recommended to get on the list and pay to stay there (something like £3,000 a year); it's like £15,000 to get in and then £5,000 a year in dues. Damn.

Our route took us to Trafalgar Square, with the leaping fountains sparkling in the sunlight (insert your own joke about sunshine in London here), past a whole bunch of English Civil War reenactors in plate armor with pikes (no joke), and to the Houses of Parliament, where the Clock Tower looked splendid in glittering gold as our guide explained to us, in careful detail, exactly what "hung, drawn, and quartered" means. Lovely.

A group of us then continued on after the official end of the tour to our guide's recommended restaurant for a late lunch. I ate my sausages, mash, and Yorkshire pudding quickly and headed into the wilds of Leicester Square to find a movie theater playing The King's Speech, which took some doing, but I managed it. I had some time until the showing, so I wandered a bit, said hello to Covent Garden, and bought dinner at M&S before returning to the movie theater cinema.

I'd heard good things about The King's Speech and I wasn't disappointed. It tells the story of King George VI, the current Queen's father, who was thrust suddenly into the kingship after his older brother abdicated to marry a twice-divorced American woman. (Those Americans, my goodness...) Poor King George had a stutter, though, a terror of public speaking (unsurprising), and no real desire to be king, if you can believe the movies. (Advice: don't.) Doctor after doctor had tried to help him to little or no effect, until his despairing wife finds an unconventional doctor who finally manages to do the King some good.

I realize that a movie about speech therapy probably doesn't sound like the best thing in the world, but it isn't really about speech therapy. It's about the lines that are drawn between royalty and commoner, even in the modern world, purely by virtue of birth. It's about the destiny that the then-future King George felt was inescapable, a role he didn't want but accepted anyway, even at the brink of war. It's about the personal courage of the King, a real person with real fears and real problems, and how he learns to make a friend.

Anyway, I'm sure much of it is dramatized, romanticized, and exaggerated, and not being a historian, I can't tell you how much. I can just tell you that if it's at all true, King George's personal courage was amazing, and watching him try to speak around his paralyzing stammer makes you writhe in sympathetic agony. If you get the chance to see it, I recommend it.

After that I went home, ate my dinner and went to bed, which brings us to today!

It took me longer than anticipated to get to the British Library today, because I was determined to take the bus and the bus was late. I did make it, finally, and got to see one of the things I'd been looking forward to this trip: the Evolving English exhibition, about English over the years. There were copies of Chaucer, and clips from My Fair Lady, and sound bytes from all over Britain, and a bookmark from oh-so-long-ago inscribed in Old English runes. It was lovely, and I spent far too much time there--just like last time. I'd been planning to go to the British Museum afterwards, but I was very hungry and rather museum'd out at that point, so I bought a book about British history and curled up in a Starbucks with a nice latte for a while. (No eye-rolling now; this is my first Starbucks since August!)

I bought a Big Issue and asked the seller for directions, and so took another bus to Waterloo Bridge. Walking on the South Bank is something of a tradition at this point, and the clear sky and setting sun made it all so lovely despite the cold. I even, after admiring Ben and the Eye for a while, went back to my Egyptian perch and sat between the Sphinx's paws until it got too cold to not be moving, at which point I came back here to have dinner and relax and watch Top Gear.

Now I've been typing for far too long and it's time for bed. Tomorrow I have to get up early-ish to take a shower and go get in line in the hopes of getting tickets for a musical, then Stephen arrives! Yay!

Welcome to London

Ahh, London. Hello again, my darling. I've missed you.

I can't explain what I love so much about London. It's a huge, busy, noisy city, unbelievably vast and completely apathetic. And yet, somehow coming here feels a little bit like coming home.

To my complete lack of surprise, I was drawn to the City and the South Bank--this summer's old stomping grounds--as soon as I dumped off my stuff at my hostel. It was full dark by the time I accomplished this, although still fairly early; the overcast sky was that curious shade of muddy purplish-orangish-grey that all city skies seem to have in common. I emerged from the familiar St Paul's Tube stop to behold the monolithic white edifice towering impassively, unchanged by my six months' absence, over the scuttling lines of traffic at its feet. I turned my feet toward the river, occasionally looking back to see the majestic dome rising over the dark shapes of its lesser neighbors, which stared at its gleaming pillars with unblinkingly envious yellow-green eyes.

Over the Millenium Bridge I went, now huddling into my coat against the cold instead of sweltering in the summer heat. As usual, the Thames was flowing serenely by, illuminated by the glow of the still-bustling city. To my left, the round tip of the Gherkin poked up among the more conventionally-shaped buildings, and off in the distance to my right, around the bend in the river, I could catch a glimpse of a curved row of blue lights high in the air: surely the London Eye. At the other end of the bridge, instead of turning my steps to the Globe, I headed towards an enormous but singularly unattractive square brick structure sporting a high tower: a former power house, now the Tate Modern.

Why the Tate Modern? Well, RFS recommends it, for starters. I'd wanted to go in the summer but hadn't got around to it. Also, on Saturdays it's open till 10pm, and it was already past dinnertime.

This is how I found myself standing in an enormous industrial building, looking at art displays that...well. It's modern art. What did you expect?

Perhaps most face-palmingly painful was the feature exhibit, entitled "Sunflower Seeds", which was an entire section of the bottom floor covered about half a foot deep in sunflower seeds. No patterns, no special designs, just millions of sunflower seeds. But wait, it's better--they're not real seeds, but fake. Not just fake: handmade, individually painted ceramic sunflower seeds. Millions of them.

It's supposed to represent something about the nature of uniqueness, and something about China (it was a Chinese artist who "made" them, although from the video they showed, it seemed that he kind of supervised and got a village to do all the actual work for him), and something about mass-production and the human soul. Or something. Mostly my reaction was in three stages:
1. "Is that just a really ugly carpet that everyone's looking at?"
2. "Holy shit that's a lot of fake sunflower seeds. Bet that took a while."
3. "Why do no modern artists ever do anything useful or constructive with their time?"

Pretty much the whole museum was like that for me. The amusing bit was the three-step process of incredulity and hilarity upon seeing the "artwork" for the first time, utter bafflement and confusion upon reading/hearing the entirely over-exaggerated analysis of its deep inner meaning and bold confrontation of the concepts of space, or sexuality, or time, or whatever, and then the absurdity that leaves you no choice but to walk away shaking your head. Highlights of WTF:

• A giant American three-way plug made out of mahogany, hanging from the ceiling (and I do mean giant), which was supposed to challenge the inherent eroticism of everyday objects (?!?!)
• A small, spindly tree carved out of a beam of wood, to find the younger tree within
• A large piece of white cloth curved around a glass beaker, with no explanation
• A piece of white octagonal paper glued to the wall, to challenge our conception of space and what makes a painting
• A video of a naked woman dousing herself in blood and then rolling around in feathers
• And a whole bunch of framed, honest-to-goodness museum pictures that "boldly experiment with shape and color" that all looked to me like various arrangements of blocks and lines painted by fifth graders.

Although my favorite bit was about a painter with a genuinely interesting painting (this one, if you're interested), featuring a rather creepy girl in a shadow-filled room; you don't notice until a second too late that she doesn't have eyes. Anyway, the funny bit was in the audioguide, which said that this Bonnard guy (he was French) would carry paints with him, and whenever he mixed a color he particularly liked or just came across one of his canvasses and decided he didn't like it the way it was, he'd just whip out his box o' colors and change stuff. Apparently, he once got a friend to distract a guard at a museum (no info on how, but I assume it involved cross-dressing or something) so that he could sneak in and change his own painting.

Anyway, having used up a week's worth of WTF?!?!, I staggered wearily back to the hostel where I now sit. The plan is to relax somewhat tomorrow, since this is, after all, my vacation, and then visit the British Library and British Museum on Monday. On Tuesday, I get to see Stephen and hang out with him for a couple days, then I'm flying off back to Germany to hang in Hamburg.

P.S. I'm surprised to find that this is the first time I've used the label "WTF". I feel like that should've happened already. Oh well.

England again

Well, I should be asleep now, but I'm strangely wide awake, so I thought I'd drop a line. Tomorrow morning I leave for England. I'll be in London for another five days, doing fun things like meeting up with my friend Stephen, and then I'll be back to Germany, but in Hamburg. I've heard lots of good things about Hamburg, so I'm looking forward to seeing it for myself.

The Fasching party with the students went very well. For those who don't know, Fasching is like the German Mardi Gras; everyone gets dressed up in silly costumes (like Halloween) and drinks copious amounts of alcohol (like every day). As you may remember, I was enlisted to sing a bit for the evening's program, so I'd been practicing with the student playing the guitar. I had no classes the day of the party, so I had the whole morning and most of the afternoon to sit around trembling and being nervous.

Turns out, the whole thing went pretty well. I messed up a couple times, but just little warbles--I didn't forget the words or start singing at the wrong time, thank goodness. And since then lots of people, teachers and students, have said that they enjoyed it. So, altogether, I'm pleased.

After the program, there was of course drinking and dancing; I didn't do too much of either. There was beer spilled all over the dance floor, and in combination with the polished stone tiles and my near-treadless Converse, it was a broken femur waiting to happen. About midnight I decided to head home, and got stuck outside the door talking to the smokers huddling together in the cold. This, it turns out, is where I should have headed in the first place, since there was enough quiet to hear and enough good spirits to have lively conversations--if not quite enough fresh air to breathe! It was another hour and a half before I finally made it back to go to sleep.

Now all the students are gone and the whole building--the whole town, really--is deathly quiet. I'll be glad to get on a plane tomorrow and find myself again in a big city. I can't really explain what it is that attracts me so strongly to London. When I'm there, I feel small and lost, but there's still something beautiful and awe-inspiring about the city itself. I don't know, I can't explain it, and it's probably just romantic notions from watching too much BBC programming. But anyway, I'm looking forward to being in the land of the Angles again.

Oh, and I didn't hear back about the Top Gear tickets, which means I didn't get them. Oh well--I've already put myself on the reserve list for this summer. Fingers crossed!

Recent Things That Have Happened To Me

So, last time I totally forgot to wish y'all a happy new year. I was a bit angry at the time, sorry. So: Happy new year! There.

Well, let's see. I started writing a summary of my holidays, so you could have an idea of what I did for Christmas and everything, mostly because it was all fun and cultural-y and stuff, and I want to remember it. That got stalled, so it's still the half-finished-draft stage, along with Sevilla and Tarifa and Morocco and stuff. Sorry about that.

Anyway, the last week or so has been a bit rough. Not because anything in particular has gone wrong, I've just been feeling down--a bit homesick, a bit listless. I think this is partly because I either have already passed, or am about to pass, my personal record for Longest Time Away From Home. Last time was, of course, Marburg, but that was only from mid-September to the beginning of March, so...six and half months-ish. I arrived in London on the 25th of June last year, which puts me at seven months on next Tuesday. And there's still a long way to go. I don't have any idea when I'll be home again, or, for that matter, where home is.

Anyway. I'm listening right now to a song "borrowed" from YouTube because the students have convinced me to sing some songs at their Fasching celebration next week. I don't actually know the music that my guitar accompaniment can play, so I'm learning it now! In fact, I need to go catch the bus to get back to the station to get back to Stadtroda so I can practice this stuff. I'll be back.

Hi, I'm back. I missed the bus and the train each by about 30 seconds, so I had to watch my train drive off into the darkness and then wait another hour until the next one, at 21:22. I hadn't eaten any dinner, either, so I was not a hppy camper. Oh well.

There are assorting things to tell you...let's see.

Last week was the full-year students' last, which was very sad because they're my favorites. On Thursday last week, we went out to Japanese food and then went to see a movie in Gera. We were going to see Narnia, but ended up in Green Hornet instead. Personally, I didn't like Green Hornet at all, partly because Seth Rogen is, by all accounts, an obnoxious jackass, and because there was an awful lot of shouting and slang in German that I didn't understand. My brain almost exploded.

On Friday they moved out, leaving behind addresses and promises to write. I haven't heard from any of them yet.

Last weekend was somewhat better. On Saturday evening, Bethany and I traveled to Ilmenau and went to see Rapunzel for the second time with Victoria. This is absolutely a brilliant movie. It is sweet and adorable and sarcastic and I love it. It is especially amusing in German, which once again makes me lift my fists to the heavens and curse regional DVD coding that means I will never be able to buy a German-language copy that will work with my computer!

On the following Sunday, a bunch of the other Thüringen TAs came to visit Ilmenau, and we all went for a hike together. Luckily, it was a sunny day, if a bit crisp--but hey, y'know, it's January. We hiked up to the Kickelhahn, a huge tower thing with lovely views down to red-roofed Ilmenau and the rolling, mist-covered hills of the Thuringer Wald. The first part of the hike wasn't very difficult, but about halfway up, we hit all the unmelted snow, and it was quite a slog from there. In some places, the trail was barely discernible, and we were clambering over fallen trees and wending through soundless forests. Being the warmhearted team player that I am, I pushed on ahead and made it to the top 17 minutes before the next people before me and felt quite pleased with myself. At the top, we tried to have a picnic but mostly shivered in the cold wind, at which point we opted to go into the restaurant up there for warm drinks before taking an easier way down.

Oops, it's Sunday now. I keep getting distracted! I've just been working on correcting some practice papers from one of my classes. They're working on giving directions, so I asked them to write some directions using a map I gave them so I could correct them and see how they're doing. Some highlights:

"The pub is on the left-hand side. I go inside trink a beer and go out. I turn right..."

"At the end of the street I'll find the hotel. My next station is the Hot Dog Stand because I am hungry and the eat from the Hotel is bad. So I go out of the Hotel..."

I also got to work with dem Wöhlbierchen (my mentor teacher's daughter) with more Japanese today. Have I mentioned that we're doing Japanese together? Well, we are. The sweet girl is a big anime/manga fan and wants to go to Japan someday, so we meet once a week to learn hiragana and other fun stuff. It's quite fun and good for both of us; she gets to learn some Japanese, and I get to talk about grammar, drink coffee, and practice speaking German. She's a friendly girl and a quick learner, so it's great fun to work with her--when I can remember enough of my atrophied Japanese to teach her something useful!

One hilarious event that I forgot to relate: I've been meeting with a student to practice our songs for Fasching (which is this Wednesday...augh, I get nervous just thinking about it!). I'd just come in and still had my coat on; his roommate was just leaving to go drink some beer in the TV room. This student, the guitar guy, is a very friendly guy who often speaks to me in English while we work on the music. Anyway, just as I'm getting settled and his roommate is leaving, he glances at me and says, "You can take your clothes off."

It took me a split second to go through surprise, bewilderment, and then realization (he meant, of course, "coat" and simply grabbed the wrong word). This would've been a nonissue if his roommate, who speaks fairly good English, had not heard him and burst out laughing. I started laughing too, at which point the poor guy realized what he'd said and bolted for the door to shout "THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT TO SAY!!!!" down the hallway after his cackling roommate. I later related the incident to Frau Wöhlbier, who then hinted about it to him in class. Facepalm. Although it still makes me giggle, thinking about it. Of all the times to mix up those two words...

Well, anyway, the job search goes on. Turns out that it's a serious disadvantage--more serious than I'd anticipated--to not be an EU national during a search for an English teaching job in Europe. I can't figure out if this is a legal visa/work permit thing, or just a euphemistic way of informing everyone that they don't want any non-British-dialect speakers intruding in their schools. Either way, it's irritating. I found one job posting that was exactly what I'd like to do--except it's run by Cambridge schools, and non-EU national need not apply.

Option B is grad school. I looked through the Edinburgh application today and discovered that I'd need to write a research proposal. Now, this is not going to happen anytime soon, because I'll have to do quite a bit more research into the areas that I'm interested in to figure out what kind of project I'd want to work on. Library, here I come. On the good side, there are no real application deadlines, so I can apply whenever I figure out what the hell I want to do for the next few years of my life.

Finally, I discovered this song on my iPod today. I have several CDs loaded on there that I've never listened to all the way through, and I found this one while walking home. It seems to encapsulate a lot of how I've been feeling recently.

The Continuing Saga of the Drunken Idiots

So, here's the next installment in the ongoing saga of drunkenness and pillockry (I made that word up. World, you're welcome) in the Stadtroda Fachschule dorms.

Yesterday we had another instance of middle-of-the-night banging on the common wall between my room and the TV room, but luckily only once and while I was still awake. Far worse was what the Hauswirtschaft students reported from the first floor...

Hearing the ruckus out the hallways, they had decided to stay in their rooms, which is generally a wise idea. However, at some point, some of the drunks got the idea to tie a thick piece of cord from one doorknob to the other across the hallway. Since the doors are directly across from each other and open inwards, this effectively locks the doors shut so they can't be opened from either room.

As far as I can tell, there wasn't too much trouble about it; another of the Hauswirtschaft students noticed the cord and cut it. Just think, though, the special kind of stupidity/besoffenness that it would take to think this is in any way funny or okay. What if there was a fire, in the room or out--and with all the cigarette smoking that goes on, that is not an idle concern--or one of the students had a burst appendix or other medical emergency?

The problem here is that there is absolutely no supervision or accountability for the residents after about 4pm, when the dorm manager goes home. Sure, there's a ban on smoking indoors, and a quiet rule after 10 pm, but it's completely unenforced, and is therefore completely ignored. In the classroom, the teachers have no power to control or punish the students, so they talk, text, or read magazines in class or talk loudly to each other, and all the teacher can do is ask them to please stop. If they don't, there's no way to enforce the school's authority. The students are simply told and expected to act like adults, apparently purely on blind faith, and when they act like spoiled children instead, oh well.

This is only part of the reason that I am not going to apply for a second year with the program. It is possible to request a second year, and that would definitely fix the what-am-I-doing-with-my-life question, as least temporarily. But I would either have to opt to stay here, in Stadtroda, or risk the lottery of schools out there. After all the freedom and responsibility that my mentor teacher has entrusted me with, I wouldn't want to risk being stuffed back into a smaller capacity.

More than that, though...I am way past the point of being an assistant. I volunteered and did a practicum in EFL classes for four years, and at the end of this year, I will have had a full year as an assistant to plan, observe, and learn. If I'm not ready at the end of this year to teach on my own, I never will be. And why should I continue to be an assistant if I don't need it, when there are lots of bright, talented, optimistic young Fulbright applicants who will be waiting in agony for that letter to come with good news? My claim on this place is weaker than theirs, and I'd rather they take it, whoever that might be.

And finally, I don't want to stay here. Stadtroda is too quiet and deserted for me; I really don't enjoy living in the dorm (as you may have suspicioned); and I don't feel like my presence here is making any difference. I'm just the latest in a long line of assistants, none of whom, as far as I can see, have succeeded in inspiring their students to strive. Like I said, there are lots of applicants vying for this place; let them have it, and I'll go somewhere where I'm needed.

I'm trying not to sound petulant, and I'm not really succeeding, so sorry about that. I am perhaps a little bit resentful. But besides that, much more importantly, I want to work doing something that no one else can do; I want to work with people who want and need to learn. I want to make a better life possible for people who would not have the opportunity otherwise. I've been considering trying to find a charity to work with; I'm especially interested in the victims of human trafficking and slavery who are rescued and then need to be educated so they can make their own way in freedom. I'll let you know if anything comes of that.

In the meantime, the guitar and the bed call, followed inevitably by the warbling of the alarm clock bright and early tomorrow. Tschüß!

Welcome, Christmas, bring your cheer!

[UPDATE: Christmas market pictures now posted in my Picasa album!]  

The title is sarcastic. Um, sort of. Or maybe not? I don't really know.

This was a very easy week for me at school. I showed the original How the Grinch STOLE Christmas! movie to each and every class. On the plus side, this meant very little actual work for me, since the movie's about 25 minutes long and I only have 45 minutes total. The students seemed to enjoy the movie (I mean, really--who doesn't like Dr. Seuss??), and I was quite amused by some of the answers to the last two questions:

Q: What is your favorite thing about Christmas?

Student: Ente! (Duck!)

Student: That it will be over soon.

Q: What is your least favorite thing about Christmas?

Student: Presents.
Me: Giving or receiving?
Student: Both.
Student: I don't like going to church and celebrating the birth of Jesus.
Me: That's kind of the point...

On the downside, I showed the movie to every class. That means my poor mentor teacher and I watched that movie three times a day, every day this week. I'm pretty sure I can do the entire thing from memory by now. Also, I made the mistake of deciding to bring Christmas cookies to every class, which meant a lot of time spent baking.

In other news, I've been spending more time with the students in the Wohnheim. It's amazing how fresh cookies will get you at least a short conversation! One girl that I've talked to a bit came into the kitchen to get some food with a couple friends, saw that I was baking cookies alone, and hung out with me in the kitchen after her friends left to keep me company and show me pictures and video of her tractors. The downside to all this friend-making is that the two 2010 classes, which are the friendliest and most inviting, are both starting practica in January, so they'll all be leaving and I won't see them again.

To offset this, I'm trying to spend as much time with them as I can. Yesterday I had a linguistics class and an Italian class scheduled, but I bailed on both to drive to Weimar with some of the Hauswirtschaft students instead. The journey that takes about 25 minutes on the train took us about an hour by car. It didn't help that we took back country roads through rolling hills covered in dry, powdery snow; the wind was blowing hard, making dunes and ripples in the snow and piling up drifts where the road used to be. It's eerie, looking out the window at a purple-grey landscape made sickly by the distant reflection of orange city lights off the clouds, unable to discern where the interminable hills of snow end and the murky sky begins.

We made it alive to Weimar, but by the time we got to the Christmas market, we had only 15 minutes to look around before it closed. We split up for dinner; I had Chinese food with two other students while the rest had döner. We trekked wearily back to the cars and inched our way back through the wildly blowing snow to Stadtroda.

I'd barely made it back to my room and taken my coat off before someone was pounding on my door: another student from a different class, inviting Bethany and me upstairs for some Gluehwein. Bethany declined, but although I was exhausted, I plopped myself in a chair upstairs and did my best to converse intelligently, with mixed results. Möhre, the student who invited me, has discovered that I like to sing, and tries to get me to do solo performances whenever possible, which is usually when I'm tired and trying to focus and figuring out what people are saying to me. It's both flattering and irritating.

Anyway, Christmas is just around the corner, and that simply astounds me. The snow continues to fall determinedly, but Stadtroda is greeting the holiday season with its customary stoic indifference. I finally decided to take my mentor teacher up on her offer to spend Christmas with her, but I'll have four whole days between Christmas and New Year to do...well, I don't honestly know. The Christmas markets will be closed, and everything will most likely be deserted. Altogether, without Christmas parties, Christmas shopping, lights, decorations, music, companionship, family, and all the other trappings of the holiday season, I can't help but be a little bit apathetic.

In other news, my beloved Kindle is having issues, and by "issues", I mean, "Amazon says it's defective and I have to send it back." They already sent me a replacement, but whaddayaknow, the replacement has the same problem as the first one! Just brilliant.

I hope I don't sound too grumpy. I'm not really unhappy, just a bit...listless, maybe. Some meatloaf and festive singing will do me good, and that's the program for tonight! I hope that everyone who reads this has a wonderful Christmas and a warm, snug, enjoyable evening wherever you are. Miss you all.

The Iberian Adventure: Portugal

[UPDATE: Pictures now available in my Picasa album!] 

Mm, Portugal. I had been determined, when this trip was in the planning stages, to go to Lisbon, despite the fact that it was actually pretty far out of the way. Now, I'm very glad we went, and I'd love to go back, but going to Portugal presented a new problem. Up till this point, my Spanish had been sufficient to get us by, but neither us spoke a word of Portuguese. Gestures and smiles, here we come!

DAY SIX
Another day, another new city. We arrived in Lisbon and stared eagerly out the windows of the bus at the sun-drenched metropolis flashing by. The bus left us in the massive Praca do Comercio, presided over on one side by an enormous white arch and opening out on the other side into the water. We went to our hostel to check in, forgetting it was barely 10am and we wouldn't be allowed to check in, and instead dropped off our stuff and, on the recommendation of the clerk at the hostel, headed towards Belem.

Belem is a suburb/neighborhood/somehow or other a part of Lisbon, and is generally frequented by tourists for its beautiful church and cloister and its waterside promenade. There was a bit of a faff getting there (we missed the first tram, then the second tram stopped before Belem and we had to take a very crowded bus the rest of the way), but this turned out to be because of another mounted parade. We seem to have been stalked by mounted parades...Anyway, unlike the one in Madrid, this was some sort of military demonstration, complete with rifles and uniforms and horses and everything. We watched the band march around for a while and then wandered on, partly because one of the regimental dogs was barking incessantly, despite the efforts by his handler to make him stop. He was probably too hot in that long coat sitting in the sun, poor thing.

We stopped at a sidewalk cafe for lunch which, though touristy, was friendly and cheap. (Get your head around that, if you can!) We made it to the church/cloister and I left Bethany standing in line while I went to check out what the deal was. It took the guard a couple of tries to communicate to me that the entrance to the cloister was free before two o'clock. I went back for Bethany and we made our way inside.

The Belem cloister is one of the most gorgeous religious edifices I have ever had the honor to lay eyes on. The ornate two-storey structure surrounds a grassy courtyard with a fountain; above, the sky was pure and unblemished blue, and the midday sun dusted the white stone walls with gold. The cloister consisted of arched walkways facing the courtyard with intricately carved pillars and columns, each one different. Even in the shade, even filled with tourists, the whole place just radiated warmth and beauty and peace. It was an effort of will to force myself to eventually leave.

Since 1) we would have to pay and 2) there was a line, we skipped the church and headed straight down to the waterfront. Beside the towering monument to Portuguese seafaring explorers, the promenade sloped down into the water, and across a narrow channel, the green hills rose up from the waves. (Didn't know this, but Lisbon is built on the estuary of the Tagus river into the Atlantic; the Tagus spreads into a wide sea before narrowing into a small channel before it issues into the ocean. This was briefly disorienting, so...now you know.) We slurped up some quick-melting gelato and then lay on the warm pavement with our heads pillowed on our backpacks, took off our shoes, and soaked in the sun.

Eventually, we had to peel ourselves from our comfortable spot and continue on our way along the water. Our next goal was the magnificent Tower of Belem, a fortress on the river. We explored from the dungeons all the way to the top of the winding staircase, where we curled up on the benches and admired the play of the sunlight on the sparkling waves. There wasn't much else to do in the Tower except admire the views and take dramatically angled pictures, but that's plenty to keep me amused.

By this time, it was getting later in the afternoon, so we began the long slow trudge back toward the tram. My foot was aching so much that we were forced to move at a painful limp, but that didn't stop me from looking at every single booth in the open-air flea market in the park between the Tower and the tram stop. I bought a few gifts before we finally made our way back to the center of Lisbon proper, although on the way back, I stopped for postcard stamps and had this delightful exchange:

Me: "I'd like three postcard stamps, please."
Younger lady who speaks good English: "Where to?"
Me: "The U.S."
Lady: *in Portuguese to an older lady behind the counter: something about Europe*
Me: "Will those go to the U.S.?"
Lady: "It's in Europe, yes?"
Me: "Uh...no."
Lady: "Where?"
Me: "Um...America?"
Older lady: "America? America!" *digs around and gets me the right stamps*
Lady: "Isn't that in Europe?"
Me: "...No."
Proving once and for all that geographical confusion is not solely an American trait.

We'd not slept much the night before, and we were both exhausted, so when we finally checked into our room, I crashed for an hour or two. When I regained consciousness, it was dark outside, and both Bethany and I were very hungry. We consulted the desk attendant and got a recommendation for a nearby restaurant in the Chiado district, so I told Bethany to get us there (she was in a traveling-on-a-budget apprenticeship/crash course) and we wandered that way together. The place that we finally found was an almost literal hole in the wall--a tiny, warm, close-quarters kind of place that looked, to me, just fantastic. Even better, as we were looking about with the kind of pathetic pleading that begs for someone to offer to let us sit with them, we were invited to sit with three very friendly Canadian woman who instantly made us feel welcome. We spent a couple hours laughing and drinking wine with them and eating really wonderful food--I had a sort of seafood stew with rice. The three ladies were sisters who travel to Europe together every year. They gave us recommendations on what to see in the city (since I had no RFS to guide me!) and made me laugh until I cried--they reminded me of the kind of carefree, wacky joviality that my mother and her friends share.

The city, which had been sun-soaked and quiet during the day, was coming awake as we left the restaurant. The streets were bright, and many pedestrian alleys were almost completely blocked by the tables of restaurants spilling out into the pleasantly cool night air. Bethany and I strolled down the streets where the whim took us, admiring the facades of churches and the music of buskers playing for wine-sipping diners. We would've liked to explore more, but we were both very tired and had a long day planned the next day, so we wandered our way back to our quiet room and got some much-needed sleep.

DAY SEVEN
We started our day with an amazing breakfast at the hostel: sausage and eggs, coffee and tea, toast and jam, all free (!!) and very delicious. Our first objective was to get tickets for a performance of fado, traditional Portuguese music, that night, but we hiked all the way up to the theater to find it closed. We finally got our tickets at a nearby mall and were ready to begin our sightseeing for the day.

Our Canadian friends from the night before had recommended that we visit an old church, only the skeleton of which remained after being destroyed in an earthquake, and an elevator that afforded a view of the whole city. We walked to the top of the elevator and had some very nice views from the bridge out to it, but they wouldn't let us up on the top viewing platform without a ticket. Screw that, we said (or I did; Bethany doesn't talk like that), and continued on.

We walked through the steep and winding streets down to the main square, Rossio, a very impressive public space framed on all sides by tall, pale, majestic buildings. Our aim here, though, was around the northeast corner of the square: a small hole-in-the-wall shop selling only cherry liqueur, which had also been suggested by our Canadian friends. We each had a taste (very sweet, with cherries floating in it!), bought some pastries at the bakery next door that had also been recommended, and continued on our way.

Our two main objectives of the day were the cathedral and the castle. Our map suggesting a walking route that connected the two through the beautiful Alfama neighborhood. I'd given Bethany the map for the day, and she got us safely to the cathedral, which was pretty but somewhat forbidding and gloomy. We didn't stay too long, since the day was bright and clear and we still had a lot to see. We wound our way through narrow alleyways between towering red-roofed white buildings, up and up the curving staircases, under laundry lines and flags, catching through narrow cracks occasional glimpses of the water shining in the sunlight below. We finally came out to a main street and marveled at the view: the jumble of red and white sloping away to the sea, crowned by majestic white churches in the distance. We paused here for a while to soak in the sun before continuing uphill.

We got a little lost, but a helpful security guard and a friendly Dutch tourist got us back on the right track, and we were soon inside the walls of Lisbon's castle. The castle sits hunkered down on the highest hill overlooking the city; the elevator that had seemed so high that morning was a small grey smudge far below. Bethany and I walked every inch of the castle complex: we visited the obligatory museum tracing the history of forifications on that spot; we visited every wall and turret in the castle itself; we visited a dig site for Muslim ruins; we even visited the cafe. The sun was bright and warm but not scorching, the sky a perfect blue, and the white city below, speckled with green and red and yellow, gleamed and shone. I could've sat up there all day in the sun, leaning on the warm stone, smelling the fresh air, breathing in the ocean and the sunlight and the beauty.

Time was short, though, and we needed to head out. We made our way back down the hill to our hostel, where we picked up our stuff, then we went by a grocery store and filled up our packs with food. Staggering back up to the Chiado district, we made our way to the theater and sat back to hear fado. This had been one of my priorities in Lisbon. Fado is a famous, very Portuguese musical style, full of sadness and longing, and the performance, though clearly aimed at tourists, didn't disappoint. Neither of us could understand a single word of the Portuguese lyrics, so we listened instead to the music of the words themselves. Fado would make any skeptic of phonaesthetics a believer; as far as I can tell, every word of Portuguese is euphonic.

From the theater we had to book it to the metro out of town. When we'd been planning our trip, I'd only really booked up to Lisbon, though we were planning to go on to Sevilla from there. Turns out that although Lisbon and Sevilla are geographically not far apart, and both major tourist attractions, there is no convenient direct transportation link between them at all, and taking either plane or train would lose us an entire day that we couldn't spare. The only solution was to take an overnight bus, departing from Lisbon at quarter to eight and arriving in Sevilla at five in the morning. Yippee.

After the plush, quiet theater and soulful music we had just experienced, it was a bit of a shock to sit in a garishly lit bus station, dreading the long trek ahead of us. We managed to find and get on the bus and settled in for a long night. I did not want to leave Lisbon at all, and watched as long as there were still lights going by. The seats were too small and, like airplane seats, seemingly designed to be as uncomfortable as possible, but sometime during the night we both managed to fall asleep and left Portugal behind in the darkness.