It is Saturday, 26 April, and the entire birthday/travel party joined up four days ago in Porto, Portugal. We spent three nights there in a charming hotel on a quaint square, seeing the sights and exploring new paths to gluttony. Yesterday, we shifted base to the seaside town of Cascais (kash-kyesh) where we will be until tomorrow's shift to Lisbon for a night. We return to the States on Monday.
The weather has improved for the Portugual portion of the trip, after a LOT of clouds and rain during the Spanish portion. Some fresh observations suggest themselves as a result of events since the last update.
Hotels
In one of my previous posts, I suggested that the UN ought to tackle the question of cash vs. credit cards in search of a global standard, and I have two other items to add. The first is that there is simply no excuse for hotels not to have electronic room keys with key cards. It is not cute to make customers carry around a big key in their pockets, and it is even less cute to restrict them to one key per room.
Next, what does Europe have against washcloths? The only hotels to provide them so far on this journey were the ones with installed bidets, and while appreciated for that function, it is unsatisfactory to provide no bar soap--just the liquid stuff in the shower--and then not provide a washcloth for use in the shower. Bottom line is that the international standard ought to be bar soap and washcloth. It is known.
Let's move on to in-room coffee makers. One of the very best things about European travel USED to be the Nescafe packs with the electric kettle. Fill kettle, plug in, push button, hot water. Simple. Easy. No frustration. They still provide the kettle, but only for effete “tea-drinking" customers. For we (manly, proper) coffee drinkers, phantasmically complex single cup coffee makers are provided, and I have an unbroken record of failing on at least the first cup. We have gotten to the point on this trip that I have to bring my McGiver-like inamorata in to figure things out, so that I can then brew the thimble sized cups enabled by these Frankenstein monster machines. Kettle, Nescafe. Joy.
Ham
This one's a bit of a holdover from the Spanish portion of the trip, but my oh my, are these Iberians proud of their ham! I mean, everyone's entitled to be proud of something, but the ubiquity of ham purveyors along the streets of the several Spanish cities we visited was breathtaking. As ham goes, it was fine, even good. But I was hard-pressed to discern an appreciable quality cut over what is available in the Harris Teeter up the road in Easton.
Digital Photography/Selfies
I gotta come back to this one, as it has been eating me up this whole trip (as it does whenever I encounter large numbers of tourists). When photos MATTERED, when each had to be individually purchased, people took photos at tourist sites, but more importantly, they visited the site. They took photos of what they saw. They experienced it. They listened to the tour guides, they read the little markers, they learned something about where they were. This seems a quaint and somewhat disfavored approach these days, when what is truly important is not to have visited somewhere, but to have been photographed visiting there. Worse still, people are stopping every several feet in incredibly busy thoroughfares to catch that perfect shot. Over and over and over again, because digital photos have no value.
Is there a German compound word for the whipped dude whose sole job in life seems to be capturing his wife/girlfriend in digital posterity? I cannot begin to tell you how often I saw these poor schleps. Below are a few examples of this species in the wild. Be advised, these were not point and shoot moments. These were extended (2 minute) vamps and primps with multiple conferences for in progress reviews.
Portugal. Well, Portuguese.
Can we have a conversation about Portugal? This is a LOVELY country and I have thoroughly enjoyed myself while here. It is an ancient country with a proud history and an earned reputation for world exploration and colonization.
But does it need its own language? And more to the point, does it need a language that LOOKS suspiciously like Spanish--which is kinda easy to pick up and intuititive--but sounds very different and uses different words for highly repetitive phrases? I wish I had a dollar for how times I said “Gracias" in the last two days, which is probably worse than saying “Danke Schon".
I did a little reading about how Spanish and Portuguese developed, so I get HOW we got here. I'm just suggesting that UN group looking at coffee machines, room keys, and cash vs. credit take a look at singling up on an Iberian language. Don't even get me started on the other languages in Spain.
App Alert
I want to make sure readers are aware of a really super app for tracking expenses within a group, like the six people I am traveling with. It is called Tricount, and it is essentially a spreadsheet running behind a really intuitive HMI. You enter your group, when someone in the group takes on a group expense, it is logged (with all who participated accounted for) and divided up. Each person's running total is kept, and the app has suggested reimbursements that make each individual whole. In my mind I was conjuring such a thing about a month ago, and wouldn't you know, it already exists
Home
We left for the airport 16 days ago, which represents the longest I've been away since making Easton MD my home some 18 years ago. The trip has been incredible; I've seen amazing things and eaten wonderful things, in company with my bestest travel buddy and latterly with very good friends.
But I miss home. I always do. I know we shouldn't put any stock in astrology, but go look up what it says about Cancers…I am one to a “T". I start to get antsy about being away from home after two or three days. Up until a few months ago, I spent four days a month in California for 11 years and for the last five years or so, each trip took a little more out of me.
Catherine and I talk a lot about extended travel in the future, a month plus. I think the key to success in something like that for me will be for us to find a place and hunker down. Create a new “home" for a spell. I think about how dreadful it must be to go from place to place living out of a suitcase/backpack for months at a time. Hell, living out of a suitcase for 16 days hasn't been a picnic.
Catherine has created an idyllic life for us on the Eastern Shore, or more to the point, she created a life into which I was invited. I love travel, but there is a gravitational attraction to that place that requires increasingly more energy to overcome as time goes by. I've already carved out a “no travel zone" for ten weeks starting in mid June, a time where I'm going to try and live some of the summer life on the water than I see around me, but that I've participated in only sparingly. I need to golf more. I need to paddleboard, in no small measure to work on my balance. I need to eat crabs, often. I need to go to minor league baseball games. I need to let my friends take me sailing, so that over time, I might actually know what I'm doing on a sailboat.
I live in a summer paradise, but I have been lazy about being a part of it. I don't think that will happen this summer.