Tag: Portugal
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Leaving on a Jet Plane
This is the final blog post in this latest travel escapade as we begin the eighteen hour, ass-numbing series of connecting flights back to Chattanooga. Currently, we are sitting on a leg from Porto to Amsterdam dutifully lining our tray tables with KLM’s stingy allotment of South African wines and saying tchau to our last…
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Prós e Contras da Imigração
This one’s for you, Amy. It’s long, so that’s your fault too. Leaving your country for the unknown with little more than a taste for seafood and a tourist’s grasp of the language is an admittedly radical step at this stage of life, but it’s not something we’re doing in haste. Some of you know…
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The Way
I’d be remiss if I spent all this time on the Iberian peninsula and didn’t mention The Way. But first, let’s be absolutely clear that I am not referring to the similarly named, bible thumping, sexually manipulating, Christian cult from Ohio that admirably condones a two-drink minimum. No, in this context, I’m referring to the…
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Play a Trem Song*
If you are not a fan of traveling by foot, much of Europe is going to be inaccessible to you. Even with Uber and the fairly complete network of public transportation, entire neighborhoods of shops and cafes (and esteemed offices of the notary) can only be visited by a labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys.…
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Makin’ Copies
For a country that seemingly has a bidet in every restroom, the Portuguese weirdly embrace the excess of the other kind of paperwork. We had to get some documents notarized yesterday to begin establishing ourselves here. I was a notary in Michigan, so I thought I could use the banter of a fellow professional (wink,…
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Preach it, Brother!
If you spend any amount of screen time reading news feeds and your algorithms indicate a travel bias, you’ll likely come across clickbait articles dissecting the differences between American tourists and European ones. And although admittedly amusing in part, the sites like Buzzfeed probably do more to reinforce cultural stereotypes than an ICE recruitment interview.…
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Graceland
If you were to take the state of Tennessee, spin it clockwise 90 degrees and squint, you’re looking at the basic size, shape, and orientation of Portugal. That thought experiment also puts Memphis (and Graceland, “thank you, thank you very much”) in the northwest corner, right on the Atlantic. That’s precisely where we are looking…
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Portu-gone
Well, it’s time to say goodbye to Portugal and their comically affordable healthcare, their cod-scented grocery stores, and their counterintuitive, rectangular toilets (apparently “a round peg in a square hole” is not so much a metaphor there as it is literal, potty training instructions). And yet, I am admittedly melancholy (as well as 4 mini-bottles…
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Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Since this Iberian odyssey began, we’ve 1) mastered the multi-headed hydra that is the train nexus out of Porto (first class definitely ain’t the worst class), 2) blew most of our tip budget on Ubers and Taxis (where we were exposed to enough saucy, traffic-induced Portuguese to make a Tourette’s sufferer take pause), 3) cursed…
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So SATA to see you go.
There are basically two airlines that fly between the Azores and the mainland on a regular basis. One is TAP, a Brazilian carrier that we have actually flown before in another hemisphere and is memorable because passengers clap each time the plane lands (“Yay, the pilot didn’t kill us!). The other is SATA, which is…
The Hillbilly Viking 