Tag: travel
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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,…
-
Ascension Tension
We took a day off from fact finding and due diligence-ing and went in for some old fashioned, Rick Steves sanctioned, sight seeing. Since Viana do Castelo offers any number of scenic hotspots, we just went ahead and started at the top. Literally. The Sanctuary of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is an architecturally impressive…
-
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…
-
New: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
As we have settled into the first week of our latest Portuguese odyssey, I have been hemming and hawing whether I was even going to blog this particular adventure (and if you’ve ever hemmed and/or hawed at my age, you know the fall risk). Since my entire schtick is Stranger-in-a-Strange-Land/fish-out-of-water observations, I didn’t feel like…
-
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…
-
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…
The Hillbilly Viking 