goodbye, europeland!

last i wrote, willy and i were in budapest, faded outpost of the late great austro-hungarian empire. between then and now, i have undertaken two full days of train rides and am entering my eighth hour in the arrivals and departures lounge at london's gatwick airport. ah, the glamorous life of travel.

this time tomorrow i will be in the homeland and in about 30 hours i will be on the screened-in porch, relaxing with the fam. its a strange feeling to be headed home--a great feeling, don't me wrong, but odd nonetheless--but it is stranger still to be alone and traveling without anyone else. willy and i said our goodbyes last night in the alexanderplatz ubahnhof in berlin, and for the first time in five weeks (since cabo finisterre), i am alone.

to be honest, i'm not sure i like it. this from a girl who LOVES her alone time--relishes it, i think would be a better description. but traveling with anna, abbey, aya, and willy has been, with only a few minor exceptions, absolutely fantastic. when you spend 24 hours a day for weeks on end with someone, you start to anticipate their thoughts, their feelings, what they want to eat...you start to be able to give them a certain look that will send them into instant giggles. you start to talk a little bit like them, walk a little bit like them, and you watch them do the same. i had my doubts about traveling with every single one of the people who i spent my summer with: would we fight? would they turn out to be too spontaneous or too stuck to their itinerary? would we be able to have a conversation after day three? would i even leave europe as their friend???

in every case, the opposite has occurred. as much as i hate to say goodbye to europe, saying goodbye to willy in the ubahnhof was so much harder because it meant the end of this incredible journey that i took with such amazing people. i did not cry, but i felt a hollowness that this wild and wonderful adventure in friendship had come to the end.

all those who made it possible--my family and friends at home, our fellow pilgrims in spain, our hosts in lisbon, barcelona, prague, and bregenz and the delightful people they introduced us to, our fellow travellers and roommates in hostels from dublin to budapest, and most of all to anna, aya, abbey, and willy, who have been beyond excellent travel buddies--deserve my thanks. you have given me a summer filled with laughter, amazement, beauty, heart to hearts, and a kind of complete happiness i have never experienced and a kind of love i can only hope to give back.

america, here i come!

too hot to handle

willy and i arrived in budapest after what amounted to the longest train ride of trip so far. it was not the longest in terms of hours spend staring aimlessly out the window at the countryside rushing by: our trips both to paris and prague were both longer by about 4 or 5 hours. the problem with our trip to budapest was the fact that it was so hot i felt like my skin was melting. willy couldn't sit still and spent most of the trip in the hallway of the carriage, where it was a fraction cooler. in our cabin on the train, furthermore, was the largest german speaking man i have yet to encounter on this trip who smelled strongly of...well, strongly of something not pleasant, who spent much of the trip (although thankfully he disembarked in vienna) talking loudly on his cell phone in strange austrian german that neither willy or i fully understood.

arriving in budapest yesterday afternoon, we were sticky, smelly, and feeling rather overwhelmed by the fact that we could not understand one word of hungarian. luckily, after about an hour of trying to figure out where to buy a three day pass for the metro, trams, and buses, we succeeded in feeding the machine our huge bills (270 florints equal about 1 euro...so 100 euros is 27,000 florints. its a bit strange to take out such HUGE demoninations from an atm! you feel suddenly very rich...) and boarding a bus to our hostel, which is in a residential neighborhood in buda.

our hostel was described as "zany" in our guidebook, but willy and i feel like it would be more accurately described as a "hippie haven". there is a beautiful garden out back and a shaded, leafy patio in front of the hostel. the outside of the building is painted about 8 different colors with a crazy geometric pattern. the garden outback has a fountain and several hammocks, and it would appear that you can sleep outside, should you wish to. since there is a huge music festival here this week (sziget...look it up if you don't know anything about...its pretty sweet!), a lot of the guests are here for that. in our room are two girls from canada, who are were planning on only staying 4 nights and are now here for at least nine with no end in sight-- "we don't want to leave!" they exclaimed. in fact, i think that if they didn't have jobs and school waiting for them at home, they would be happy to stay here forever. according to a sign posted in the kitchen, the record stay is 420 days, so i suppose its possible.

as for me... while i'm not sure i'd want to stay here for 420 days, budapest does seem pretty amazing. it has the appearance of a somewhat faded and derelict neighborhood of a european city, but it is full of all these fabulous colors and bright buildings and parks. like prague, the echoes of communism remain here, even more pronounced than in the czech republic, alongside detailed arabic influenced architecture left over from the turkish occupation which ended in the 17th century. the danube is spanned by a series of absolutely stunning bridges, all overlooked by buda castle up on the hill over the city. its a strange mix of old and new, communist and capitalist...in a lot of ways its like europe, rolled up into one city.

onwards and upwards

willy and i are wrapping up our last day in salzburg and i confess that both of us are starting to feel the pull towards home. after being in europe for two months, its no longer the little things that i miss--although my computer, my books, my cell phone, and a greater variety of clothing certainly would be nice--but the big things. i miss the feeling of home, of being somewhere entirely familiar and completely comfortable. i miss the people who make home...home: my family especially, my naked pasta crew in amherst and my dearest ones at bard, and everyone else.

in other words, as excited as i am to see budapest and to visit berlin and dublin again...its really home that i want to be flying to next.

one week left (more or less). i'll be missing this soon enough.

grime, grandeur, and giggles

so its been a while since my last post--for which i apologize profusely. as it turns out, while on the camino there is the problem of too much time and not enough internet, here the problem is reversed: not enough time to use the internet when one also is trying to see a whole city in one or two days.

so, with two days still left ahead for me and willy here in salzburg, austria, i thought now would be a good time to start catching everyone up on my travels.

barcelona was incredible...so incredible in fact that willy and i tried to leave and just couldn´t. no, literally. we missed our train. feeling like complete idiots (which i guess we were, since it was very clear on our tickets which train station we had to get to and we went to the wrong station), we went back to antiono and carola´s house, the family friends of anna's where we had been staying. thankfully they not only let us back into their house, but also force fed us ice cream and juice and made sure we were able to get up in time for our early early train to france in the morning. luckily, we actually ended up saving money in the bargain, although we lost one of our two days in paris. if you have been to paris before, you know what i know: one day is not enough. not even close to enough.

however, we made the best of the situation by getting up at 9am with aya (who met us in the train station the previous day) and spending the next fifteen hours seeing as much of paris as we could possibly squeeze into one day, and to be honest, i'm sort of impressed with how much we managed to squeeze in. we explored several neighborhoods, a steeet fair, art musuems, a couple churches, hung out in a park, ate dinner on a backstreet, and ended the day on top of the eiffel tour overlooking the city of lights, giddy with how ridiculously high up in the air we were. if you´ve never been all the way to the top, its worth the 12 euros.

the following day we embarked on a day of train connections to prague, where joanna tanger, bard grad '07 greeted us in the train station. she has been living there for about 8 mos., so we had a "native" praguer who could show us around. our first intro to prague involved a scrounge for change in order to buy our metro tickets. what kind of metro station won't let you buy train tickets without exact change from the ticket counter? prague, apparently.

prague was beautiful--its such a stange mix of eastern and western europe. the buildings are beautiful and unspoiled by war, but then the trams are communist in style, as are the streets and the kiosks. its seems, just every so slightly, grimy and a little bit faded. it has the air a city in decline that is also so alive and vibrant. it was amazing to have an apartment to stay in, not to mention a good friend to show us around and put us up! we spent most of our four days exploring the city and took a side trip to a town about an hour from prague where there is a church decorated entirely from human bones. apparently, the family who owns the estate the church sits on wanted to redecorate the interior of the church in the 19th century and they asked the designer to also get rid of the 20,000 odd skeltons of plague victims that had been buried in the cyrpt several centuries earlier. well, all i can say is that you can't say the guy wasn't resourceful and that the result is surprising less macabre that you might expect, although definitely not entirely creep-free.

four nights of homecooked meals, czech television, and so many adolescent jokes...and then it was off to vienna! if prague was slightly grimy, vienna was grandeur itself. everything in vienna has an air of being calculated to impress, intimidate, and overwhelm you. i have never encountered quite so much gold leaf, white marble, or so many pristine facades in my life--it is an incredible city. we spent the morning in the leopold museum, then headed off to explore the city a bit, including the discovery of several opera related events (these viennese are serious about music). i feel like we barely skimmed the surface of vienna--its really too big and too overwhelming to take in--and we also were overdue for certain activities such as laundry and the purchase of cell phone funds, so we spent some time working that out in less glamourous locations in vienna. rest assured, i'll be back!

now, we are in beautiful mountains salzburg, where i can report that the hills really are alive with the sound of music. we hung out on a mountain in the alps for most of today, having taken the most dazzling (read: terrifying) cable car ride up the side of rather craggy mountain top. we couldn't even believe where we were. the views were, in a word, astounding. mind blowing. ridiculous. it was sensational. we ate lunch on the edge of a cliff, drank the bottle of wine we found in willy's locker at our fabulous hostel, entertained the ravens who seemed to flock around us (or our food, more likely), before heading back down. willy and i are planning on spending another two days here, which is good because this city is actually the prettiest and quantiest place we've been to so far and without question also the most scenic. we are now figuring out what do post-budapest...visit willy's friends in bregenz? return to berlin? go elsewhere in germany? part ways?

there are only ten days left...remarkable that our time here is almost gone! i am looking forward to being home again soon, but there are no alps in western mass, and that, to me, seems most unfortunate.

roadtrip!

its been a week since i last posted, which feels as unbelievable to me as the fact that i am leaving spain in only a little more than 24 hours. what? how did that happen? how has time gone by so fast that it is almost august? incredible.

on the 25th, abbey and willy arrived in santiago after driving all night. they were absolutley in the most ridiculous state of mind i have ever since either of them in, and their insanity was infectious. by the end of the day, anna and i were speaking in a strange half english half nonsense language that none of the four of us seem to be able to break ourselves out of. at least i don´t have to go back to school and try to sound smart in the fall. what a relief.

after taking them home so they could shower, we all went out for chinese food, which in spain tastes exactly like spanish chinese food. that is to say, its like chinese food in the states only without any flavor and crunchy where it shouldn´t be. we decided to walk around santiago a little bit, attempt to find somewhere to buy bread and cheese for dinner (even though it was a sunday and nothign is open on sundays), and see a tiny fraction of the city. instead we abandoned our plans to hunt for bread because we found a huge ferris wheel and a carnival to accompany it right in the middle of santiago. replete with small children holding balloons, cotton candy stands, strange games with huge stuffed animals as prizes, and definitely more than a few rides that are illegal in the states, this carnival was a serious find. who cares if steam was coming out of the electrical sockets on one of the rides or if the ferris wheel was making inauspiscious noises? we were having the time of our lives in the pouring rain!

we spent a few more days together in santiago before willy, abbey, and i hopped into pepe, our fantastic two door car, to begin our drive from santiago to valencia. little did we know that we were about to encounter more magic than i even knew existed. we took a highway that cut through portugal and got off for lunch just over the border, where we found a castle perched atop a beautiful little city with winding streets and colorful houses. we were utterly astounded by the beauty of portugal, and in the northern mountains found vista after vista that made us pull over and take a dozen pictures each. it felt like we must have done something right in our previous lives in order to be having this experience. picutres would only barely describe how amazingly beautiful it all was and words certainly can barely capture the moment.

it was not the last time we would be in the mountians before the day was out, but we left portugal in a daze of happiness inspired by nature only to find the best gas station of all time just across the border. hoping to beg some bread and cheese from the bar there, we instead found a fully equiped general store. for those of you who have been to dan and whit´s in norwich, vt, it was like that...only better. since we were in the middle of nowhere in spain of the side of a spanish highway. we bought snacks and cards and willy bought a new pair of sneakers. truth.

we drove up to the top of the mountians just outside of madrid around midnight, where we ate dinner, almost got run over by bulls, and saw madrid in all of its night time glory. seriously. magic was everywhere....especially considering that we almost ran out of gas, until we suddenly found a gas station just at the right moment with the nicest hotel for super cheap just across the street. we all feel asleep feeling absolutely marvelous and woke to a beautiful morning with clear skies and sunshine.

we drove the rest of the way to valencia, stopping for the night on abbey´s floor (although we weren´t supposed to be there...and if her madre came home, willy´s game plan was to either a) pretend we were cleaners or b) push her over and run out the door into the streets of valencia. in his boxers. so maybe game plan is not really what we should call it. i didn´t really have any kind of game plan. after getting a sunburn on the coast of the meditterean (spelling?), willy and i said goodbye to abbey (tear!) and got on a train coming north to barcelona. we were welcomed by anna´s family friends with a shower (which we needed. badly.) and a homecooked meal.

august 1st, we´ll be in paris!!!

the end of the world

well i have been to the end of the world and lived to tell the tale.

i arrived in cabo finisterre, which people used to think was the westernmost point in europe, last wednesday for a few days of r&r by the sea. as the result of my still quite swollen achilles and the significant pain they were causing me, i decided that the best option was for me to take a bus to finisterre, or more specifically to the town on the instead of its harbor, fisterra, and wait for anna who had elected to walk the remaining 90km. had we been able to go at a slower pace, i would have walked--i wished i´d been able to!--but in the end, my health mattered more to me than anything else and because the towns are spaced farther apart on that stretch of the camino, it would have been impossible for me to walk all the way.

fisterra is a fairly small town right on the coast--in fact it has coast on two sides. if you google map cabo finisterre (and you should, ´cause its sweet looking), you will see that it sticks out into the ocean like a finger pointing southwest into the atlantic ocean. fisterra sits right in the middle of that "finger" and so has coast on both sides. once anna arrived on saturday morning, we met up with a few other ex-caminoers our age (joe and brendan from limmerick and galway, laura from boston, and lisa from amsterdam) to swim in the bay on one side (one word: COLD) and then had a picnic dinner on the other side, watching the sun slide into the atlantic sometime just before 10pm.

after our picnic was over, the six of us headed down to the beach itself, where people were setting up a bonfire in the sand. it was an incredible experience to sit around the fire and talk about life and the world and this THING we did, which was now over. some people brought guitars out and started singing, others sat in silence, we sat drinking wine, and others burned their clothes that had survived the camino...if barely. anna discarded her stained t-shirt, others their jackets, pants, at ripped hat--all of them beloved but, well gone.

we are now in portugal, having really left the camino ourselves, having a few days of at home time (as it were) in the apartment of a family friend of anna´s mom in lisbon. so far, we have spent a night out on the town with dana (the family friend), a night in vegging, a day shopping, and a day doing errands and seeing the sights. lisbon is beautiful--coming from the end of the earth to the place where the age of discovery in europe began seems fitting--and its been amazing having a home to stay in!

tomorrow, back up to santiago de compostela to meet up with willy and abbey, and then the next phase of the great european adventure commences!

besos!

santiago de compostela

the road has to end somewhere.

objectively, this is a fact. no road goes on forever, eventually mountains and oceans and forests and national wildlife refuges get in the way. i´ve known all along that eventually we would get to santiago, and that although we would extend our camino to cabo finisterre on the coast of the atlantic (about 90km from here), that essentially i would eventually have to finish this road. the journey would, by its very definition, come to an end.

but i didn´t think it would happen so soon.

walking is such a different kind of travel--you suspend the moment of arrival in your final destination because each day has its own destination. sometimes all you are capable of is thinking to yourself (quite literally): one more step. one more step. one more step, but still there is always an immediate destination and now...we are here and the immediate destination is our final one. santiago is the end of the road, and for the first time in almost two weeks, we will sleep in the same place for more than three nights. how strange to think of actually seeing a city, rather than passing through it...and that we will come back again for three more nights is astounding. in total, we will spend about 6 days and nights here--and maybe more.

the camino has momentarily suspended time for me--i hardly know what time of day it is, let alone what day, and most importantly, i haven´t had time to be concerned about the future. all my worries about what to do with my life, how i will pay the bills and find dance classes and find dancers and become world famous (kidding!) have been erased by this constant need to live in the present. the camino prevents us from really being absorbed in anything other than the conversation we are having, the sensation of the road beneath our feet and our sound of our breath, and the beauty that surrounds us everyday which i have never had to find time to notice. its all of these things that have made this experience what it is, but the people and community here, the natural beauty, the coziness of these tiny towns we pass through in five minutes or less, the stillness of foggy mornings and the heat of the sun are sensations which have made every pain i´ve had, the swollen state of my achilles tendons, and my exhaustion each afternoon not only seem worth it, but seem blessed.

compostela means field of stars, and that is what i have been in, each day and each hour of this journey.

so little, so much

unbelievably, anna and i are only 50km from santiago. i am literally not sure how this happened. weren´t we being jostled awake on a french train at the spanish border just the other day? ridiculous.

the road is so much more crowded now that we are out of sarría, the last place to start and still receive a compostelum (certificate of completion), including so many more slackpackers and the like. despite that though, i have managed to walk most of the past few days walking alone, in part because i am so slow with all my injuries and blisters, and in part because i am simply enthralled by the scenery and the people. last night, anna and i split up for the night and i stayed in an albergue run by a christian organization that provides free housing and food to pilgrims. it was absolutely magnificent to be holding a conversation in german, spanish, english, swedish, and italian all at once around a table of homemade food, complete with jokes and laughter and this sense of community. there were a few familiar faces--some people who have caught back up with us or who we have now caught up with again--and everyone shares the same sense of excitement. we are all so close!

i´m still in a lot of pain from my achilles and have experienced quite a bit of numbness in my toes at the end of the day also. i wish i had trail shoes with me, rather than hiking shoes, and while my back has been great the whole time, you can bet that next time i will carry less weight...

anna and i will be in santiago by sunday for the pilgrims mass, but its unlikely i´ll be able to post before then. be well, be safe, and wherever you are in the world, i wish you a buen camino.

a view from the top

last night we spent at the top of the world.

at least, thats what it felt like. o cebreiro is a tiny little town--okay, its a village--but its literally on top of a mountain. on one side of town, you have views over the entire valley that lies in the provience of castilla y león, and a two minute walk through "town" and you find yourself looking out over the entire valley that lies in the provience of galacia. the fog was rolling in, the wind was wiping, and while the climb was certainly no everest, it was as filled with the same sensation of success.

we met up with our canadian moms, ana and eleanor for desert, braving the heavy rain and mist that rolled in the late afternoon, unfortunately obscuring the view. we were exhausted and cold from our climb, and my newly diagnosed "inflammed achilles tendon" (i actually went a doctor in villafranca--which was free! i love europe) gave me some trouble to be sure up the mountain. however, after a cold shower and a nap, the world seemed much brighter, and dinner with our favorite adoptive parents was icing on a very scenic cake. we spent the day walking down the mountain with them, and it was nice to return to our normal pace--22k today. we are now only 133k from santiago--which really is only a few more days. its amazing how fast the time is flying.

it feels so strange to think that in some other part of my life, people get up and do different things everyday but in the same place. here we go somewhere new literally everyday but we are doing the same thing everyday. its actually the most relaxing, if not the most physically healthy, vacation i have ever taken. we simply wake up and walk.

on another note however, we may have become infested with bed bugs. we need to see a doctor to be sure...but we are suspicious. and covered in welts.

alright, well its bed time for me. i would say sleep tight and don´t let the bed bugs bite, but well, it might be too late for that.

¡muchas besos a todos!

one week and counting

...well we´re still alive, so thats something.

its been officially one full week of walking for anna and i at this point, and to be honest, i am much worse for the wear than she is. anna looks tan, healthy, and has a stride to her step that i envy immensely (she just knocked on wood). i, on the other hand, am blistered, am finally feeling some pain in my broken foot area, had two days of unbelievable pàin in my hip rotators as we went over the highest point in the mountains, and now seem to have acquired a tightness in my achilles tendon that is as mentally distressing as it is physically painful. its also swollen. AWESOME. basically, to sum up, i am a limping mess. this is frustrating, as one might imagine, for me because i wish everything didn´t hurt so much (although my back and shoulders seem to be doing okay...at least until tomorrow, when they will probably develop a strange rash much like the one on my left ankle) and for anna because she could probably go twice as fast without my poor little limping body.

the only thing distracting me from all my painful ailments is that it is so beautiful here that at least five times a day at a bare minimum, anna or i or both of us stop and just say, "um, can we just pause for a moment and LOOK AT THIS VIEW!?"

as we came over the mountains two days ago, the views from the trail were so spectacular that i was able to momentarily blink back the tears that were forming in my eyes from the pain in my hip and i was able to recognize how incredibly lucky i am to be doing this camino. remember, i was in so much pain at this point that i had to tell myself to take every single step and i still felt this lucky. i spent the night with our canadian friends/trail moms ana and eleanor while anna h. went farther along. the town, el cerdo, has only 14 people living in, which is typical of many of the towns that we pass through. the old woman who owned the supermarket gave us free plums and candy and offered to make us dinner for free. these are the kind of people who you find along the camino. there are new friends every night and locals help point the way every morning as we walk. we can´t believe that we are more than a third of the way through: we only have 10 days or so left! eek!

following us around is a pack of spanish high school students. i can only really describe this phenomenon by calling it a kind of spanish-catholic (is there another kind of spanish?) birthright/teen tour of northern spain that gives spanish high schoolers a chance to gain college credits in exchange for walking the camino. they just sang "knock knock knocking on heaven´s door" with spanish accents. priceless. perhaps they will serenade us tomorrow morning at 5am, as they were kind enough to do this morning. we can only pray. its actually kind of nice to see them everyday.

sophie, this is a comment mostly for you, but all of you pioneer valley kids will understand me when i describe the albergue we are staying in tonight: it looks like a classic leverett house. kind of swiss family robinson meets dirty hippies meets religious icons meets new wave vegetarianism. its pretty rocking/funky. the town we are in tonight, villafranca del bierzo, is an absolutely classically spanish mountian town: tiny winding one way streets that are for some reason two way superhighways of speeding cars, hills all around that are greener than green, and plazas filled with cafes and archways, and everything is on an extreme slant, since the whole town is on a hill.

tomorrow, we head out of town and start up the final mountain. it will take us about three days to get over the mountain, since we are taking a slower pace for my battered body (although anna might want to go faster, right now i literally can´t), but once we are on the other side, we will be in sarria, the last place new pilgrims can technically start the camino, and only 110km kilometers (about 5 days) from santiago.

okay! my turn at the internet is over--another pilgrim awaits her turn. lots of love to all--i find that two and half weeks into being here, what i miss most are your voices and your stories. tell me everything. send me emails. send me baseball scores. the outside world seems very far away.

over the hills and far away

its a pretty incredible thing to get to the top of a steep hill and look behind you and realize that as far as your eyes can see, you have walked. in fact, you have walked farther than your eyes can see, and its not even noon. its a powerful sensation, and also rather empowering, to feel that you can walk so far. the countryside is beautiful beyond measure. often, when we walk through a tiny town, a block will just end and the little familiar yellow arrow points us onwards. towns just end, abruptly, into the fields that surround the camino.

walking in the morning means we get to see little towns just coming awake, farmers in their fields and ubiquitous old spanish ladies with their thick wool socks and sturdy little black shoes tettering their way across cobblestone plazas. they call out "¡buen camino!" (good road!) and "¡un abrazo por el santo!" (a hug for saint james!) as we pass. sometimes they stop us to ask if anna is spanish and where i am from (they usually think i am german) and to wish us luck. i have to say, people here are incredibly friendly and sweet, and my fellow camino-ers likewise are supportive and friendly. at dinner tonight anna and i held a halting and awkward conversation with fransisco, a spaniard on the road, who is doing the camino for a second time, and who speaks little english. my spanish is saturated with accidental german and anna´s is likewise rusty, so we made an odd trio, yet we managed to discuss everything from school, to families, to the camino itself, to sparks and ghetto predators (willy and grace, i kid you not). we met lots of americans on the road today as well and ate lunch with a california boy named eric. i met a couple from santa cruz (kalia! i thought of you!), and we contintued to weave a path with our new canadian friends eleanor and anna, and rheo from hawaii.

the meseta is finally coming to an end after three days of straight red dust roads. this morning we began climbing up into the hills and by a this time tomorrow we will be in the galician mountains., watching the germany-spain european cup in a local bar. i´m not entirely sure how to feel about this game: if either team was playing someone else, i would be routing for germany or spain, but since they are playing each other and they are my two favorite teams, i am feeling very torn. my heart is with germany, always, but i am IN spain on the camino, and i do love the spanish team also. ah, the conflict!

all in all, it was a good day, despite being even more sore and exhausted than i was yesterday, and despite the fact that i can´t seem to get my blisters to heal....suggestions?

did we walk 60km?

yesterday as anna and i shouldered our packs and walked out of león, we passed a small man who pointed to a sign on the wall of a building that said "santiago de compostela 350km." tonight, outside of the restaurant where we ate our pilgrim´s meal we saw a sign that said "santiago de compostela 290km." anna and i agree on this fact: we have not walked 60km. we have walked about 37km since beginning--i´m not sure of exact km to mile conversions but you all have calculators and we are estimating about 20 miles. knowing me, thats some distance.

we followed the alternative route out of león, which meant walking a little farther, but also meant not walking along the highway. this was probably a good decision, for scenic reasons, or at least it seemed so for a the first hour. around this point we realized the scenery was not going to change anytime soon. it was hot yesterday, beyond hot, and there was no shade. by the time we stopped for lunch around quarter of noon, i had already drunk 2 liters of water and was still thirsty. here on the mesesta of spain, the first thing you feel is the heat and the sun, but the second is the thirst. towns appear as shimmering mirages on the horizon, little red tiled roofs peeping out over the top of the next hill. as they grow in the distance, you begin to hope wildly that they are the town you have planned to stop in or stay in because your feet are aching and in my case (anna seems fine) your blisters are killing you and every step begins to feel like its own private agony. meanwhile, the sun just gets hotter and hotter.

today was doubtless better than yesterday. we didn´t have to walk through an industrial park to get out of town and into the countryside, and we managed to do all of our walking in the morning on paths that took us through cultivated fields and shade (thankfully!). nonetheless my feet were hurting horrificially by the time we arrived in hospital de orbigo, and after some frustration getting into town itself (a wrong turn took us into some weird field for about 3o minutes, which feels like hours when all you want to do is get into town, but before long we were walking across the famous bridge in town over a "river" (translation: dried up stream) and on our way to a little oasis. there is a garden in this albergue and the church next door smells like gardinias because some little old lady fills them all the vases everyday. the courtyard is cobbled and sweet, and anna and i spent most of the afternoon in deep conversation with two canadian woman, named oddly enough eleanor and anna. we both got accidently sunburned, but otherwise had a delightful afternoon and evening in the company of two women who could easily be our mothers (they both have children my age or older).

this is what is most incredible about this journey: we are some the youngest people on the camino and in many ways have little in common with those around us, many of whom we can only communicated in vague pointing gestures and simple words, and yet we all share this experience of being tired and worn out and yet somehow more alive for the whole experience.

its someone else´s turn to use the computer, so i´ll sign off. 19km tomorrow!

besos.

hallo/allo/hola

its been a few days since i last posted, but since then i have left berlin (sad face), and gone to paris, where anna and i spent a whirlwind day in the city, ate dinner, and left again. this afternoon we arrived in léon, españa, where we will begin our journey on foot tomorrow. its starting to feel real.

my head is now one big mush of languages--i say merci when i mean gracias, enschuldigung when i mean pardoname, and becoming more and more confused about where i am everytime i open my mouth. its all a bit much.

anyway, i can´t write too much right now: anna i need to track down housing and food and find somewhere to watch the game tonight. i´ll write more again soon, i promise, as soon as i am in a town with internet again. in the meantime, i am increasing my fluency in the international language of gesture, drinking lots of water, and trying to kick the runny nose and cough i have picked up in the past 48 hours.

keep me in your thoughts--tomorrow we begin our life as pelegrinos...

bard in berlin

it turns out that bard has moved its campus to berlin. i mean, thats what it feels like. anna and i are here, staying with aya mckeen, visiting with and hanging out with willy crichton and emma hagendorf, as is abbey hart. emma lives with sara frier, and somewhere else in this city is natalia dzodziak. camilla geld might be around. shay howell was just here and later this week, after i have left, jess loudis will be here too.

friday was abbey's 21st birthday, and you can bet that we celebrated with style. in fact we celebrated from the time it became her birthday here to the time it was no longer her birthday in new york.

we (anna, aya, and ella) met up with willy, abbey, and willy's brother harlan outside of the hauptbahnhof (main train station) and headed to the edge of tiergarten, a large park in west berlin, along the banks of the spree, where we proceeded to watch the police and tourist boats meander past, sipping beers, and snacking on "african flavored" chips. it was a beautiful day filled with laughter, sunshine, and friends. anna and aya left around 6 to go grocery shopping, and the rest of us headed to willy's neighborhood to check out his flat (very impressive) before we headed to the main turkish neighborhood in berlin, kreuzberg, to watch the turkey-croatia game and score some schwarma for dinner.

for the record, berlin is the fourth largest turkish city in the world, so this game was kind of Big Deal. we found a bar/restaurant with lots of chairs and a huge television screen, and having eating dinner in a playground, we all settled in to watch the game. willy's parents joined us, as did about 35-40 turks as the game started. it was maybe the most boring game in the history of football. there were about 10 minutes that were exciting, and since the game went to double overtime and sudden death, that meant there were about 118 minutes of boredom, plus halftime and the breaks between overtime.

with three minutes left in the second overtime, the croatians scored. you could literally feel the sadness coming from the turks sitting all around us. it was almost impossible to come back with so little time left. to their credit, however, the turkish team held it together, bidding again and again for a shot. in the LAST second of injury time, with an impressive pass, the turks scored. had they missed, the game would have been over. their goal meant that we now went to sudden death and that everything around us exploded with screaming and jumping and dancing and all the turks in germany freaking out. this explosion of excitement was matched by the each goal the turks made in sudden death and each miss by the croatian team, and then on large scale when the croatians missed their last shot. suddenly we were leaping out of seats, screaming, and freaking out as well. the only comparison i can think of in sporting experience is game 4 of the world series in 2004. if you live in red sox nation, you know what i am talking about.

as we boarded the ubahn to go back to willy's, we encountered rioting, dancing in the streets, riot police, and turkish fans singing and banging on the windows of ubahn cars. it was absolute joyful chaos. on wednesday the turks play germany to advance to the finals. germany and especially berlin might....implode. pray for aya's safety as she is a deutschland fan in a türkiye section of the city.

the rest of the night was spent in the strangest club i can imagine encountering (bunny suits? thongs over short shots? bathrobes? gold lamé? tutus? leopard print? tiaras? where are we? only in BERLIN.) dancing and celebrating the birth of abbey gail hart. willy, harlan, abbey, emma and i ended up having a sleepover at emma's, the perfect end to a truly great, and truly berlin, day.

check back later for more on our berlin adventures. i'll post again later today.

Deutschland, Deutschland

thursday morning at 3am, anna and i were dressing silently in the dark of our hostel room, trying not to wake our hostel roommates.

actually, we weren't dressing. we went to sleep in our clothes.

why this early wake up call? well, a month ago, anna and i found a FREE flight from dublin to berlin. well, free flight equals 6:05am flights, but it was still "cheaper than a cab from the upper east side to battery park city" and less than our taxi last night home from emma's apartment in berlin...but i am getting ahead of myself.

getting to this early flight should not have been an issue. after all, there is bus that runs once an hour from only a 15 minute walk from our hostel directly to the airport. now, let me clarify some things about dublin public transportation. it would APPEAR that dublin has great public transportation, but you would never know because there are no comprehensive schedules and no map. anna and i were baffled by this. its not so much even that there are no maps for tourists; there are no maps or schedules for people who live dublin. i don't get it. the bus that we were supposed to take to the airport came once an hour, but did anyone know what time? no. we asked the following people: the concierge at our hostel and the fancy-schmancy hotel where the bus stops, the central bus station, and a bus driver on one of the airport buses. no one had the same answer, and no one seemed to know for sure if their "answer" was the right one.

not helpful. so anna and i woke at 3 in hopes of catching a bus by 4:15. in the end, getting nervous, we shared a taxi with five others and spent half as much money, making it to the airport in good time. in the end, anna and i think that we spent time awake, in city center dublin, for every hour except 6-7pm when we napped both days.

ryanair did NOT loose our luggage, thankfully, and we arrived in berlin, city of my heart!, to find aya waiting for us at the baggage claim. after hugs and excited, we bought tickets for the bus and headed back to her apartment to nap (we were a little tired, after our early morning adventures on the streets of ireland's capital). around 1, we woke, showered, and prepared a picnic lunch for ourselves, imogen, and willy's family at a little park only a block or two from aya's apartment.

it was this beautiful little palatial park, with sloped lawns and neatly groomed hedges, and it was so lovely to see willy and imogen and aya and to meet the rest of willy's family (i had met his dad several times before). there was something about it that made me feel full and warm and gushy inside...maybe it was the nutella and strawberries.

later that night, after dinner at aya's, the three of us went to emma hagendorf's to watch the germany-portugal game in the european cup. it was an incredible game, well played by both teams, and incredible to be in germany again during Serious Soccer Season (SSS). During SSS, the germans cover themselves in facepaint, wear only "schwartz, rot, gold", the colors of the german flag, and run around singing songs with lyrics as poetic and thoughtful as "deutschland, deutschland, deutschland, deutschland." we naturally joined it, dancing around the apartment every time the germans scored, air fiving the super cute 7 year olds who were also celebrating across the street in their window, and screaming every time someone set off a firework or shot an air gun--which seemed to happen a lot, irregardless of what was happening in the game.

germany won 3-2, which caused a lot of yelling and celebrations, including several that stopped traffic in emma's neighborhood. despite the rain and the forced taxi ride because the s-bahn had stopped running, it was a night of elation.

i fell asleep hearing the chants of the germans ringing in my head. "deutschland, deutschland, deutschland...."

its a small world after all

so anna and i are staying in a hostel called "jacob's inn" in city center dublin and this is my opportunity to officially recommend it. i slept incredibly well last night (the guiness may have helped) and we made friends with the other girls in our bunk room incredibly fast. this is what i love about hostel culture--everyone is there with the intent of getting to know the person sleeping in the bunks next to them, and everyone is eager to make friends and have adventures. i was sort of worried before, having never done the hostel thing, but now i am totally all about it, which is good, cause its all i'll have for several weeks on the camino.

so these are our new friends: karen and susan, cousins originally from hawai'i who now live in oregon and new york respectively; and a pair of talkative, funny, "non-mormons" from utah named cynthia and misty ("i am not a porn star, despite my name"). we went out with them to a bar called temple bar last night. temple bar is such a big deal in dublin that they named an entire district of the city after it--and its actually that cool, a mix of tourist and locals, live music and heavy drinking, lots of weird rooms connecting to each other decorated in a thousand different ways, all in a old section of the city with cobblestone streets. the italians were being celebratory (their team just advanced in the european championship), but to ward of their unwanted advances, we made friends with a another american who had just arrived, a 20-yr old named andy who played ultimate at the university of wisconsin. his team just won the national championship, and you can bet that anna and i "talked shop" with him about ultimate for a while. i explained that i was from amherst, and he lit up.

A: "my roommate in the fall is a kid from amherst!"
E: "no way! who?"
A: "jeremiah berlin. do you know him?"

to be clear, i do not "know" jeremiah berlin. it is likely that we have met, and i certainly know who he is. we have probably even had conversations before. this is especially likely because we went to elementary school together as well as high school and while he is two years younger, in a school of less than 200, you know everyone. his sister is an ultimate player in my brother's class. i have watched him play. I wouldn't say we are buddy buddy, but yes, i know him, and at a school of 50,000 students, he is living this fall with the boy i just met by fluke in a bar full of 200 people.

bars in foreign cities are the ideal place to discover that it is, after all, a very small world.

Dublin!

hello hello from dublin!

anna and i arrived here almost 8 hours ago--which means our flight landed at 5am. there are many benefits to flying early: no customs lines; you get to see the city awake; and you can almost convince yourself that the reason you are so tired is because you "woke" up at 5am, which is an absurd time no matter who you are. we have spend most of the day walking around, having dropped off our bag and registered at our hostel, jacob's inn, which is only a block from the central bus stop. we bought breakfast supplies at the grocery store on our 7:00 to 8:00am stroll through our hostel's neighborhood and then searched for a park to rest in, eventually settingly on the college green at trinity college. after b'fast, we had some tea/hot cocca at a coffee shop, did some journal entries for a good while, and caught up on the sports news from the day before, mainly for me, who is rapidly reentering into my obsession with int'nat'l soccer (DEUTSCHLAND UEBER ALLES!). anna and i are hoping to find somewhere to watch the game tonight between holland and romania or italy and france--either way a good match. if romania wins, they advance, along with the netherlands. if they lose or draw, then france or italy has a chance. should be good stuff.

for those of you uninterested in soccer, dublin has plenty of other things to offer it. its a nice walking city and beautiful old buildings everywhere. having come from nyc, i confess it feels...small scale. but regardless, its a good breaking ground for the behemouth that is berlin, and we are able to get some logistical things done here, in english, that we might find very difficult in berlin or spain (like eurail reservations, figuring out how to use my international cell phone, etc. etc. etc.)

i miss home already, but it feels great to be here. its strange to think that i won't have a "home" from now until the end of august, but somehow that feels appropriate with ending of my bard home and figuring out where my next home will be. lots of x's and o's to all--let me know how you are doing as well.

Commence!

This spring, in a fit of insanity and sleep deprivation while I frantically worked on my senior projects, I decided that it would be a good idea to join my friend Anna Henschel as she hiked across northern Spain on the Way of St. James, or as it is called in Spanish, El Camino de Santiago. Ever since spending a summer in Spain when I was seventeen, I have wanted to walk this pilgrimage. Not for religious reasons (anyone who knows me would say that I have never been a religious person, although spiritual might be accruate), but for...fun.

Fun is a relative word in this instance. Fun is a little over 300km (~190 miles) of heat and dust and exhaustion; fun is blisters and post-fractured foot pain; fun is a (still) sprained ankle dealing with up to 15 miles a day; fun is walking, all day every day for almost a month. Anna and I aren't even doing the whole thing, and it will still be a huge and monumental challenge. However, there is another side to this, which is that the Camino is the perfect opportunity for me, at this huge transition in my life, to see the world in a totally new way, and consequentially (I hope) to see myself in a new way also.

Its terrifying and exciting at the same time. I am gripped with nerves about walking so much on a foot and ankle which have not entirely healed and which I fractured/sprained only two months ago (three months from when we begin). I am worried about running out of money, running out of medical tape, running out of contact solution, not being able to find Willy and Abbey* when we do get to Santiago (*dear friends of mine from Bard who are coming to meet us for the feast days) and quite simply afraid of being unable to finish. I am not a hiker or even an outdoorsy person, yet the physical challenge of this experience, in addition to terrifying me, also gives me such joy. I cannot wait to see how my body responds to pushing itself to its limits. As someone who is fascinated by human motion and physicality, this is a huge test for me, to see what may or may not be possible for my own body.

I hope to be able to find internet cafes so that I can post regularly on this blog along the way and keep anyone who might be interested updated on my travels. After Willy and Abbey meet Anna and I in Santiago de Compostela, I will be traveling for almost another full month throughout Europe (Barcelona, Paris, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, and Dublin...or at least thats the plan right now!). I needed to do something this summer that wasn't a place I knew, i.e. wasn't Bard and wasn't Amherst but was an adventure.

So, here's to adventure, and to commencement!