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.