Running Out Of Gas

Pray to whoever it is you believe in that if you ever run out of gas in a foreign country that it is Portugal. Now I don't make a habit of running on empty so I can't compare the services of other nations, but Portugal does a pretty damn good job of helping those in distress. Too bad for me and my traveling companion we weren't aware of it until after our ordeal was over. We could have saved ourselves a few hours of stress and been on our merry little way.

Cruising along the highway reading Harry Potter aloud to entertain us, I feel the car lose power and just crawl to a stop 100 meters later. I look at my friend the driver, and he says, "Uh, I think we ran out of gas", and I'm thinking to myself how the hell did that happen. Yes I was annoyed, but that wasn't going to solve anything, so we decided he would walk to the gas station since he remembered a previous sign saying it was about 2 km away. I would wait in the car in case the polic came.

During an hour of waiting the police had in fact come and set up the hazard triangle warning and tried to communicate with me to figure out what happened. I saw a distress phone, called it and spoke with the woman telling her that my friend had left quite a while ago and hadn't returned with gas. She said she would send the road patrol people.

By this time I had visions of calling my friend's mother and telling her that her son had disappeared somewhere in Portugal. When the road patrol people got there they told me the priorly mentioned gas station was actually 20 km away, which isn't very walkable. They asked for a description of my friend and were off to find him, get us gas and come back. Fast forward another hour - still no sign of anyone and the sun is setting.

Enter extreme paranoia. I go to the distress phone again. The woman tells me they found my friend, got gas and would return soon. Another hour plus and they finally show up. My friend tells me that they had to stop and help everyone along the way, and he just patiently sat there with a can of gas in his lap.

Turns out if we had just used the distress phone in the first place the road patrol would have given us enough gas to get to the next station. Go figure.

The Most Interesting Of Places

A little over 2 years ago I had the opportunity to go to Cuba, and believe it or not it was all legal. Once upon a time (before W changed the rules) you could travel to Cuba for "educational" reasons. So a few of my fellow architectural graduate students and I got together and planned a trip to Cuba for educational reasons. And it was educational - we did, after all, take in many of the countries architectural splendors and we even dragged along a professor for the fun.

Now Cuba, by leaps and bounds, is the most interesting place I have ever been, but I would never say it is my favorite place, or even the nicest place. It was interesting in that the culture and the way the people lived was like nothing I had ever been privy to. When visiting other places, even if they were in the 3rd world, I could see the influence of American culture, or even some would say global culture. These things - jeans, post 1980's cars, cell phones, internet cafes, McDonald's, even CocaCola at restaurants, just to name a few are seemingly nonexistent. To be sure, I did see these influences here and there, but not too often. It just very interesting to be in a place where a dictator is praised by the people, neighborhood narks proudly display their credentials above their doorways, and tourists are more or less forced to only eat in certain restaurants and travel in specific taxis.

Grafitti in Trinidad - this was a pretty common sight

Another interesting thing that was clear when I returned stemmed from a conversation I had with my mother. She asked if it was really poor, and by this I knew she meant the kind of poverty we'd seen on numerous trips to visit family in Mexico. It was strange because, yes there is poverty, but not the kind that leaves people begging in the street. It was clear that people weren't living in luxury, but at the same time they weren't destitute either. In fact I saw no homeless people when walking around the streets of Havana or Santiago or Trinidad. I didn't even see beggars, except the occasional woman or child asking for a bar of soap, a pen of all things, or the jeans I was wearing. Apparently these items are in demand? I read somewhere that they aren't really, but Americans always arrive with a stockpile, so the locals know to ask for it.

There are many anecdotes I will surely share about Cuba, like racing down the Malecon in Coco taxis after devouring some ice cream at the Coppelia, or being asked if I want pork, little pork, or big pork at a restaurant to explaining to our guide why a visit to the National Art School was a must, but I really just wanted to touvh on why Cuba is the most interesting place I have ever been...so far. Maybe it was the fact that I had to pre-arrange our entire trip with the Cuban government, which was a battle in itself, or the fact that 15 of us (13 of whom were women) got the most bizarre looks everywhere we went, or the guide who accompanied us and couldn't understand why we wanted to look at so many buildings (we actually ended up giving him a book about Cuban architecture in the end because he told us how much he had learned from us and enjoyed our company, claiming he felt we were more the tour guides than him) or the fact that Cuban food in the US is so good, but so bad in Cuban restaurants, or the families that welcomed us into their homes for lavish feasts. Yes, there are many stories to share and I will get to them all someday

The Latest Place

This blog was really inspired by my latest trip, which included a brief stay in Paris before heading off to Tunisia for a week. Paris, without question is my favorite city outside of the United States. Some anti-French enthusiasts might not find that phrase comforting, but this is only my opinion after all. I have many reasons for feeling this way - mainly that I have spent more time in France (a good amount of that in Paris) than in any other foreign country. But this post isn't really about the magnificence of Paris, as I am sure many future posts will be.

Tunisia is honestly one of the most interesting places I have been. The culture in itself is interesting in that it is very much a part of the Arab world, but at the same time is heavily influenced by Italy, and more so France. I got the distinct impression that Tunisia doesn't get too many American tourists because every time someone finally figured out that my companions and I were American they looked shocked - and intrigued. The Tunisians, who are some of the friendliest people I have ever encountered, seemed to take us for Spaniards most of the time.

As Tunisia has not been completely bombarded by the tourism industry, many of its sights are great treasures, particularly the Roman ruins at Dougga, the Colosseum as El Jem, and the Kasbah at Le Kef. I am sure each of these will be its own blog entry at some point, but I have posted a couple of photographs for extra enticement.

A View of the Capitol Building at Dougga

The Colosseum at El Jem

A View From the Kasbah at Le Kef

After all my travels I thought it might be a bright idea to log my stories not only to remind myself of the crazy things I have seen and done, but also to share them with anyone who might be interested. That being said here is one Tunisian story to get started:

There are few things as cool as having a museum all to yourself. Okay, maybe not to yourself, but more like 200 of your closest friends. The provocation for going to Tunisia was to attend a conference on mosaic conservation, which was extremely educational and also provided an opportunity to learn something new. Part of the conference included a day trip to a few sights, such as various Roman ruins, Carthage - which is amazing, but really requires that you use your imagination, and the Bardo Museum. You might not have heard about the Bardo Museum, but it is like Tunisia's Smithsonian. It's housed in an enormous presidential palace that was actually never used, but that's another thing entirely.

Well, most of the conference attendees were leaders in the mosaic conservation field, so seeing as the museum houses some of the world's most intact mosaics, the place was open only to us for a private reception. We were welcomed by the museum's director, permitted to wander the museum at leisure and then treated to a reception in the grand hall hosted by the Minister of Culture who provided us with a welcome speech.

After his choice word (in French) covers were ripped off the food to reveal a lavish spread that included two lambs laid up on the table and being carved to our desire. I should mention here that Tunisia really isn't the pace for vegetarians. I don't think they know the term to be honest. I should also mention that I have never seen a group of grown adults scavenge so quickly for food. Now it could have been that we had been out all day and were starved, but I am not sure that's any excuse for clearing oodles and oodles of food in 20 minutes flat. There was no seconds. It was also disconcerting to see half-full glasses and plates of food rested on priceless statues and works of art by a group of people whose daily work activities include protecting and preserving such sacred objects from harm. Oh, the irony.

A great mosaic at the Bardo Museum

Bitten By The Bug

I should really start by describing my first trip apart from my family, where I was on my own to gallivant as I pleased. I was 16 and I went to Finland for 3 weeks. Now I wasn't quite alone as I was traveling as part of an under-18 USA soccer team, but I was still more or less able to do as I pleased. It was my first true taste of international travel, where I was thrown into a culture I knew little about. Luckily this was offset by the fact that I lived with a host family for 2 weeks while training before the tournament, who game me a great introduction to the Finns, their customs, food and general lifestyle. How could you not love a place where every house has its own sauna?

Finland was a great experience, not only because we were celebrities for a brief moment with television and radio appearances, but also because I learned how to embrace things that were foreign to me, like: trying to sleep during the midnight sun (it's a strange thing when you leave a bar at 3am and it's light out), sitting in a scalding hot room surrounded by naked men and women until you can't take it anymore and jump into the freezing lake, followed by beating yourself with a tree branch to dry off; or realizing that when the lakes freeze over, people living on the islands just drive their car right across to get what they need in town; or that most Finns know more languages than I thought was humanly possible.

Even though we got our asses handed to us in the tournament, my interest had been piqued to travel more. Combine that with the spring break trip only a few months earlier to Mexico (that's a whole other story in and of itself), and I was ready to pack up my stuff into a small backpack and wander the globe for a while. Too bad it would be a few years yet until this dream would be realized.

Oh The Places We'll Go

The following is the most up-to-date list of the foreign lands I have traveled, so it provides an indication of the places this blog might touch on in the coming posts. I have a goal of 50 countries before I'm 50, so seeing as I have a little over 23 years until that happens, I find this task easily attainable. I also want to visit all 50 US States, which might be more of a challenge, as who can really come up with an excuse to visit North Dakota (sorry to anyone who might be offended). The list is pretty much in order of when I visited, and marked if I've been more than once.

United States (well, that's too obvious)
Mexico (4x+)
Canada (2x)
Finland
United Kingdom
Italy (2x)
Vatican City (it actually is it's own country)
Austria
Slovakia
Hungary
Poland
Czech Republic (2x)
Germany (3x)
France (4x)
Netherlands
Denmark
Sweden
Luxembourg
Andorra
Switzerland
Spain (2x)
Monaco
Barbados
St. Kitts
Aruba
Venezuela
Australia
New Zealand
Belize
Guatemala
Morocco
Portugal
Brazil
Cuba
Bahamas
Belgium
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Costa Rica
Tunisia

What's really amazing is that when I was 21 years old I could only mark off 5 countries, one of which was the United States, and another two that were my neighbors to the north and south, so I certainly hadn't traveled far. The first chance I got to really bounce around the world was when I studied abroad in France in the fall of 2000, and I used the opportunity to travel around for a couple of months before classes started. In the 5 1/2 years since then, I have added all the others. That's a little crazy. For the most part I have actually been to these places, they were not simply layovers in transit to other destinations. I have at least eaten a meal and/or spent 1 night in each of these places.

Well, maybe one or more of the places listed above will have peaked your interest and just maybe I will post something soon about an amazing thing that happened there.

Introduction

I finally decided to do a blog, but I figured I had to make it something more to my character. Seeing as I just returned from a two week vacation in which I visited my 41st country, I thought I would make this blog about my various travel experiences. So breathe a sigh of relief, since it will not be about my decision regarding where to eat dinner tonight, or my latest spat with a friend/co-worker/significant other. I can assure you there will be no rhyme or reason to my posts, as I plan to write about random experiences I have had over the years: places I've been, interactions with the locals, dining experiences, great hotels I've found, strange coincidences, etc. I'm looking forward to the inevitable reminiscing that this little activity of mine will bring. In the meantime....happy reading.