Excerpts from “Your Feet”
Pablo Neruda
When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters
until they found me.
*pictures from Lisbon, Portugal
More books & travel:
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton
“Poem,” from Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara
I don’t think I’d ever been to a green house before. Green houses aren’t really “travel destinations.” But for whatever reason, when I opened up my Lisbon Card info packet (more on that later) and saw the green house as one of my discounted options, I thought to myself, “You know, I like plants.”
Best decision ever. The only way I can describe this place is to say that it felt like it was its own little exotic planet. It is massive (the brochure says one and a half hectare of land, so if you know what a hectare is, there you go) and it’s actually three different types of green houses connected to each other: the Estufa Fria, which is the cold green house (meaning it doesn’t use a warming system), and two regular (or heated) green houses. One of the warm green houses is dedicated entirely to succulents and is equal parts gorgeous and ominous*.
I spent about two hours wandering around the green house. There weren’t more than 10 other people in there with me during that whole time; pairs of lovers and spouses, holding hands and posing by the flowers to take pictures.
(that tiny person is me)
I probably had a much different experience here than someone who has any degree of background knowledge in plants, but I enjoyed my time all the same. It was refreshing to find a place that remains mostly isolated from tourists but that still feels like a unique monument to the city, equal to the Tower of Belem or the Castelo de S. Jorge. And even if I didn’t know their exact varieties or histories, I still felt a sort of kinship with the plants. They were brought here from all over the world; a plant from Japan would be sitting just a few steps away from a plant native to South America. These plants are travelers as much as I am.
*Something about being in a room that is filled entirely with thorned organisms doesn’t really provide me much comfort.
I have spent more time than is necessary clicking on every “Traveler’s Wish List” that pops up on Twitter. Everyone loves these lists even if they won’t openly admit it — it’s window shopping without the window; cutting out the middle-man. One thing I haven’t really seen yet is how to make your wish list work specifically towards fulfilling your travel budget for an upcoming trip — in other words, asking for help with specific expenditures that you’ll encounter during the trip, instead of just general travel-trastic things that look pretty, do something cool, or warm your heart.
I am lucky to have been born into a very generous family. Christmas is always a fun time for us because we all love to give each other presents. The making of wish lists and picking out of presents are always meticulous, and we have a system for opening gifts that allows us to appreciate everyone’s facial-expression-tastic reactions to full effect.
This year, since I will be traveling for a while right after the holiday, I decided to try to make my Christmas wish list work towards my budget for that trip. Instead of filling my wish list with things I am going to fill it with places and experiences – a hostel room for a night, or a ticket to a certain museum, or maybe my bus ticket to Gibraltar.
Not only will this help with my trip, but it will also help me with the weight of my luggage. I’ll be in Los Angeles for Christmas, but after my trip I’m heading straight back to Chicago instead of stopping again in LA, and so I can’t afford to have anything extra to carry with me all throughout Europe and then back to Chicago. My biceps will refuse to cooperate.
My dream budget-saving wish list is currently as follows:
1. Hostel room for a night in Lisbon at this lovely place, or maybe this one
2. Bus ticket from Sevilla to Gibraltar
3. Hostel room for a night in Barcelona
4. Joan Didion’s Blue Nights (because who doesn’t want to be depressed on the train?)
5. A night here: the only hostel in Gibraltar, apparently
6. A lovely tapas dinner in Sevilla! Girl’s gotta eat.
7. Cable car to the top of the rock in Gibraltar OR entry to Gibraltar museum
8. I was here: a travel journal for the curious-minded. This journalis adorable and I want it.
9. Bike rental for a day in Porto, Portugal
10. World map shower curtain (Not for my trip. For my soul.)
Dry shampoo: in the past I tried to be cheap and use baby powder, but it turns out that that makes you smell like baby powder.
Nourishment. [Carrot cake?!]
I will not be bringing comfortable shoes. I never learn.
All forms of moleskin.
(I am bringing about 364554 pairs of tights on this trip, roughly)
I have a post about duct tape coming up. I play for team MacGyver when I travel.
So that I look nice when I’m waving goodbye to the US from my plane window [find them here]
Of course I do not expect to receive every thing or even most things on this list (does anyone ever expect to get everything they write down on one of these?). Even just getting the moleskin for my blisters would help with my travel budget and make me one happy lady (with very happy feet). What do you think, should I “accidentally” forward the list to all of my relatives? Or would a note casually slipped under each person’s door be more subtle? Maybe I’ll rent a billboard, like Mary Kate and Ashley in Billboard Dad. You’re lying if you say you’ve never wanted to do that.
When I was a senior in college, my roommate introduced me to the concept of FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. ”I don’t really feel like going out tonight,” she’d say, eyeing her pajamas longingly, “but I’m having major FOMO.” We’ve all been there. The one night you decide to stay in and watch something shameful on television instead of heading out with your friends is the one night that goes down in history as the time when everything happened and you missed out, the time you “had to be there.”
I am currently having major FOMO with my travel plans. In January I’m going to Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar, and my original plan was to end this trip with a quick flight over to the beaches on the Black Sea in Romania and Bulgaria, to do a kind of east versus west type of thing.
But part of me wants to just stay in the west and get to know those countries really well instead. If I split up the trip by heading over to the east, I am terrified of what I’ll miss in Spain and Portugal. Tapas, tiles, warm weather in the middle of January? Why would anyone leave voluntarily?!
Then again, if I don’t head over to Romania and Bulgaria, I’m worried about missing out on that comparison, on getting to see these two different areas of the world one after the other. I’m curious about the possible culture shock, and I’m still in that phase of traveling where everything is still so new and I still have so much to see that I just want to see all of it right away, before I miss my chance. I am a classic example of wanting to have my cake and eat it [preferably all in one sitting] too.
I also have this sense of urgency that if I don’t see everything I can right now, something terrible will happen that will prevent me from seeing it ever, like getting hit by a bus [almost happened last week], the world actually ending in 2012 [John Cusack can make me believe anything], or the cost of airlines becoming so ridiculous that it’s either a flight to Paris or a down payment on a house [I choose Paris]. It’s exhausting always trying to beat widespread devastation to the punch, but that’s FOMO for you.
