Stop and Say Hello @ ruiaf.org

Some time back I left a link to this website in the comments but Hugo remembered me about this and I think it deserves its own post. It's pretty amazing, it considers every possible way to get from one point to the other by train, car or plane and lets you sort by time, price and carbon emissions. This is what I should do this Christmas.

Stop complaining that I never post things about myself and what I'm doing. Here goes a photolog.

Work

Rome

Sailing

US

This weekend I went to Portugal but lost the flight on Friday. Really stupid because I thought that the flight was at 4pm and arrived to the airport at 2pm with a lot of time to waste. I started reading on the coffee shop until the flight time neared and then went in line to do the boarding area. I looked at the board and there wasn't my flight in there - uh-oh. Apparently the flight was at 1.40pm. Upss. Fortunately I found another cheap flight early morning in Bergamo, close to Milan. I had to do a 5 hour train trip and then sleep in the airport which reminded me of another story.

A couple of years back, I was going from Porto to Stockholm to meet some friends. I had a stopover in Liverpool so I arrived there around 9pm but my flight was in the next morning therefore I was going to sleep in the airport. I went out to catch some "fresh", ahem, air and was trying to return to the boarding area when the officer there tells me, - Sorry sire, your flight is tomorrow, and he looked at me like I was a lunatic. What would any Beatles fan do in this situation? A Beatles night tour with minus something degrees. Obviously.

It was a Friday night so the city was quite lively. I ate dinner somewhere, tried some pubs, had some beers, practiced the art of talking with strangers. I also went to The Cavern, looked around, saw the pictures but it was almost empty and I was very disappointed. At 2am, everyone was leaving to their homes and I was stuck in Liverpool, without buses to the airport and with a coat for Portuguese weather, I had left the warm clothes in the luggage deposit with my bag.

I decided to walk to warm up a bit and started going in the direction to the airport. The bus from the airport had taken 15 minutes to the city center and I though that wouldn't be a long time walking. I hesitated a bit but then I looked in the bus stop and I noticed two things. There were only 3 or 4 bus stops before the airport and one of them was in Penny Lane! I started walking, following the bus route. Who needs a map? The problem was that the streets were really long and there were many bus stops in each street, all numbered 1,2,...,7. After a long walk I arrived to Penny Lane, indeed there is a barber shop with photographs but, other than that, it's just a normal street. I don't know what I was expecting. I then tried to steal the street sign but someone thought of that before and they were very well stuck. No luck.

Kept walking to the airport and a few hours later I arrived there. Cold as hell, I crashed on the floor and slept. Don't listen to anything I say about tourism by osmosis.

I've reached the conclusion that the best way to do anything is doing it by osmosis.

Tourism by Osmosis

I don't understand how people can stand visiting continents, countries or cities by going trough every little sight of interest, trying to do every possible activity. Sometimes seems that people travel just to put little checks on their travel book.

I know that, if you are some place where you've never been and probably are not ever going to be again, it seems like a crime not visiting that museum or that famous building. Why would you be in Paris and not Visit the Eiffel tower? In London and skip the Big Ben? In Rome and not go to the Colosseum? You would have to be crazy.

Here in Pisa I always wondered how come there are so many Japanese people by the tower but you never see them around the city, in restaurants and ice cream shops. A while ago, someone explained it to me. In Japan, it's so uncommon that you have vacations lasting enough time to travel that they only do it once in their lives. So, when they do it, they buy these "Visit Europe in 10 Days" packages where everything is organised and they only spend a few hours in each place. They fly to Pisa. Stop for 30 minutes by the tower. The bus takes them to see the Ufizzi in Florence. Off they go to Paris. Crazy. Also, their idea of visiting a museum is going through every painting or sculpture in the museum and taking 3 pictures. One for the label. One for the painting. And finally, one of them in front of the painting. All this without even looking at the painting. They are pretty good at this and can "visit" a museum in an hour or so.

I'm just giving this example for you to see how far this can go. This is not what normal people do but it's not so different. When I have to do visit a city in one or two days in fast mode, usually with someone that makes me do it, I arrive home and I don't even know where I've been, what I've seen and I'm dead tired. I don't meet anyone, I don't learn anything new and after the first five minutes I can't really appreciate what I'm seeing. It's like watching the best 10 movies ever made in the the same day. No one would try to do that.

That's why tourism by osmosis is a great idea. You just randomly walk the streets, turn wherever you feel like. You're tired? Stop at the coffee shop and watch the people go by. After lunch? Nap in the park! That shop or museum looks cool? Go inside. Read a book by the river or the sea. Talk with people!

Learning by Osmosis

When we first learn how to speak, we learn from being around other people and simply picking it up by repetition - by osmosis. We don't go to school to learn our native language. We simply pick it up because it is all around us. It doesn't matter what the language is: Chinese, Maths, Music. If it is what everyone else is speaking, we automatically pick up the basics. Did you ever learn language in school without going to the country where they speak it before? Without seeing why it's useful? That's the best way to hate that language.

Everything

This is a mindset and it takes a while to get used to it. The point is: if I'm not enjoying something that I was supposed to enjoy, I'm definitely not doing it the right way and maybe it can be done without really making an effort to do it.

Last week, in my way home, I did a stop over in Lille. Don't ask. There are only direct flights twice a week and, irony, going to the north of France is just a slight detour from Italy to Portugal. One day I shall write about the hidden sins of low cost flights. Guilty. Anyway, I had time to go to the city center and have bread with raisins for breakfast in a "boulangerie". Very fancy. I was quite surprised with this cool city and shock, people were nice!

I'm totally against stereotypes but I've been a few times to Paris and I know very well how the french people are! Joking, I actually like Paris, with 10 million people the darkest hobby has its place and it's just fun to go inside a store of a calligrapher and origami maker or the like. Also, I have some friends there and obviously this makes cities much more interesting. By the way Sarah, if you're reading this, thanks for you couch. My point: Parisians, hem, are not the nicest people in world.

In Lille I was ordering breakfast and the waitress, who was very nice (and cute), double checked every thing I ordered and gave advices such as "you should take the bread with pine nuts and raisins and not the sweet bread with raisins, it's much better" or "we don't have dark chocolate for your cappuccino, do you mind the organic-fair-trade-even-better one?". Sure this became complicated after I run out of the 5 different sentences I can say in french so, shock again, she changed to not-so-good-but-with-effort english! It was just this girl! - you say. No, people were generally very nice, giving indications of where the buses were and so on. I'm not really sure what's it all about with those people doing street polls in every corner, though.

All this to say that I must twist my arm and visit some other places in France with a bit more time. On other news I heard that Belgium is claiming French Flanders back.

Para não serem sempre os mesmos a fazer estes desafios e aproveitando que o vencedor do costume está de férias, aqui fica a pergunta: Onde é que este gajo foi?

Como prémio, o vencedor tem direito a uma garrafa de vinho :-)

Como dica, posso já dizer que não é o Douro nem o Napa Valley.

English version on the comments.

This week I returned to Couch Surfing. Hosted a couple of guests during the week and went hiking in an CS event in Cinque Terre. We did all five villages. So good, I was missing this... 3 months without doing CS was definitely too much. I used to use Hospitality Club but since I moved to Italy and couldn't change my profile's location I had to stop. I'm sorry to see the site dying slowly; lots of good friends there.

Fui passar o fim de semana a Lugano na Suíça. Aproveitei que o Bruno está a trabalhar em Basileia e encontramo-nos a meio do caminho. Conseguimos ver Lugano, Lucarno e Como; também fiz speed-visiting em Milão e Génova porque tive algum tempo entre as mudanças de comboio. As fotos estão no sítio do costume.

Um "pequeno" detalhe foi que quando cheguei não tinha bicla! Deixei-a na estação com dois(!) cadeados mas cortaram os dois e levaram-na. Não era nada de especial e foi muito barata por isso a perda não foi muito grande. Tive-a durante tão pouco tempo que nem deu para me apegar a ela. Nem sequer tive nenhum acidente com ela.