“Holy shit it’s him!“ Who was him? Vin Diesel? LeBron James? Generalisimo Franco?! No: our hero, the bus driver from Lisbon to Sevilla. You remember him. We sure did. The Sevilla to Lisbon bus was leaving shortly before our bus to Granada, and apparently he was driving it. We kept low and out of sight, lest he remember us from three days ago. You should never meet your heroes. Getting Settled In What struck me about Granada as we came…
“Oh, dear.” After traveling half the day, and lugging our bags up the hills of Montmartre, those were the first words Ruth softly spoke as we stepped into our new home for the next three nights. Erika and I immediately set about to doing what we do: checking out the bedrooms, finding the washing machine, exploring the kitchen. But Ruth was quite clearly stricken. “It’s just so… old, and… run down,” she clarified. Truth is, I don’t think Erika or…
“How long are you here for?” the immigration agent asked us. “Just five days,” I replied. “What’s your next destination?” she followed up. “France.” “And then?” “Portugal!” I said brightly. “And then?” “Spain!” She made a haughty hand motion; ‘get on with it,’ it said. “Keep going until you’re back to your home country.” “Whew, that could take a while. Italy, probably Bulgaria, Turkey… then Asia, but we don’t have it planned…” “When do you go home?” I shrugged. “I…
Sadly, traveling to Amsterdam brought our airplane-free streak to an end. This was doubly sad because Arlanda airport, in Stockholm, is way outside the city. From Nacka, it was over an hour for us to get there. Then the flight had a short layover in Copenhagen… it was a long travel day. Fortunately, our hotel was very close to the airport in Amsterdam, so once we landed, getting to our place was easy. Why’d we stay out close to the…
Going to Stockholm, I was terrified. I’d just seen Erika–who was far more excited about Copenhagen than even I was–be crushed by unmet expectations. Now, here, we were going to maybe the one city on earth I most wanted to see, and I was terrified Stockholm would do to me what Copenhagen just did to Erika. I could walk through our steps of getting into the city, how we spent our time there, slowly building up to the answer to…
The elevator doors opened, and we shambled out into the bright early morning light. With Franz and Helga—and fatigue—weighing us down, we found ourselves in the middle of an overgrown field with some crumbling structures near by. Hmmm. That’s a weird first look at Berlin. To get to Berlin from Munich, we did something kind of weird and crazy for us—we took an overnight train. It was kind of ridiculous, being on a train for 11 hours and making ourselves…
We had no intention of going to Johannesburg. On top of being “just another big city,” we both independently felt like it was one of the more dangerous places we considered going. South Africa in general, to put it lightly, has some issues with crime. “Oh, it’d be the greatest country in the world if it weren’t for all the crime,” a South African we met in Istanbul airport, months later, said to us. He may not be a wrong…
