Under Construction
People
People are always the main attractions in any Tom Pears trip. I travel to meet the people, not see the sights. It is true that on the three winter trips I really need to ride my bike but I would love to ride with other people. The best is to ride at a nice slowish pace so I can talk! The hours go by in a flash. Such did not happen at all during Portugal 2019. Oh well, there is always 2020.
So, I interacted with the people off the bike! There is always one person who is the star in Portugal, Valentina, the co-owner of Baffi Bar. There are a few pictures of Valentina scattered in my Portugal pages. Here is a rare video of her AND her partner Simona. He is the young man who stands up on the right with the baseball cap. The young man who remains standing is Simona’s Sou chef. Valentina leans in to speak for a second. This was just a religious parade that passed Baffi Bar one afternoon. It is a little long but be sure and note the man in the parade who signals for us to stand up!
I’m a little conflicted about how to present star number 2. I think I have to hide her true identity. I think I need to change a great deal of her story so that you will not be able to do what I did, Google her!
We will call her Mesha. She sat next to me on the Lisboa-Boston homebound flight and was a total delight! I will show her picture:
Mesha is on her way home from a month long trip alone from Ireland to Lisboa. She mainly stayed in hostels and loved it. She just graduated from a small college in the midwest. She is a published poet. Her mother is a counseling chaplan at a college and her father an athletic coach. Two Older brothers, one a doctor and one in business. Mesha is very athletic. Quite a paddle boarder. She is returning to Europe in a few months to work as a coach in a school for at risk young boys. There are a couple breweries in her home town. This was Tuesday and she was looking forward to being at her chosen brewery Wednesday night. The people in her generation frequent it while her brother’s generation are loyal to the other one. Mesha is the real deal. Someone I would love to follow for the rest of my life. But it is not to be. I gave her the business card and asked her to email but she didn’t. My wife and daughters are always cheeped out by this Tom behavior.
She did a few months? as a freshman in Vienna. She had a great story about watching the other students get into trouble night after night with liquor. She was very afraid that her turn would soon be coming and she wanted to avoid it. So she developed a technique of drinking a shot of hard liquor. She just pretended to drink it and kept it going all night but it was enough to make the others who were constantly goading each other on to drink more to leave her alone.
Mesha has spent a lot of time volunteering at a school for the deaf. She talked about the deaf culture. She has seen couples who were both deaf and hoped that their child would be born deaf so that the child could live in their world. Life without sound is very special. Of course we look on it as a disability but I think you can entertain the idea that there are all kinds of aspects of it that make for a special environment.
Mesha is a special young woman and maybe someday I will get up the nerve to reach out to her.
The next place of honor on this page should go to Dennis. No pictures, sorry. Coming back from a ride to the East, so probably Thursday, just as I was entering the Lagos town wall, here was a man my age clearly using his phone to find something. He only had a smallish backpack. He had made a reservation at a hostel and was looking for it. I entered the name he told me and we started off, bike in tow, to find it. I let Dennis lead the way as long as it was generally correct. Soon we were just a block from Baffi so I dragged him over, pointed it out, and told him I was there every night. We finally found the hostel and I went home. Dennis did not show up that night but did the next.
He bought me a Sagras beer and then we headed off to Old Bastard, a bar up the road, to show him their beer. It was closed but by this time I had found Peppers so we went there. I went to the bathroom and Dennis insisted on choosing a beer for me. It was Belgium so I only yelled at him a little to let me choose my own beers. I think I had a second beer, a sour!, and then we walked down to the bar area. Dennis had found these bars and stayed on while I went home. I don’t meet many people my age who are alone and willing to go anywhere.
Saturday night Dennis showed up again at Baffi. By now I knew his story of having been made redundant from Liverpool and was just traveling around I think for a month. I never got any deeper. No idea what he did for work. His accent was pretty hard to understand. I had to ask him to repeat almost everything.
Monday morning I am waiting for the 10:40 bus to Lisboa and there he is. He said that he had figured out that we were probably taking the same bus. We talked a while but they have assigned seats on these buses and we were not together. Once we got off in Lisboa, he made a point of coming over to where I was repacking and said goodbye. I had given him a card a couple nights ago but I would be surprised if he follows up.
Here is a picture of the next group:
Valentina makes a rare appearance in the first. This is her normal mode of operation, getting people to hold up a mushstach in order to have a picture taken. In the past, we have regularly had groups of women, often from a local hostel. 2019, this is about the only group I can remember.
They are from Queens. All of them work in the fashion industry. The third from the left is the only one married and I talked to her the most. She actually flew in from San Francisco to NYC to be with them a couple days before continuing on to Portugal. The blond on the left is the leader and won some kind of reward at work that allowed her to bankroll the rest of them on the trip. This was the end of the trip. I think they drove down from Lisboa. I’ll call the one I talked to SF. She works with shoes. They had all been in Queens originally. She said that 2 of them have had their eggs frozen. The one second for the left was the wildest. She and the Asian one were constantly on their phones with dating apps. Valentina said she got to talk to them later in the night and is really tempted to visit NYC.
And then there was David. Again, no picture. David was staying at a very expensive hotel in Lagos that Valentina took me to back in 2017. She was aghast when she saw how much the wine was that we drank. A worker at the hotel knows Valentina and must have sent David to us.
Slowly over the course of a couple days we came across the following. David is a lawyer at Microsoft. He is traveling for a month. He has been fighting cancer at Mass General, seven operations. He has a 37 ft motor boat in Seattle. He is divorcing. He is class of 83 at Princeton, I am class of 68.