Pooja

Travel Diaries: A Glimpse of Lisbon

I went on my first ever trip to Europe last December. It was one of the coolest things I have done in my adult life – just travelling with a friend to a whole new continent. When Swetha asked me if I wanted to fly back from New York to India together, she suggested a week-long ‘layover’ somewhere in Europe. We pretty much picked out the exact location in Europe based on the timing and price of flights – and after extensive Skype sessions, mapped out an itinerary which ended up being NY – Lisbon – Venice – Florence – Rome – New Delhi. Italy was our main destination, but we found a flight that had a legitimate layover in Lisbon for 22 hours, which felt like a pretty great bonus.

I was wildly excited about this trip, but it was hard to pinpoint what exactly I was looking for. Apart from the general excitement of seeing a new place and culture, I also wanted the independence of just finding my own way around in completely new surroundings. Which is why we shunned all sorts of guided tours, agreed to carry phones which were quite useless without public WiFi, and made our own itineraries, a lot of which involved ‘walking around the streets to soak in the place’. We went as old-school as possible: paper maps with x marking the spots, multiple print-outs, handwritten notes to account for our finances. Our schedules for all of Italy were completely packed to squeeze in everything we both wanted to do, but since Lisbon was our little treat, we agreed to keep it light and flexible.

The very first sight which greeted my eyes the moment I stepped out of Lisbon airport was a gorgeous stretch of ocean. Palm trees, with their fronds gently waving in the breeze. It looked sunny, warm and welcoming – which is just how I like my Decembers to be!

20161209_065938 — Nothing signifies ‘summer vacation’ like palm trees!

We exchanged some currency and took a bus over to our hostel, only to be greeted by some very welcoming folk, who chattered away with us, pointed out some of the local attractions and stored our bags. They were very excited indeed to hear I was from Goa – which I wasn’t sure how to feel about. Didn’t the Portuguese rule over Goa for some 450 years, and shouldn’t I be slightly resentful at this sweeping familiarity of their feelings? Oh well. I decided to see it as a useful talking point – and believe me, there were SO many similarities to Goa! The architecture, the beaches, the slanted roofs! The climate, the insistence on having fish with every meal! After we shed all our bulky winter layers (which had proven so useful just a day ago in NY), we walked over to the Commercial Square, wandered around, took photos, and pored over the menus of every restaurant in the Square before we settled on a meal.

After a long leisurely lunch, Swetha and I decided to go see a place called the Belem Tower which everyone kept gushing about. It’s right by the coast, they said. You can’t miss it, they said. We took a bus and dutifully got off at the stop called Belem, which was apparently the wrong stop for Belem Tower. This led to a comical forty five minutes of being misdirected and rerouted by every person we stopped to ask directions from (“it’s a 100 meters to the left”, followed immediately by “just walk straight on this road for 700 meters, the Tower should be on your right”). Life without Google Maps is hard, you guys! But on the plus side, yay for the metric system! At some point we saw a couple of guards who were dressed up like the Queen’s Guard at Buckingham Palace, and timidly went up to them to ask for directions. They stoically refused to break character and looked straight through us. It was rather unnerving, we weren’t sure whether to turn our backs and sprint away, or walk backwards verrrry slowly (they had these scary-looking rifles, and didn’t blink AT ALL). A normally dressed guard witnessed this one-sided exchange and taking pity on us, pointed us in a third direction. Our gratitude proved to be premature, as we ended up reaching near the sea, but with no tower in sight. It HAD to be on the coast, and our view was unencumbered for miles … but believe me, there was no tower in sight! I began to think it was a mirage – only existing in people’s minds. At one point we saw Portugal’s Ponte 25 de Abril bridge, which was disorientingly similar to the Golden Gate Bridge from the continent we’d just left. Eventually we decided that even if we did find the tower, we’d probably be denied entry because it was nearing their closing time. We somehow ended up at the Jeronimos Monastery, which I’d also looked up before, and decided to act as if it was our destination all along.

But the moment we walked into the Monastery, it stopped being a consolation prize – it was incredibly beautiful. The stonework, the design, the intricate marble carvings were stunning. We found ourselves in a courtyard which felt right out of a story book. This huge grassy green expanse with a little fountain in the center, surrounded by four tall walls of marble, and above, the bluest of skies. It was almost deserted – we had the place to ourselves. We chatted and took photos for the first five minutes – but it was so peaceful that we fell silent. You know those moments that just take your breath away, the moments where you forget everything else, and all you want to do is savor it? The kind of moments you are so busy experiencing, that documentation becomes unimportant? Because all you care about is the here and now. You don’t want to be anywhere else. You don’t miss anyone or anything, because there’s no other place you’d rather be. This … right here, is everything you want right now. And in that moment as I lay stretched out on my back in the grassy courtyard, looking up at the clouds skidding past the pointy towers of the monastery – I realized that this kind of peace and quiet was what I was looking for all along.

20161209_115917 — The courtyard at Jeronimos Monastery, photographed before I went into philosophical musings

Much later in the evening, we hunted down a McDonald’s for free WiFi, called an Uber and drove through multiple sparkling streets to the Santa Justa lift. This is a grand and slightly eerie antique-looking elevator which takes you up to a viewing platform where you can look over miles and miles of the city. This turned out to be a common theme during the rest of the trip – for every city we visited, I made it a point to climb up to an accessible lookout point to get a bird’s-eye view. The view from Santa Justa at night was glorious – you could see slanted brick-red rooftops all around below you, interspersed with streets and marketplaces decorated with streams of Christmas lights and decorations. On one side, the glittering black sea stretched out to meet the sky, and on the other, an old castle upon a hill. By this time in the evening, stars were glinting overhead, the wind was whistling in my ears and doing its best to toss my curls into further disarray, and it felt like we were literally on top of the world.

20161209_150756 — The Elevador de Santa Justa, with a viewing platform at the top

The rest of the evening whizzed past in a series of cheerful events – Swetha and I wandered into a bakery and inquired about all the different kinds of sweets and their fillings. The guy behind the counter was kind enough to describe each of the pastries, and after we ordered two to go, he very sweetly added three more, and refused to let us pay. We had dinner outside a lovely restaurant where the waiter brought us Ginja, a traditional Portuguese drink, along with Pastel de nata, a traditional Portuguese egg tart custard pastry served with cinnamon – which immediately won a spot on my list of all-time favorite foods.

20161210_022521 — I’m going to find myself some of these in NYC!

After a late stroll along the beach, we hung around in Commercial Square once more. We ended up walking up to and into an artificial 100 feet tall Christmas tree, which looked rather silly from the outside (it was disturbingly symmetric), but was stunning from the inside. It was quite wide at the base and had a doorway on the side, sort of like going inside a very tall tent. I stood at the exact center of the tree and looked straight up – and instantly felt dizzy. It was like looking into some sort of twinkling red, green and white tunnel which was shooting straight upwards with no discernible ending. If you stood in the center and started twirling, looking straight into that tunnel, it almost felt like tumbling inside some giant kaleidoscope of sound and color. It was hypnotizing – I had to be physically dragged out of there.

22 hours in Lisbon weren’t enough – it deserves a lot more time. Before I knew it, it was 6 a.m. and time for us to leave for our flight to Venice. Since our bags were already checked in straight to Venice, all we did was stroll into the airport with our carry-ons and walk all the way to the gate. Security was surprisingly lax – we got almost all the way to the boarding gates before anyone stopped us to see any documents or to scan our bags. It totally fit in with the whole laid-back attitude of the people, the whole sushegaad lifestyle my Goan relatives have introduced me to. You know all those dramatic movies in which someone is running through an airport to declaim their undying love at the last minute? Well, Lisbon airport seems like the easiest spot where you can get away with it, no problem whatsoever. In fact, no need to run, just casually saunter in and you’ll be fine.

Will I return to Lisbon? Probably. It seems like the kind of place I’d like to settle down in eventually. I’d live in a little house with a red roof and a porch, sit and read at the beach every evening, finally hunt down the elusive Belem Tower, and devour pasteis de nata by the dozen. Throw in the year-round warm weather, and it’s a deal! Sushegaad indeed!

Of tooth troubles and darling daughters

When I was about seven, my baby teeth started falling out. I was exceptionally proud of this fact, because I was the first kid in my class to start losing my milk teeth and getting my permanent ones, Those were also the days when kids used to excitedly show off their new erasers, pencils, pencil boxes and assorted paraphernalia in school. I was quite keen to start a new trend by showing off my teeth – not just the resulting gap in my mouth, but the actual tooth in a box.

Love isn’t what you say, it’s what you do. My dad is not the most expressive person – he won’t be the parent who calls me every night so I can prattle on about all my doings, but he will be the person who asks my mom about those said doings on a daily basis without fail, and is always updated on all my activities, mundane or otherwise. My dad has more interesting ways of showing how much he cares.

When I was about seven, my baby teeth started falling out. I was exceptionally proud of this fact, because I was the first kid in my class to start losing my baby teeth and getting my permanent ones. Those were also the days when kids used to excitedly show off their new erasers, pencils, pencil boxes and assorted paraphernalia in school. I was quite keen to start a new trend by showing off my teeth – not just the resulting gap in my mouth, but the actual tooth in a box. Anyway, my front lower tooth had been loose for about a week, and while I couldn’t wait for it to fall off, I was much too scared of potential pain and blood. I refused to physically yank it out, or tie it with a string to a door so it could be pulled out Tom Sawyer style (much to my regret – that does seem like a pretty cool technique). After a whole week of nursing my tooth so carefully that not a crumb of food could come close, one fine afternoon while I was rinsing out my mouth over the sink, the tooth finally detached and fell off. Except of course it got washed down the sink and swirled right out of sight before my horrified eyes.

Seven-year-old me stood frozen for a few seconds, then turned around and dashed over to my parents in a flood of tears. I don’t remember what all they said to console me, because clearly none of it was effective. I’m sure I was told that I had 19 other teeth that would fall out, ergo 19 more chances to show off to all my classmates and teachers (also, in retrospect, which teacher actually wants to see a tooth in a box?!). While I continued crying and hiccuping, my mother redoubled her efforts to console me, and my dad eventually walked away. This was not a surprising turn of events, even at that age, because my mom has always had a lot more patience with my more irrational moods and demands, while my dad is prone to offer a slew of logical solutions to my problem, or even worse, laugh – such a clever strategy; what a surprise that I didn’t immediately wipe my eyes and smile a watery smile of gratitude at being jolted back into rationality.

Anyway, after my mom had administered enough hugs and sympathy, the waterworks did relent a bit. This is when I became aware of distant bangs and clangs, and mom and I went to investigate. There was my dad, with his toolbox, taking apart the pipes under the sink into which my tooth has vanished. He calmly dismantled the whole thing, and I kid you not, he went in and retrieved my lost tooth. After the hullabaloo subsided, the tooth was washed quite thoroughly, put in a box and shown off at school – minus the backstory of its eventful journey. Quite a satisfactory ending!

At that time, this event did not strike me as anything out of the ordinary: I was upset, I wanted something, and so my dad got it for me. Of course he did. But now when I look back, I am shocked, grossed out, but mostly filled with awe. Because you see, that is what love is. It’s not just words, chocolates and flowers – it’s not just the cliches I read about in my stash of romance novels. This is the one true example of love that comes to mind – doing something icky and unnecessary, just to make your kid happy. It’s the kind of love I have always got from my dad: solid and reliable, the sort of love you can rely on unconditionally. It doesn’t matter that we don’t talk every day, it doesn’t matter that he isn’t my primary sounding board, it doesn’t matter that we don’t express our feelings to each other on a regular basis – because whenever I have actually needed anything, he’s always there for me, he’s got my back and I know he always will. And that is what unconditional love is.

While my dad’s medium is actions rather than words, I choose the written word to express all my sentiments, both simple or convoluted, heartfelt or plain cheesy. I would much rather spell out my feelings – because mild embarrassment and potential non-reciprocation is something I can live with, and words unsaid I cannot. So while I know it, and he knows it, and anyone who knows us knows it, I still want to say it out loud and clear … and not on any special occasion, birthday or anniversary, I want to say it just because: I love you, Papa! My first hero, my forever hero.

A Cold New World!

Your heart is pounding away, your fingers are ten blocks of ice encased in mittens which are clearly not up to the task, your breath is hot and panting, fogging up the goggles, the bare trees lining either side of the slope, and it’s all beautiful, so beautiful, but you just have a split second to register it because you’re still hurtling down at speeds you’re not sure you are actually controlling …

Last month I had the dubious experience of waking up several hours before the crack of dawn (on a Saturday morning too. Oh the injustice!). The dark overcast sky was incredibly glum and disorienting, clouding my mood further – annoyed at having to be up and ready, and deeply resentful of 3-Weeks-Ago Pooja who signed up for the grad school ski trip to Vermont with such thoughtless enthusiasm. After staggering onto the bus along with all the other sleep-deprived students, I promptly fell asleep for the next five hours or so.

I opened my eyes to find myself on what looked like a whole other planet. Everything around me was a blinding sheet of white. Fresh and crisp, I found myself in completely foreign untouched terrain. There were alternating patterns of ice and snow, gleaming under the dazzling sunlight. Every few minutes, the wind would kick up, creating swirly little dust devils out of icy snowflakes. And the temperatures! I have never dealt with such unbearable cold – it was negative Fahrenheit. I was pretty convinced they had accidentally switched the scales to Celsius because seriously … below zero Fahrenheit?! That should be the new absolute zero! Did it even exist outside textbooks? And does life actually thrive in such harsh conditions?

Turns out there is a pretty strange species which has adapted to the adverse climate of this hostile new world. The natives are vaguely humanoid figures clunking around in a rather amusing fashion, carefully pressing the heels of their boot on the ground and then leaning their weight deliberately on the toes – looking like waddling penguins or just some sort of strutting dance performers – I’d count off a quick beat in my head every time one of them went clomping across the food court in their uncomfortable footwear. Additionally, they wore clunky gray helmets and over-sized goggles. Half the times you couldn’t see their faces or their eyes, and then … they’d strap on two long pieces of fiberglass and zoom down snow-covered slopes with incredible velocity. Why would anyone hurtle down such a risky terrain, braving frigid temperatures? (After having signed waivers saying they won’t sue in case they sustain any injury or death. Yes, hurry up and let me sign that.) Have you ever carried around skis? They are heavy and unwieldy and my arms were nearly pulled out of their sockets lugging them around.

However, the reason people take such risks became apparent very soon, because the moment you strap on a pair (of skis :P) and whiz down the slopes yourself, it hits you. The crazy crazy adrenaline rush! The wind whistling past you, light bouncing off the white snow, the undulating terrain, navigating the bumps and turns and whatever other technical terms they use for it. You’re moving, fast, so very fast … your heart is pounding away, your fingers are ten blocks of ice encased in mittens which are clearly not up to the task, your breath is hot and panting, fogging up the goggles, the bare trees lining either side of the slope, and it’s all beautiful, so beautiful, but you just have a split second to register it because you’re still hurtling down at speeds you’re not sure you are actually controlling – you try to take wider and wider turns to cut down on your momentum and you know you’re maybe, barely in control, at this very second, but unless the ground evens out a bit it might be a better option to sort of lower yourself on your skis and just brake by plopping yourself to the ground! I’m guessing professional skiers view all this with icy (pun intended) aloof disdain, and are not very vocal with their thoughts whilst on the slopes, but I am the kind of amateur who keeps alternating between exuberant woohooing, cursing, and singing Let It Gooooo! depending on how fast I am going.

IMG-20170310-WA0028

Oh boy, bring it on! As long as after every run, I can painstakingly unhook my skis and hobble over into the warmth of the lodge to thaw and eat warm sugar-coated waffles or just wrap my fingers around steaming mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows bobbing around – I am ready to become an native. Welcome to this new world!

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