Back That Month Up | Lisbon
The people, places, and things that had me spending some serious time in the infamous Growth Zone
While you’re on RY, you often get asked what has been your favorite city, which leads you to do a mental comparison of all of the places you have been. The question gets asked by just about everyone — friends and family back home as well as your fellow Remotes.
It seems like a pretty harmless question, right?
I’m not so sure.
This past month made me realize that the question and its underlying sentiment — that the cities we are living in this year need to have some sort of clearly defined ranking of awesomeness — can have negative and unfair consequences to how much you do or do not enjoy a new city.
In my most recent First Impressions, I wrote how I was giving Lisbon the cold shoulder initially because I was comparing it to Prague — which I proudly boasted as my new favorite. I basically went into the month with a subconscious bias against it.
I wasn’t alone either.
We had our Prague people and our Lisbon people. The Prague people (myself included) would either be reminiscing about all of the things we loved about Prague that Lisbon didn’t have and or we would be commenting on how certain things in Lisbon just weren’t “the same”.
How dumb is that?
You don’t travel the world for a year hoping that every city to is going to be the fucking same.
This bias softened over the five weeks we were there and by the time I left Lisbon, it was non-existent. In an ironic twist, I actually felt very similarly to leaving Lisbon as I did Prague — like I was leaving a very familiar place that I had gotten extremely comfortable in and grew to love. While I’m super glad that happened, I can’t help but feel that I missed out that first week or so when I was being a dummy. It feels as if I missed out either on some activities or fond memories because I wasn’t open to them at the time.
I think that it’s normal to have favorite cities. However, going forward, I’m going to try to not compare places to each other because not much good comes from it. I’m either going going to take longer to embrace a new city or I’m not going to look back on my memories of a prior city as fondly as I should.
We’re now a fourth of the way through our journey (wut) and I’m realizing that the four or five weeks we’re in each city is not as long of a time as it sounds. It would be extremely unfortunate to waste any time in a given city lamenting over our time in another city being over.
I think you’ve just got to appreciate the time you had there, write a blog post about it, and be open to seeing what the next one has to offer.
The People
Kaizen
Call it the honeymoon phase. Call it a bias. Call it whatever you want. I still think we’ve got a very special group.
Not seeing someone for even just a couple days feels like forever and when you finally do see that person again, whether that be in the workspace or around the city, you’re usually greeted with an enormous hug.
As challenging as it can be to constantly be surrounded by 50 other people, nothing makes me happier than the nights when the whole krew gets together and goes out like we did on our last night in Lisbon.
Familiar Faces
My sister, Jess, was in town for the first two weeks of the month. She has been doing her own solo version of Remote Year for over a year now and has always been my biggest RY supporter.
Sara, one of my oldest friends, and Megan were in town during our first week in Lisbon!
My friend and coworker, Paige, and I continued our string of hanging out in foreign places as well (London, Barcelona, and now Lisbon).
The Places
Portugal
Lisbon
I warmed up to Lisbon big time. The city has this palpable energy to it that makes you want to go out and do things. There’s a lot to love: the people, the weather, the ocean, the kebabs. The list goes on and on.
Highlights:
- Celebrating the festival of St. Anthony throughout the entire city, which turned into the most fun I’ve ever had on a Monday night
- Surfing for the first time and not being completely terrible
- Getting a tour around the city by a bunch of Portuguese grannies
- Taking a cooking class at Time Out Market
- Sunsets and Aperol Sprtiz at Miradouro de Santa Catarina
- Venturing across the river to the Christ statue with Aashima
- Feeling way more active than in the prior cities — which included taking crossfit and spin classes in Portuguese
- Having the surprisingly welcomed feeling of normalcy for the last couple of weeks (Morocco excluded)
- The BEACH
Porto
Our first side trip of the month was a quick 24 hour excursion up north to Porto — the birth place of Port wine. It’s a gorgeous city and kinda reminded me of what I’d imagine would happen if Split and Dubrovnik were to have a baby.
Highlights:
- Making a pit stop in Óbidos to walk the wall
- Port wine tasting with the krew
- Playing 3 person thunderstruck in a park with Matt and Iris using only a cell phone speaker
- Trying Francesinha for the first (and last) time
Sintra
If you’re living in Lisbon and you don’t take the 40 minute train ride to see the castles in Sintra, what are you even doing?
Highlights:
- Walking up all of the hills in 100 degree heat ❤
- Spending time with Milena’s incredible mom and friends who were in town visiting
- Taking pictures of one castle from the top of another castle
Morocco
The main event in terms of side trips this month was a 6 day excursion through Morocco with four other Kaizens. It was without a doubt the most interesting, unique, challenging, and frequently uncomfortable experience I’ve had on RY so far.
Most of us came into Morocco with no idea what to expect besides knowing that we’d be driving around 20 hours in total through essentially the entire country with our driver, Hassan.
Chefchaouen
The first stop on our journey was Chefchaouen — which is also known as the The Blue Pearl because most of its buildings are painted some shade of red. Just kidding. They’re painted blue, dummy.
At first, I felt very outside of my comfort zone. Thankfully, I had Aashima with me on the trip because she’s basically a human ThunderShirt. She is a badass traveler who exudes a much appreciated sense of calmness — a quality of hers that I really admire and that I’ve reminded her of on many occasions.
Turns out my initial anxiety wasn’t completely unfounded. While we were walking down an alley, some pissed off dude wielding what appeared to be a knife came storming in our direction. Luckily for us, and unluckily for whoever he had beef with, he walked right past us. It was a high-stress moment that ended up not being a big deal, but it was the first “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment of the trip.
Is this that Growth Zone we keep hearing about?
Highlights:
- Staying in our first riad
- Having the first of many tagines (kefta ftw)
- Truly feeling outside of my comfort zone and realizing how easy we have it with RY (so far)
- The vibrant colors of the buildings, spices, soaps, and clothes all over the city
- Having one of those “everyone is the same” moments while we watched a young Moroccan girl, who was all dressed up for a celebration, be forced into taking a million pictures by her mom — she was just as annoyed as you probably were as a kid in the same situation
- Unintentionally recreating one of my favorite memes with a piece of soap
Fes
We met up with a guide who took us to some local sites and escorted us through the impossibly chaotic and confusing medina. She taught us a little bit about the history of some of the architecture and offered us some advice for our stay.
We were there at the end of Ramadan, so one piece of her advice was that most people would be breaking the fast at home or in a restaurant come sundown. The only people left in the streets would be people who were of the unsavory variety and were looking to cause trouble. She basically made it sound like we needed to be inside our riad or in a restaurant at sundown in order to avoid The Purge. Fear not, that was most certainly not the case and we #survivedthenight.
Highlights:
- Getting tours through a place where they make pottery / mosaics, a tannery, and a sewing mill
- Following our guide like white on rice through the medina
- Having extreme sensory overload and culture shock within said medina
- The smells — I can’t honestly say they were a highlight, because some of them made my stomach turn — but they are some of my more vivid memories
- Trying a surprisingly delicious camel burger
- Playing the most fun round of Heads Up that I’ve ever been a part of
Merzouga Desert
We drove 7 hours to ride camels and sleep under the stars in the desert because that’s what you do when you go to Morocco. We rode camels 1.5 hours to our campsite where we were greeted by our three hosts.
Highlights:
- Being paired with a particularly ornery camel, whom I named Miguelito Jr., who hated doing anything just as much as I do
- RIDING CAMELS!!
- Enjoying a Moroccan feast that was prepared for us at our campsite by our hosts
- Sharing music with our hosts around a campfire — they played traditional Moroccan music with their drums, while we played some songs on the ukelele (to be clear, I am musically illiterate, so I just clapped along like a fool)
- Running and dancing around the campfire with Toto’s Africa playing on our speaker
- Sleeping outside under the clearest, starriest sky that I’ve ever seen
- Getting up for sunrise and sand boarding before heading back
Marrakech
Marrakech was our final stop of the trip. By the time we got here, I was feeling much more comfortable amidst the Moroccan chaos.
Highlights:
- Getting a hug from Hassan as he dropped us off — the true sign that he started to enjoy our company (or that he wanted a good tip, one can’t be sure)
- Watching Aashima haggle like a pro
- Having a treat yo self evening at a hammam and getting closer to D-Ry and DDR than I ever thought possible (what is seen in the hammam stays in the hammam)
- Seeing the post-Ramadan celebrations throughout the main square
- Going to a shockingly modern hookah bar/club that could have passed for somewhere you’d see in Vegas
Moroccan Countryside
Here are some pictures from our TWENTY HOURS of car rides throughout the country. Morocco, you a beaut.
Highlight:
- Stopping to see wild monkeys — which decided to climb on our car and try to steal our luggage from the roof
The Things
The Ocean
Being by the water just makes life better. This month we had daily surfing lessons and a seemingly endless number of beaches to choose from.
The Views
The hills weren’t only good for toning the glutes and calves, but also helped make incredible views throughout the city.
The Colors
Blinding, beautiful color was around every corner in the city.
The wrap up…
This month was a big month for me in terms of growth.
I tried new things that I had never done before, I learned about a culture that I was embarrassingly ignorant of, and I learned what I need to do to make sure that I am fully appreciating the present, regardless of where I’m at. All of which were reasons why I decided to blow up my comfortable life in Austin to travel and work around the world for a year. It’s great to see that this stuff is actually happening.
Saúde, Lisbon!
Before you go, don’t forget to back these months up, too!
- Europe: Split, Prague, Lisbon, Sofia
- Asia: Hanoi, Chiang Mai, Kyoto, Kuala Lumpur
- Latin America: Lima, Medellín, Bogotá, Mexico City
Holy sh*t, did you see those pictures? Obviously I took maybe 3 of them. Photo cred goes to Sean Marier (IG: @839photo ), Aashima Kapoor, and Emmy Singh!
