Brain Food Update

Hey again!

The Brain Food section has been updated for some good links if you are looking to procrastinate.

Harry Potter and the Visit from Mom and Mo

Hi friends!

Happy Belated Thanksgiving!!! I know, I know, I haven't update the blog in a while.. but I have a good excuse!!! Last Saturday Mom and Morgan came to visit me!! They came in on Saturday morning and I returned from London that afternoon after having seen Harry Potter the night before in Londontown.

Sidenote: Harry Potter was EPIC. I think it might be my favorite movie so far. It was the closest to the book, and we all know how much I hate it when the stray from the plot. (AHEM pathetically pitiful ministry battle scene at the end of Order of the Phoenix, I'm talking to you). I also had a fabulous time with Yomna and Hira walking around the city and spending all day shopping at Topshop in Soho. The best part of the trip was easily the collective gasp in the theater as the movie started. Priceless. Here's some pics from London:

Moving on, Mom and Mo leave very early tomorrow morning. We had a fun time hanging out and I really loved showing them around. Here are a few highlights from the visit.

Monday through Wednesday I had class all day long so Mom and Mo went to Musée D'Orsay (which was inexplicably closed but where they met a very charming older British lady), shopped at Galleries Lafayette, and saw Harry Potter (for Mo it was the second time).

This is the Christmas Tree at Galleries Lafayette.

The Sunday before all of my classes I took the afternoon to show them around the Opéra Garnier. Instead of paying extra for a guided tour, I did the tour from memory. I was so excited when we found a door on the 2nd floor that was open for people to view the theater with the lights on.
Thursday I took Mom and Morgan shopping around my neighborhood. We went to Bon Marché (a large upscale Harrods-like department store) in the morning, stopped by Repetto for some shoes for Morgan in the afternoon, looked in the windows at Manoush, ate some late lunch, stopped by Aigle where Mom bought rain boots and children's riding boots, got crêpes on the side of the road, and picked up some macarons at Ladurée! It was a long day of shopping. The picture below is the three of us sitting in front of a mirror while Mom was trying on shoes at Aigle. I took the picture because I thought each of us was sitting in a way that completely reflected our personalities.

If you start on the left with mom, you'll see that she's sitting in a very proper and composed manner. Morgan is in the middle, sitting like she doesn't care what that position does to her posture at all, and then there's me on the right, just looking awkward.

After leaving Aigle and getting some macarons (to go) it started pouring, so we ran to the nearest metro and stopped near Galleries Lafayette to shop at Mango. All of the huge department stores are decorated for the holidays and it's really pretty.

Friday afternoon we took a cooking class. The company that offers the cooking classes in english is owned by a woman from Hyde Park (who used to be a banker for citi group) and her french husband. We made french onion soup, spinach souflée, and chocolate fondant. It was so much fun!! And it was delicious. Chopping onions in the beginning was a bit of a nightmare as 11 people were chopping them, but looking back it was pretty funny.

After eating we walked over to Oysho for some loungewear and then crossed to street to go into BHV for Morgan to get a hat but we ended up walking out with a lot more than that hat. I had wanted to take them to Le Marais to get falafel but we were too stuffed and tired so we called it a day and headed back to the hotel. Today we took it easy. We met Hira and Yomna at Angelinas for some famous hot chocolate. I ordered a pecan brioche to make dad happy. (Happy dad?) Somehow sleeping in and drinking hot chocolate exhausted Mo, and this is what she looked like before we ordered room service for dinner.

I bid them farewell and headed back to my dorm to get some work done and let them get to bed early before their flight tomorrow. I can't wait to see them again in Spain in a few weeks. But for now, it's working time. This week I have 3 finals, 2 of which are two hour essays, and a 100 page yet-unwritten group research paper to turn in. It's going to be a marathon.

H.

Swiss chocolate, swiss knives, swiss cheese..

Hi all!

I just returned from Geneva, Switzerland a couple of hours ago. We didn't spend much time there. Our train got us in at 12:30pm on Monday and we left Geneva on the 5:00pm train tonight. When I think of Switzerland I think of ski lodges on snow-covered mountains, rich people storing their billions in banks, and neutrality. Unfortunately we had a tight schedule and we barely left our hotel neighborhood so I didn't get to see the pretty mountain towns that I'd imagined..or even walk past a ginormous and intimidating modern-looking bank.

When we arrived in Geneva it was very cold and pouring rain. Luckily our hotel was a one-minute walk from the train station. The hotel hadn't assigned rooms to people, so Bruno (our teacher and the head of our public health program at Sciences-Po told us to match up on our own and tell him what we decide. People started pairing off left and right and I felt like I was back at middle school worrying that no one was going to ask me to room with them. I was even more worried that I would have to room with one of the people on this program that have no notion of how to not be an annoying person. I took initiative and asked one of the girls I get along with who wasn't paired up yet to be my roommate.

At 2:45pm we headed for MSF. We were going to walk there but because of the train we took the cable-car bus two stops and walked into a very unassuming building. There is no way I would've ever guessed that inside this building was the headquarters to Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders). I didn't even see a sign. We listened to a speaker talk about the history of MSF for an hour and a half, something we had all already learned while in Paris (not to mention that we're all global health minors and probably knew it before coming to France).

His lecture was very dry and I found myself struggling to keep my eyes open. I entertained myself by drawing the MSF logo on my notebook. After his lecture we were supposed to hear a doctor speak to us, but because of the Haiti cholera goings-on all of the staff were all over the place so we got a last minute lecture from a more lively woman (who had reporters waiting for her once she was done), she talked to us for a half an hour about a new nutrient supplement and the controversy surrounding it. Apparently there are intellectual property rights battles surrounding the liquid. It is made of peanuts, milk, water, and something else. I couldn't figure out what she was calling the stuff, it was either "plumpy nuts," "plant peanuts," or "plampinuts." There was nothing else scheduled for us at MSF so we were released at 5:00pm and told to meet in the hotel lobby a couple hours later to walk to dinner.

As we were leaving I noticed the front desk was displaying MSF apparel for sale. I asked the guy behind the desk if they were for sale and he said yes but they only accept Swiss Francs and they don't accept credit cards. Yomna and I decided we'd try to look for an ATM and then we'd return to buy something. We were told that the closest ATM was back at the train station near our hotel. We started walking that direction, searching earnestly in the pouring rain for any sign of an ATM. As we left a pharmacy that couldn't give us change in Swiss Francs we quickly realized that ATMs were not located every couple of blocks like they are in Paris. We tried to go into a bank but found the place completely empty.

Look closely at the picture below. The ceiling was made to look like the night sky!!

We left the bank feeling very confused about our preconceptions of Swiss banking. This was supposed to be Switzerland! Land of banks! Where was the top security? We walked in like we owned the place and only saw one person in an office behind a curtain.

As we left the bank we saw a bureau du change across the street! Yomna and I changed over 50 Euro and hurried back to MSF. The man didn't seem happy to see us, he informed us that the guy who was in charge of the apparel wasn't around, and that they didn't have all of the merchandise there. I was about to get nasty and tell him that we'd take the shirts they had behind the glass in the counter until he said he would make a quick phone call. As we waited Yomna pointed out a white board that listed all of the staff who were departing for service over the next several days, their debriefing meeting times, and their location of work. People were listed as going to Sudan, Swaziland, Niger, and one or two places in the Middle East that I can't remember. Eventually he got off the phone and was about to tell us that the merch guy wasn't there but then cut himself off and said "oh, he's right here." The man behind us asked us what we wanted and he went downstairs somewhere to bring up sizes. The sweatshirt was 80 Francs (about 70 Euro)! I didn't get a hoodie but I got a t-shirt, which was much more reasonably priced.

When we returned to the hotel I drank some tea and tried to ignore a sinus headache. I tried to get into my room but we were only given one key and my roommate had it and she wasn't there. I got one from the desk and took some sinus medicine and laid down for 20 minutes, channel surfing.

At dinner we were served traditional Swiss fondu.

There was a band singing, yodeling, and playing traditional Swiss instruments like the saw, the accordion, and this thing:

First they brought out orange le creuset pots with handles full of slightly boiling cheese and placed them on little...hot plate things with a little flame inside. We watched Bruno show us the proper procedure. First you take the long skewer/tiny fork onto which you secure a hunk of bread and you dip the bread into the hot cheese using the skewer/tiny fork. Bruno let his bread sit in the hot cheese for a long time before taking it out but the bread gets really soggy that way. I decided that what I liked the best was to dip half of the little hunk of bread into the cheese to improve the proportion of cheese to bread. We had two birthdays on Monday; Yomna and Amanda's 21st birthdays! The band brought them up a few times to play their Swiss instruments and it was really cute. When it was time to bring out the hot pot of chocolate fondue and the fruit trays the band played happy birthday as we all sang.

The experience was great but the food wasn't good enough to make up for it being so absurdly unhealthy. I don't know why, but food in France has a tendency to be made with alcohol. Almost all of the desserts (except for the ones at patisseries) taste like someone poured two shots of rum on them after cooking them. Well, Geneva is in the French speaking-side of Switzerland and, true to form, the cheese tasted faintly of alcohol. We had really good white wine with our meal, but I hate when my food tastes like alcohol. Also, the cheese they used didn't even taste that good. Several people said they didn't like the cheese that was used. The chocolate was delicious but they served it with apples, oranges, cantaloupe, and pineapple. I was really surprised that they didn't give us strawberries or bananas. Nothing went well with the chocolate, and the cantaloupe with chocolate tasted like vomit. All criticisms aside, it was a very fun dinner!

It was still raining by the time we left the restaurant around 10:00pm. I was dead on my feet when I got back to the hotel. Sunday night the new people in the room next to me had friends over and they were up past 2 am. They kept doing that random loud bursts of laughter thing. Remember the girl I spoke about before from New York who spoke like my Ben & Jerry's co-workers? I could hear her voice clearly. I could hear every word she said. I had waited since I went to bed at 11:30pm for them to quiet down, but I finally knocked on their door at 1:30am and asked them politely to keep it down because I had to get up at 7:00 to go to Geneva. My roommate came back from her weekend in Brussels and Amsterdam at 6:00 am and didn't see the point in sleeping for just one hour, so she stayed up. So I only slept from 2:00am to 6:00am the night before. At the hotel my roommate wasn't back yet so I changed into my PJs, vowed to ignore any knocks on my door, watched BBC news for half an hour in bed, and then went to sleep at 10:45pm.

I will post day 2 in Geneva soon!

Love,

H.

Portugal ch. 4: Leaving Lisbon for Lagos

WARNING: This post is very long. You have my permission to read it in pieces.

And now, for the final chapter of my week in Portugal!!!

We left off on Sunday late afternoon in fairy tale land in Sintra.

That evening once we'd returned to Lisbon on the train we decided to take it easy because we'd had a long day of walking/hiking. We ate dinner and relaxed at a coffee shop called Brown's Coffee to eat and read. It was like a large starbucks. We just camped out and didn't move for a couple of hours until it was time to return to the hostel to shower and sleep.

Monday:

Apparently in Portugal Monday is the day that nothing is open. We had been informed of this the previous day by our breakfast friends (whom I forgot to mention we ran into at the moorish castle in Sintra). We decided to wander around the areas known as Barrio Alto and Alfama. They were in opposite directions so we began with Barrio Alto. To reach this neighborhood involved a lot of uphill climbing but we passed by a plaza that I later recognized to be the same plaza where Ali and Roberto took pictures. Most things were closed because it was still before 11am. We found a really book store where I spent some time leafing through books. It was a pretty cool area.

Afterwards we returned to our neighborhood and sat by water for a half an hour, I was reading To Kill A Mockingbird and was almost done with it so I was trying to slow down so I'd have something to read on the train ride to Lagos.

We walked to Alfama, considered Lisbon's old town, caught lunch, and walked over to another castle. Outside of the castle a rasta guy was selling something. As I passed him he said to me "Eres Española?" (Are you Spanish?) I shook my head and half smiled in delight and then he said "Oh! Eres Italiana!" (Oh! You are Italian!). I grinned, so happy to be presumed anything other than American, and he gave me a high five. The next two pictures are from Alfama:

We walked back to our neighborhood and found ourselves on a major shopping street, so naturally we spent a few hours popping in and out of stores. We bought some pastries and returned to Brown's to relax. Once we were ready for dinner we headed over to the local mall and ate in the food court. We each got huge salads and then to balance that out we ordered chocolate cake.

Tuesday:

Tuesday morning we had a 10:20 train to Lagos (pronounced "Lagosh"). We arrived at the train station around 9:40 and couldn't find our train time on the monitors. In horror I looked down at my ticket and realized that our train station was the Lisboã-Oriente station, the one in the suburbs about 10 minutes before Lisbon. I had noticed this a couple of days earlier but we figured that didn't make any sense and that it would just stop in the main station on it's way down to Lagos. There were no teller windows in that entrance and I frantically ran across the street to what seemed like some kind of train building as well. I showed the woman our tickets and asked her if that meant we were at the wrong station. She kept telling me I had to cross the street and look at the monitors to find my train platform. We were losing precious time! Finally she listened to what we were asking and she confirmed it and told us to find a taxi. We happened to be in the one city where taxi drivers do not wait in or around their taxi when they are in a line up. We found 15 taxis and none of them had drivers. We crossed the street again to the main drop off point for the station and hopped in a cab as soon as some woman got out. He didn't speak english so I broke out my rusty spanish. "Tenemos prisa!" I told him (we're in a hurry!).

He flew and got us there in ten minutes and I gave him a tip and thanked him. At the station the monitor had out train time but a different city other than Lagos was listed. I asked this older British couple and they said our tickets indicated a transfer at that other city, then on to Lagos. We sat down, relieved, and waited for the train to come. The British couple took us under their wing (I'm SURE they were grandparents by the way they took care of us) and made sure we got on the right train car and everything. We knew how to board a train but I just smiled and let them help us with whatever they wanted to. On the train I instantly wanted them there to tell us when to get off and transfer, but they were far away in another train car. The ride got prettier and prettier the more south we got. We looked out the window at the sea and at miles of orange bush things (they had oranges on them but it didn't look anything like a tree). After our transfer I looked out the window and saw several geckos crawling around by the tracks.

We reached Lagos around 2:45 pm.

Once again, we followed the crowd and then we got directions from a rent-a-car place to our hostel. They also gave us a handy map of the town. Lagos is known for it's beaches and is quickly becoming a vacation spot for lots of British who are buying up properties. I can tell it is still a city in development (it looked like a poor man's Huntington Beach) but in a few years I could see the prices rising and the tourism business becoming more professional. As we were asking for directions everyone kept telling us to walk past the big statue of the person, the statue that no one really knows what it is:

After checking into our hostel, which felt liked it too belonged in southern california, we found lunch and walked around. The town is really tiny. This was late October, but I bet that in the summer it is over-run with families and college kids doing beach stuff and clogging up the restaurants. I'd love to return in the summer. As it was, there were already tons of Brits there when we were there. Really, it was a town of British people. We found dinner at this hippy place where we ate on a couch because the mexican place we'd wanted to eat at was empty. The food was delicious and we enjoyed the vibe.

Wednesday:

We ate breakfast at a tiny place called the Odeon café, owned by a middle-aged British man who also serves as the cook, and his daughter (who was around my age and was on facebook on the computer everytime we walked in) was the waitress. It had a tv and the menu was full of cheap american/english breakfast food like pancakes, hash browns, eggs on toast, beans on toast, and juices. The atmosphere was very friendly. When the daughter would take our order she'd sit down next to us at our table and write everything down. They also had free internet. We returned each morning for the rest of our time in Lagos.

That afternoon we spent a few hours at the beach because it was about 80 degrees and Jennie wanted to tan. I am done with tanning on purpose, I'm hella afraid of getting sun spots and premature wrinkles..not to mention skin cancer. So I put sunscreen on constantly. And I still got tan, woohoo!

There was this dog on the beach that was about..twice as big as tiger and asia and had black curly hair. It spent all afternoon harassing beach goers with it's incessant barking. It barked at everyone who went near the water. It barked at me as i was halfway in the water but eventually switched to barking at a group of British college-aged boys. Every sound was amplified because of the rocks and at one point, as I was reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (a book I'd picked up the day before because I'd finished my other one), I heard one of the guys yell "F*ck he's after me!!!" British accent and all. I looked over, along with every single other person on the beach, and watched as this kid tried to swim away from the dog, only for the dog to follow him into the water.

As the sun went down it got chilly and we stopped for tea and "read" a couple of Portuguese magazines.

We ate dinner next to an American/Canadian couple at an otherwise empty restaurant. They were acting oddly formally and politely but we couldn't figure out what they would be doing in Portugal on a first date. I decided they must've come with a big group of friends, and everyone else was not interested in dinner quite yet, but they were and they decided to eat by themselves and they didn't know each other before the trip hence the awkwardness. Afterwards we got hot drinks at a café called Xpreîtaqui. They played coffee shop music and we chilled there and chatted for awhile before hitting the sack.

Thursday:

We had breakfast at odeon café again. Then at noon we went kayaking!! The kayaks were doubles, and it was us two, a strangely quiet Australian couple, and two very tan, small-ish, and muscular guides. The journey was a 3 hour trip to see the rock formations along the shores and to visit the grottos. Jennie and I pulled up the rear the whole time, but it was a great work-out and I was glad for the exercise. The guides kept pointing out rock formations and saying "this one is an elephant, this one is a face, this one is a toilet seat.." Once he said the toilet seat one I started to wonder if he and the other guide have fun by pulling out random nouns every time they hit the water and hearing the tourists go "Oh, I see it!" Jennie and I started doing it too. I would look at a rock and be like "This one looks like a teapot! That one looks like a table!" The guides started laughing and judging by their reaction I have a feeling I'm right about them making it up sometimes.

After the kayaking we sat on the beach so Jennie could tan some more. It wasn't as warm as the day before but it was still somewhere in the 70s. After an hour on the beach I tried to find the slave market. According to our map I had passed by that plaza a dozen times already. Our map wasn't totally accurate as we'd figured out during our time in Lagos (another thing that will improve in the next couple of years). It told me it was located in one corner, but it absolutely was not that corner since that corner held a bikini store and a restaurant. I think it was this:

On the sides of the broken platform were iron rungs. Also, why else would they keep this broken slab of cement around? This is on the side of the church in the lower picture.

We showered, tried and failed to get the hostel cat out of our room and had to get help from the manager, then read for a bit and ate an early dinner. After dessert we walked around and ended up back at our café with the weird name.

Friday:

We grabbed breakfast at the odeon café. Our train wasn't scheduled until 4pm so we sat down in another café while we watched a tropical storm try to blow everyone over. We had a ten minute walk to get to the train station and there was no sign of the storm letting up. We changed into our board shorts and I put my scarf over my head and we hurried in the rain over to the station. We spent about 20 minutes in the bathroom drying ourselves off along with our luggage/shoes/purses.

Once I was done I saw a sign that said the next train wasn't until 5:20. I have a suspicion that the train time on our ticket was for our transfer stop, not from the Lagos station. Which meant we were going to miss our train. We hastily changed our tickets to the 5:20 and later called the hostel to let them know we wouldn't be arriving until sometime after 1 am. The train ride was long and we had a couple of transfers, but I survived by reading my book and eating trail mix. Except for the stuffiness I was quite content. Jennie had less patience for the train ride, and I realized that Bolivia really helped me to see transportation in a new light. After being on a 10-hour freezing cold and bumpy ride to Sucre and back, several cold 7 hour bus rides to La Paz with one bathroom stop, and taking a 12 hour train to Tupiza in freezing temperatures with unsanitary bathrooms and warm but gross blankets and alpaca socks on my feet, 6 hours through Portugal was a piece of cake.

We returned to the same cool cinema hostel in Porto that we stayed at when we arrived in Portugal. We had to return to Porto because the only flights to Paris left from Porto. I was in bed by 2:10 am and woke up a little after 8 to grab a relaxed breakfast at the hostel before leaving at 9:15 am for the metro to the airport. We arrived with plenty of time and witnessed a strange scene. The picture below is my sneaky no-flash shot of what we saw. We walked much closer but I didn't think taking a picture of a possibly dead woman would make the police very happy. In front of the police was a person on the ground covered with a medical sheet. There was no medical professional around, and the police weren't even paying attention to the body. I looked around for mourners and saw one lady facing the opposite direction on a bench and a man who was putting his arm around her. I can't even be sure she was related to the incident at all. There was an arm and a foot sticking out from under the blanket. She was there for at least half an hour with nothing going on around her except some police standing a ways away chatting. There was no rope or barrier around, I mean literally someone could've walked up and uncovered her before the police noticed. Eventually some paramedics carried her away in no hurry and put her in the back of a van that could've been an ambulance but I couldn't see it that well. I didn't hear any sirens.

Anywho, I bought a National Geographic and we boarded the plane back to Paris!!!

That's the end of my trip to Portugal! We leave for Geneva tomorrow morning for a public health field trip to MSF headquarters and WHO headquarters. We also get fondue.

-H.

Portugal ch. 3: Today Was A Fairytale

Hey everyone!

I know you've been hanging on the edge of your seats waiting for the next addition to my Portugal posts, but wait no longer! To refresh your memory, I ended the last post on our first afternoon in Lisbon after having left Porto. Here we go,

After we spent some time bumming around the plaza and walking into a few different stores near the shopping area (including a store called "Pull and Bear" which was like a cool version of Hollister where there were a few VERY attractive Brits standing around chatting), we headed back to the hostel to change and head to Hard Rock to celebrate Jennie's 21st birthday, which was that day.

On the way to Hard Rock we passed by one of the coolest lunar scenes I have ever seen. Behold:

(Tilt your head so the left side is the top of the page)

I didn't have my camera but I drew it in my journal that night.. and then stole this picture from Jennie once we got back home:

It was one of those moments when everyone around you has stopped and is staring at something, so you look in the direction of their gaze and your jaw drops.

There was a very long wait at Hard Rock but it was well worth the wait. I ordered a strawberry daiquiri (is that really how you spell that?) that tasted exactly like a strawberry smoothie and I have a sneaky suspicion the bartender left out the alcohol..which I guess is fine with me, it was yummy. To my surprise Jennie didn't order a drink because she'd had half a drink the night before. We had agreed on getting a fun drink while we waited for our table to celebrate her birthday but after I decided on mine she changed her mine and ordered a soda. I was a little frustrated but I wasn't going to push the issue and make it awkward. It was delicious food as always, but my twisted mac-and-cheese (which is Morgan's go-to at Hard Rock) was 11 Euro or around 15 dollars! Oh, and while we were waiting in the crowded bar area to be seated, a guy walked past us and said "hi" with a british accent, and as he passed Jennie heard his friend say "dude they're like 14!"

No comment.

The next morning was Sunday. We got up and ate breakfast at the hostel. While we ate we chatted with a couple girls from Eau Claire college in Wisconsin!! How random. After talking to them and sharing tips, we decided to head out to Sintra, the castle village about 45 minutes out from the city. We hopped on a train, I with London Fog Starbucks drink in hand ("hazelnut instead of vanilla, please") right before it pulled out of the station. We chatted about boys and political ideologies until we got to Sintra. We knew when to get off because all of the tourists on the train were getting off. When traveling and confused, always follow the tourists.

Before we go any further I should mention that Ali from last season's Bachelorette went to Lisbon with 5 of the guys and visited 3 different castles. One of the castles was multicolored and I'd seen it atop it's ginormous hill from afar while our train pulled into Sintra. I was more than excited.

We followed the tourists up a long, windy road as a horse-drawn carriage rode past us (Ali took a horse-drawn carriage all the way up to the multi-colored castle!) and we found ourselves in the middle of a fairytale village. I mean, it was lush and green with a slight chill to the air and the place was littered with palaces nestled in the rolling hills. It was beautiful. We reached the city center which was tiny and visited a tourists office to plan our day. First, we visited the King's summer home (don't ask me which king) because it was only free until 2pm.

I found two amazing things in the King's summer home.

First, Narnia's wardrobe!

Second, A GALLEON ROOM!! WOOHOO! There were no galleons in that room and my dreams of wizarding riches vanished with a sting.

Then we decided we should grab some food before walking over to the next palace. Strolling along the narrow streets to find food we passed by a café that Jennie had read about for being famous for two of Portugal's pastries. They are called "travasseros" and "quejados." One was an almond pillow and the other a sugary cinnamon cheese thing from which I tasted no cheese, only heaven. To get them we had to take a number and wait in line. We took our pastries to a café and ordered food and chatted.

Our chat turned into a conversation about what it is to be gay. You see, Jennie is a conservative Christian who goes to church every Sunday at an english-speaking church in Paris, and while I am a spiritual person I also do not agree with many dictums from organized christianity or christian churches. We had a very respectful and grown up talk, but a lot of things surprised me from our conversation. I knew she was a strict christian, she will only marry a christian and she has a tattoo to remind herself of God's love, but I don't know..somehow I thought she would think the same way that I did about this topic. I guess that was naïve of me. I quickly learned that she believes that being gay is a sin, "just like murder, it's in the bible." She also said she knows for a fact that it is something you can change about yourself because she had a friend who was a girl and dated a girl for a year, but then changed her mind and "saw the error of her ways" if you'll allow me to paraphrase, and she switched back to men. Then she went on to explain that she doesn't think politics should get into the moral issue and that the reason we should ban gay marriage shouldn't be because of religion, but only because it is causing so much tension.

The frustration was building up inside of my chest and I could feel myself frantically trying to calm myself down and find a way to respond politely while still expressing my opinion. I hate debates. I took a breath and told her that the story about her friend is ONE story, and that it's purely unscientific to take one case-study and apply it to everyone. I went on to explain to her the theory of the dimensional view of sexuality, where everyone has a place on the scale. Some people are at either end and are purely homosexual or purely heterosexual, where as there are some people that can fall anywhere in between the two extremes, and that her friend would fall somewhere in between the middle and heterosexual. She hadn't heard this theory before and I was surprised by that. I didn't make it up, I learned it. We decided our disagreement was purely based upon whether we thought our sexuality was something we could change, or something we were born with. Over the course of our conversation we had moved from the cafeteria and were walking to another summer home palace of sorts.

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves!

I found Aslan!!! I can't share with you what he told me.

Next we caught a bus up the huge hill/small mountain to find the Moorish Castle and the Palacio Naçional de Pena (the multi-colored castle). I thought the winding walls looked a lot like the great wall in Mulan. Climbing all of these steps was very tiring and tricky to do while wearing a skirt in the high winds, but well worth it for the view.

We were told that the multi-colored palace was only a 15 minute walk up the hill from the Moorish castle, so we walked. This was the most exercise I'd had since climbing the too-small-to-be-called-a-hill hill at the Salar de Uyuni at 10,000 feet up. It was tough but I was glad for the exercise. (That exhausted picture of me above is before the hike up to the palace.)

Walking around the palace was amazing. The rooms were full of stuff to look at and admire. Jennie charged ahead in front of me so fast she didn't stop once to look at anything. I raced through the rooms in order to catch up to her when what I'd really wanted to do was take my time and marvel at things. When I caught up to her she said "there you are!" as if I'd taken my sweet time. Traveling with only one person can be tough sometimes. You can never argue because you know you're stuck with them and the awkwardness that is sure to come after an argument. I smiled silently and followed behind her. I decided to take my time looking at the hogwart's-esque kitchen with fake dead animals strung upside-down in the back pantry.

Thus ends chapter 3!!

-H.