Digital Wanderer

We live as long as we fly

Portugal — 14, The Party

Let's finally get back to the party. It works like this — you pay a fixed entrance fee (in our case, 10 euros). In return, you get to hang out at two stages and stuff your face with pizza. That is, of course, if you have the patience to wait in line. They bake the pizzas in these huge wood-fired ovens and lay them out on stones in front of the hungry crowd. The stones are faintly marked to show what kind of pizza is in front of you: meat, fish, or vegetarian. Nearby at the counter, there's also a dessert pizza on a plate, which I think is their most successful creation. The rest are pretty average and slightly burnt, though there's a certain charm to that — they are baked on wood, after all.

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Portugal — 13, First Interlude: Project 'Outlander'

Ooooookay. That's what my favorite podcaster Sam Harris says, and I seem to be picking up his mannerisms. He continues from there, and usually you hear the word "Housekeeping", which means cleaning up.

In the physical world, housekeeping awaits me upon my return, but for now let's do a virtual one. I barely made it onto the bus to Riga, from where I fly to Edinburgh tomorrow. The plans are grand: I will spend ten days there, and then Romania awaits, where I'll spend just as much time, and finally I will return to Riga via Prague.

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Portugal — 12, arrival at Friday Happiness Pizza Party

It's been a while since I picked up my sword! The renovations are finished, things have cleared up a bit at work, I'm feeling more or less okay, so I can give it a try.

Especially since I picked a good place to pick up from—that very same cliffhanger. Just so you know what we're talking about, let me remind you that the previous episode ended with a black jeep moving swiftly towards the Friday Happiness Pizza Party. For me personally, the news that this party was outdoors, and even in the mountains where it can get pretty cold at night, came as a bit of a surprise. I had only the vaguest idea of what this whole gig was about — supposedly a rave, and supposedly they bake pizzas there, if you make it in time. Luckily, we arrived right on time — around ten o'clock, I'd say. You could immediately tell the place was popping — even a quick glance revealed dozens of cars parked nearby, but you couldn't hear the noise or see the stage lights from the parking lot, which meant the line of cars stretched even further down the road. And so it did, plus we had to climb a hill to get to the gates.

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Portugal — 11, Chapel of Bones

Returning to the pier, we stomped back to the center of Faro. On the way, we got caught in a crowd of gawkers who were staring at an incomprehensible phenomenon: two young dudes with a bottle were poking at some black wavy thing. As happens with humans, we copied the gawking and also froze, studying the incomprehensible. Explanations didn't take long: the dudes' tracksuit-wearing buddies standing nearby didn't fail to tell us that it was a kind of fish called "Old woman's vagina". They apologized for the name, but you can't erase words from a song. However, considering the guys repeated this fact several times, they clearly got a kick out of mildly shocking the tourists. But Ira is no pushover, she herself can tell anyone a thing or two about vaginas, and this time it all ended with just jokes and banter in response.

Half of the pics are by Vika

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