Digital Wanderer | Portugal — 7, a night outing and thoughts on friction

The young padawan really loves construction equipment. He just couldn't miss the chance to take a picture with a crane.

In Portugal, buildings are often peeling, but that only adds to their charm.

The Little Mermaid

I'm a master of zoning out on my phone. What can you do, it's a quick way to see what interesting things are around. The main thing is not just to look at it in the phone, but sometimes actually look around too. I use TripAdvisor and Foursquare to navigate interesting places, and after traveling, I delete the app from my phone. Ira and Anita complement my primitive approach of a bus tourist with things like NomadWiki and AtlasObscura, which gather more original and underground spots.

The photo reminded me that people in Portugal can be dark-skinned to the point of being pitch-black; exactly such a girl, Paola, sold us tickets for the boat tour. Probably because of that, in the huge shopping mall where I went on the last day before my flight, half the models on the posters were black.

Returning to Fuseta in the evening, we decided to drop by a small nature park on a hill at sunset. What I didn't take into account is that we were driving a van, not my beloved bicycle. Driving along narrow mountain dirt roads is no picnic even in a passenger car, let alone in this thing. While Ira, who was driving almost the whole time, pushed through the bushes trying not to scratch the sides, I prayed to Satan that there would be a place to turn around at the end. Otherwise, I'd be the first to get it, since I was the one who, out of habit, led the team into the natural wilds. Huge thanks to Ira, by the way, for her unpaid driving labor, because it's genuinely very, very hard work, which, as it turns out, the rest of us didn't do.

However, the detour into the wilds was worth it. The road brought us to ruins with a well and some kind of irrigation mechanism. The latter, apparently, was intended for the citrus orchard, which still grows in abundance, albeit without human intervention. The tangerines and oranges smelled and tempted us to try them: the first fruit turned out to be sour, and I almost thought they were wild ones. But no! A couple more tries led to fruits with intoxicating flavor notes.

It was getting dark quickly, but we still couldn't resist walking around. Nearby we discovered a small river, a waterfall, and a little bridge to the other side, better suited for the "Snowdrop" club than for a standard tourist route. As it turned out, the bridge led to the other side, which was approached by a beautiful asphalt road that we totally missed. Well, not we. I did. However, given my constantly mega-crappy condition and lack of sleep from all our adventures at the beginning, it's not surprising at all. On the flip side, a bit of adrenaline spiced up our trip; otherwise, the van, the kid, and wandering around shops sometimes took up more time than we'd like.

This doesn't mean I'm all that unhappy and just bitching for no reason. In any joint endeavor, let alone a trip, coming to an agreement isn't so simple. When things are complicated by a small child, different tastes, and habits, it's completely kaput. Good thing our values are fairly similar. Ranging roughly from Vika's rather religious but positivist (non-Christian) spirituality, through Anita's freeganism and minimal environmental impact, my non-religious mystical feeling and secular Buddhism, to Andrey's utilitarianism, radical rationality, and moderate capitalism. Andrey's stress tolerance and Ira's very non-conflictual nature also helped. She doesn't even like board games where you have to play against each other — now that's a socialist upbringing!

I'm also a fairly peaceful person, until lack of sleep and pain get to me. Then I snap at people with or without reason. This time it seems I didn't suck too much blood from my companions, but of course, they would know better.

Of course, in "big" life — of which a trip is just a tiny demo reel — everything is much more tangled. As my life experience shows, you can totally be non-conflictual, for everything good and against everything bad, but that won't save you at all from acting in a damn unethical way.

In any case, it's all temporary — all these twists and turns, dramas, and troubles. Which doesn't make them any less cruel and agonizing for the participants. In the lives of my friends and acquaintances in recent months, there's been somehow way too much hell. I tried to reconstruct the timeline, but lost count. All I know is that around the days we were driving around southern Portugal, my buddy from Minsk passed away; he had been living with someone else's liver for a couple of years. He got the transplant because he was infected with Hepatitis C in the hospital. Judging by his colorful descriptions, his life in the last year was the most horrific one can imagine without going insane. Whenever things get completely unbearable for me, I remember him, and I realize I can endure a little more.

On this sad note, I present to you a song from Amanda Palmer's finally released new album — "There Will Be No Intermission". The track is called "The Ride", and I first heard it at the end of a big live concert, the broadcast of which I stumbled upon completely by chance on YouTube at two in the morning. The song is about the exact same thing I often chew over in my head and posts — the impermanence of all things. I'm getting ahead of myself, because the discussions about rationalism and Buddhism happened later, but my brain isn't quite a Turing machine like Andrey's, so it just comes out how it comes out.