Somewhere in between the countries...

February is almost finished and our travels continued. The trip to Czech Republic was quite successful (or I hope) and all papers and documents were submitted. Of course it didn't help the mood when I went early in the morning to the town- hall and saw a paper on the door - Today closed! (Every last Friday in a month the office is closed). Well lucky me, that they were open on Saturday morning. Some of you might know that the town of Liberec, will be hosting next week the world championship of skiing and ski jumping, which is great for all the tourists, but will be very complicated for all the inhabitants of this town (let's say that the road structure should have gone through some construction prior to this event). Well I will tell you little bit more about it once I return next week hopefully with my new documents and new identity - I am slowly getting there :)

That is why it is great that we have lots of snow and temperature below zero, for this important event (and it is great that I am writing this blog entry from a sunny Lisbon, where we currently have 16 degrees - well, life is beautiful)

While we were visiting Czech at the end of January, my great friends (Kacenka and Pavel) took us for the first time (to a big excitment of Pedro) to the ice hockey game. This sport is quite popular in Czech and I must say that we are (or at least we were quite a good in it). Great sport, especially if you are watching it from a VIP floor (thank you Kacenka for finding the tickets) with food, champagne, beer, popcorn... hmmm shame that the game is so short (3x20mins with 2 breaks in between the thirds). Well, we had fun! (and Pedro enjoyed not just the ice hockey players dressed as White Tigers - name of the club - but as well plenty of cheerleaders in the stadium)

From there I took a crazy plane to US and spent 4 days in West Chester near Philadephia in a meeting and realised again how this kind of travel is different. Just travelling with business people is not such a fun as most of them open laptops in a second the plane is in the air, starting preparing presentations and at the airport waiting impatiently and silently for the luggage. Then you look to the luggage belt beside you and you see many people from some charter plane returning from the holidays, chatting, laughting, being loud and us in the "business area" jeallously looking at them and almost "shushing" them as they are destroying our great professional environment. :) Well it was fun, as always when I go to US something happens to the weather and there is the constant thread if I am going to leave this country on time. (eg. some hurricane approaching Philadephia and due to the strong winds flights were cancelled and some of my colleagues had couple of hours to rebook, reschedule, or buy new flights - well again, this is much easier if you are travelling on business)

And as I have mentioned already before, now I am sitting in Portugal Lisbon, enjoying the sun and the warm weather ( had to do already some spring shopping due to the unexpected sun:) We came to celebrate Pedro's birthday (not mentioning his age - even though 31 is really not a lot:)

It is great to dine with his family (extended) as it is a habit in Portugal and you almost feel that you are in a different world. Loud music, 10 people talking in the same time, and they are not talking, they are very loudly exchanging opinions on politics, music, films, next holidays, Pedro is trying to translate and for me it is like a movie and I am watching it from my sofa and eating popcorn. It is great, they are great and all the fun, great atmosphere and they genuine feeling of love and being loved sucks you into the environment and you have to participate. You don't have to, you want to as it is extraordinary how happy they are, seeing not just Pedro but as well me, the alien who doesn't speak the language and comes from this cold culture and family where we never raise the voice :) Well, you have to love it!

I am going to say good-bye tomorrow, leaving my hubby behind as he will go to UK (again) and spend another weekend in Portugal and me returning to Czech to collect my passport.

Well - 3 weeks, 3 countries... and there will be more. Next trip planned is to Chicago (beginning of March) where I will participate in a training course for a week....

Until then - hopefully we will spend couple of days together in Strasbourg!

Somewhere on our white sofa...

Another Sunday behind us and we are sitting on our white sofa, enjoying being at home and don't have to travel. Well, it will start again, but it was a nice change to stop and just look around, without being part of the crazy world. We couldn't though just sit and do nothing as Pedro would say that I am hyperactive and won't let him in peace for couple of hours, so he took me to a trip to Freiburg. Freiburg is a really nice German university town, approx. 70km from Strasbourg with a great catheral, old town and a nice walk to the Freiburg "castle", where you have a great view all over the city. But the main reason we went there was a coffee, which Lenka had to have for a long time already - these cravings which don't go away until you satisfy them:) . It was not a coffee per say, but a lovely cafe latte, which Pedro - as a proper Portuguese - calls hot milk. Well French have really no idea, how to make this tasty hot milk, so you have to go to Germany to get it. And what a fantastic surprise, when we arrived to this town and saw.... oh yes! Starbucks cafe :) For you who knows us, you remember our forever discussions about Starbucks. Is Starbucks this devlish place, the factory for bad and expensive coffee or a place where you can enjoy different tastes, with nice sofas and a nice vanilla latte :) I guess we are just different! But Lenka couldn't resist - of course. Perfect!

So we have spend a nice lazy Sunday in sunny Freiburg, calling friends, thinking about future, drinking "fantastic" coffee and realizing that everything is perfect and we do need more days like this in 2009. So enjoy your Sundays, or any other days in 2009, get a nice coffee, tea or glass of wine or whatever you enjoy and have fun! Crazy travels will start soon, so we will let you know how we are coping. Next stop - Czech Republic, seeing friends and most of all coping with all the bureaucracy of changing Lenka´s surname and her documents - well, definitely an adventure. Have a great week!

Somewhere in...

... It has been more than a year that we have written an article about our travels. This doesn't mean that we haven't been travelling - may be too much and we have said many times that we need to go back to our lovely blog and create some more tips and stories from our travels. The 2008 was a long and a busy year and it included travels around the world again, though in a different style. Travelling on budget and for personal reasons give you a different perspective and it seems that you see more details and different details on your journeys, than you do whilst travelling on business:) That is logical right?! but you might not realise it. All the hotels, restaurants, 24/7 contact to your travel agent, priority cards for hotels, flights, check in.... Gosh! :) Sorry just remembering our last travel from Heathrow - Frankfurt which took us 12 hours... So, let's try to continue this travellers blog - definitely more frequently than in 2008, to share both types of travel the business one and the personal one. It reminds me of the adverts from the bank HSBC when they compare two things and exchange the meaning. :) Business travel comfort, personal travel budget or business travel budget, personal travel comfort? Well, it all really depends.

So the first and probably last article from 2008 will be from Czech Republic, where I'm spending Christmas with my family.

In Czech snow does belong to this fantastic holidays, though the weather forecast said that the snowflakes are delayed for 24 hours, which means we can forget snow again this year and especially on the 24th December, when we celebrate Christmas, decorating the Christmas tree, watch old and even older fairy-tales in the TV, eating carp (yes carp:) and potato salad for Christmas dinner and visiting friends and relatives to wish everybody a very merry Christmas. So no snow... which I was very disappointed about, but the rest is excellent as every year... the mold wine tastes great and the Christmas dinner which was prepared by my father (our own family tradition:) was delicious.

Reading the statistics from 1908 - 2008 what is the most favourite present each year, I must say that we have followed the most of the Czechs and didn't give each other many useless presents but spend 3 days in a really nice hotel in Prague and celebrated Christmas as family. It was really amazing!

So let's see how the Christmas holidays will look in the 2009 and what travel is planned for us in the next year.

We wish you all Merry Christmas and all the best for the new upcoming year 2009! Enjoy....

L&P is back under 1 single surname Farinha:)

Somewhere back in Europe ...

We have proved that indeed the World is round, and travelling eastwards for the last 8 months, in a journey starting at the end of December, a cold windy day in Frankfurt, Germany, we have ended up back in Europe, in a much sunnier Portugal, a fitting final as a tribute to the first world traveller Ferdinand Magellan (or Fernão de Magalhães) who set this trend which we have now followed!

And what eight months we had, so many countries we have seen, cultures we have encountered and people we have met and made friends with! Oh and how we already miss the Thai street food, the Angkor ruins, the Mallaccan "Portuguis", the Singaporean tidyness, the Australian beaches, the New Zealand scenery, the Macau and Hong Kong skylines, the Chinese temples, the Korean barbeques, the Japanese trains, the Hawaiian sunset, the Canadian Tim Horton's coffee and the US beautiful scenic drives! So much we have done and seen, we come back with a wealth of experiences that is so rich it will take a long time to digest it all, review it and remember - when we are back home to Strasbourg in early October we will need to organise a long party just to go through all the hundreds of photos and fill back our famously empty bar!!

It is impressive how seeing something new and amazing every day and moving from one place to another can be so tiring, but thankfully during our journey we were so lucky to find so many amazing people all over the world who were so happy to take us in to their homes and allow us to set down our heavy backbags and relax our weary feet, and share in their lives if for just a little while, to all of you - you know who you are - a very big thank you!

And it is with mixed feelings that our last day in our travel reached an end, a party in the lovely town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania a perfect finale, after having visited the wonderfully free and museum-ridden capital city of Washington. We packed for the last time the few belongings we took during these 8 months (packing is certainly a skill we have perfected in this time!), bid farewell to our last hosts Matt, Lisa, Maddie and Moby and took our final plane back to Europe. But in all this time we never felt alone and the 4,000 visitors to this blog have kept us company all throughout with their reading and comments, and it has been great for us to be able to share what we saw and did with you, it never felt like we were too far away!

Eight months of travelling takes its toll and we reach the end tired and happy to be back with family and friends, with homecooked food and familiar places, the bar which has not changed a bit and the friend whose conversation resumes where it left off. This is the end of our round the world trip, and what a fantastic trip it was, but it certainly will not be the end of our travels, once the travel bug bites, you can never get rid of it, and we have been very badly bitten! We will probably go back to many of the wonderful places we have been to, and visit many new places that remain unseen, and we will try to continue sharing our stories in this blog, but until that happens, it is time for us to take a small rest, regain our energy back and watch the World go round ...

Somewhere in...between both ends of the East Coast

It is again some time ago since we shared with you our journey. It is not because we are getting lazy or because we stopped caring about you, but believe it or not we were quite busy. In a week's time we will be sitting in the plane which will take us back to Europe, so we are trying to enjoy every single minute of each day.

After Quebec we crossed the border back to USA, though the queue was much longer and the process much more difficult than going to Canada. But they have let us in and we stationed ourselves for couple of days near Boston.

The area of New England is quite unique and very beautiful. We drove for a short trip to Rhode Island to visit and dine with Pedro's uncles and to see beautiful Newport with lovely scenery and gorgeous houses, where each of them had sweeping sea view.

We don't have to introduce or explain anything about Cambridge, the town where one finds the famous Harvard University and the MIT. Pleasant parks, walkways, hundreds of cafes and thousands of students and tourists passing the centuries old university buildings and campus.

Boston was a big pleasant surprise. This beautiful city with lots of history has lots to offer. From beautiful churches, history lessons on the American Revolution (including the famous local Tea Party) Constitution, to a pleasant afternoon in the famous Cheers bar (from the TV series, where everybody knows your name). We had a great day there (not just in the bar), but the beer was as well very good.

After Boston we have made a huge jump and took a plane from Newark to the famous party place - Miami, Florida! We had a fantastic weekend with Matt&Lisa and some of their friends who live in this very chilled out part of US. What could you wish more than gorgeous long sandy beaches, fantistic torquoise water, air-conditioned bars with lots of colourful cocktails and friends with a fantastic sailing boat, who took us all on Saturday aboard and sailed around the Miami bay. Lenka has tracked down her relative who came to the US in 1970's, so we can even mark this journey around East coast as a collection of small family reunions.

Beautifully tanned and tired we have arrived on Sunday night and left on Monday to say quick good bye to the never sleeping city NY. And as this is a journey of reunions, Pedro met up with his american friend from Edinburgh University and she generously offered us her appartement to stay. We could experience Manhattan, Greenwich village, Soho and all beautiful parts of NY all over again.

There is just Washington left and then we are saying good byes and packing... But we still have a week to go, so we will continue keeping you posted ! :)

Somewhere in ... Quebec

"Bonjour Quebec" we said as we crossed the state line into the province of Quebec, Canada, when all the road signs turned to french only, even the until now universal STOP signs! And this "Nouvelle France" does try to retain much of the Older France culture and language while, at times reluctantly, embracing many features of the nearby English-speaking New World!

Our first destination was the big city of Montreal, where we were able to practise none less than our swiss-german with fellow europeans Pablo and Chantal! Their house featured one of the first interesting features of Montreal, double-storey buildings with external staircases leading directly to the 2nd floor! Montreal made quite a difference from Toronto, more compact and many, MANY more churches (quebequois are historically a very catholic bunch), while still remaining a canadian metropolis with a skyscraper skyline and the ubiquitous Tim Horton's, a very canadian coffee shop chain with delicious cheap treats! Oh and did you know that many, many Hollywood films are made in either Montreal or Toronto due to their older architecture and just as importantly, lower production costs!

After saying goodbye to Montreal and our swiss hosts, we headed for Quebec City, the capital of the province of Quebec. And while Montreal retained many of its fellow New-World qualities, Quebec is pretty unique in that it is purely french-speaking, historical, old (even by european standards) charming small city, with the old core surrounded by the original military walls, and even despite a significant presence of english architecture, it felt more french than many french towns we visited, with the kind of old french charm of small restaurants, outdoor cafes, exquisite little urban gardens and street musicians.

We would love to have spent more time in this romantic city but our journey relentlessly must go on with many more places to see, and anyway we look even more forward to experiencing again this french lifestyle back home, and amazing to think it's not so far off any more! But for the moment we must bid all of it, Au Revoir!

Somewhere in ... Ontario, Canada

We have crossed the border now between the United States and Canada with the first impression immediately that we were in another country - we can understand the temperatures which are in celsius and the distances which are in kilometres! What a beautiful border too, decorated as it is by the famous, and most impressive, Niagara Falls, which we had the chance to experience upclose in the boat "Maid of the Mist" which takes us to only within a few feet of the falls and gets us all wet in the process!

We spent then the weekend in Toronto, hosted by some real Torontonians, Hilary and Clinton! And even though we are coming in from New York, Toronto seems so vast! The difference clearly is that in New York the attractions are mostly concentrated in Manhattan in a very compact area and the residential neighborhoods surround it. In Toronto, the real attractions are the residential neighborhoods themselves, which are spread out so much walking around by foot is just impossible. In fact there is no real feeling of a "city of Toronto" - with half of its 2.6 million population born outside of Canada it is not surprising to see a varied collection of neighborhoods hailing from many different countries, each with its different personality, culture and often language.

Hence we have passed first by Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Italy, and by accident, Little Portugal, where many Portuguese and Azorean flags adorn the houses and shops alongside the Canadian flags, and Portuguese with an azorean accent is heard.

After Toronto, we did a short drive to one of the most impressive natural parks in Lower Canada, the Algonquin Park, a huge expanse of maple trees and pines, and lakes everywhere, where moose and bears and wolves roam. We saw amazingly built beaver dams (although the beavers themselves were waiting for us onwards in Ottawa!), and we even spotted some moose in the distance, animals the size of horses!

Our final stop in Ontario, before moving on to french-speaking Quebec, was the capital of Canada, Ottawa, itself already a bilingual city. As with Canberra, Australia, we were expecting a bland, featureless "new" capital, but instead we found a really exciting town, with amazing architecture including the impressive Parliament Buildings themselves, and with a size of 700,000 it felt like a very chilled out and pretty capital city.

We have now reached the region of Quebec, where we stay for almost another week and practise again our french, hopefully we have not forgotten it! Donc, a Bientot!