As I was saying before the Portugal trip, if there's a time to visit Livermore, it's during the winter when the hills are green and fresh from the rain. Along with the rain comes something else that was a bit of a surprise for us East coasters- snails. Yep, right now the snails are loving life. There's water everywhere, and they're all coming out onto the sidewalks like it's some kind of snail mardi gras. Personally, I'm fascinated by the little guys. Where are they all going? What's so great at the other end of the sidewalk? How exactly does the snail's propulsion system work? Can they bite? I think about these kinds of things while helping them cross the sidewalk at work, knowing that I really don't want to know the answers.

Oh yeah! This one's all mine!

Amy's got a different take on the matter. Sure they're interesting, but to her, they're little bandits that raid her garden at night and attack helpless plants. They also have a tendency to hang out on our back door step, and make terrible crunching noises when you step on them on your way to change laundry in the garage.

Rather than fight the little invaders, I've been trying to think up ways that we could polish them up a bit and make them more presentable. My first thought was that we should get tiny little chariots, attach them behind some of the bigger snails, and then have some races. Maybe some of the smaller snails would get to ride in the back, yelling out gladiator things. My second thought on this has been that we should make a bunch of tiny little hats, and make the snails all wear them. Everybody loves hats, right? And it's hard to hate something that's just so cute..

Yeah.. it might take a while, but I think that's my great calling in life. Tiny hats for little pests. We could branch out and work into different markets.. Hats for Rats.. Short Pants for Grasshoppers. Maracas for cockroaches.. There's just and endless pool of ideas here, and thousands of pests to dress. I'm going to be super rich.

Things have been picking up for Genevieve lately in San Francisco (yes, she's still crashing at our place, but she's been making progress in the SF theater community). Recently she picked up a job as a stage manager for a controversial new play called Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom'. As the name implies, Guantánamo is about the US prison camp in Cuba where enemy combatants are being held and interrogated. The play is particularly heavy because the dialog comes entirely from statements made by the prisoners, family members, and government officials. The SF production is using the same actors that put on the NY Broadway production, so it's a fairly high caliber deal. While looking around on the web for some links, I came across this review, which actually references Genevieve by name. Go Gen!

As the stage manager, Genevieve was able to hook us up with a free pair of tickets for the opening night. Amy and I took BART into the city, happy to be escaping from suburbia and getting a little culture for a change. Along the way, we stopped off at Union Square to have dinner and to pick up some fancy soap at a yuppie store called Lush for a friend of Amy's. After dinner, we caught a cab to the theater in the mission district (ouch, $20), picked up the tickets from will call, and found our seats. The theater (Brava) was pretty cool. Their website has some pictures of this old, renovated theater. It's like an old movie house, but with soft, velvet seats. cool.

Anyways, one of the things that they're doing for this play is have a special guest celebrity come out and do a monologue at the beginning and end of the play. Gen told us that different celebrities would be doing it each night, such as Martin Sheen, Tim Robins, and Susan Surandon (basically, all the actors they made fun of in Team America). The special guest for our night however was.. Danny Glover (you may remember him from such gems as Lethal Weapon 4). Mr. Glover stumbled through his lines like he was William.. Shatner.. reading something.. for the first time. After he finished, Mr. Glover returned to the audience and took a seat that was just a few rows behind us. Wow, never before had we been so close to part of the Gibson-Glover genius.

So.. during the intermission, Amy and I wandered down the hall to the lobby to see if there was any mid-play hubbub to listen to. Amy and I were sort of chuckling to ourselves about how funny it would be if Mr. Glover had personalized the introduction with his Lethal Weapon tagline "Gunatonamo: I'm getting too old for this shit". Then it hit me- now was our chance to do something for Mr. Glover. Thinking about the fancy soap we had just bought, I turned to Amy and said "Amy, you know what we should do? We should go up to him, hand him the gift bag, and say, 'Danny Glover, here's some soap. Thanks for coming out.'" It was at that point that Amy said (rather loudly) "Craig, you know that Danny Glover's standing right behind you now". Doah. He may not have heard me, but I know he heard Amy. In any case he gave us look that I interpreted to be "Soap? What the hell do I need soap for?".

Rather than take the opportunity to tell him that we did in fact have some fancy soap that we could give him, we decided to just scamper off. I like to think that Mr. Glover will ponder this odd remark for a while, until it turns itself into a story of its own that gets told on some late night talk show interview. Yep, that's how I plan on changing the world. Plant the seeds of "what the hell did that mean" in the heads of famous people, in hopes that one day the stories will blossom into party conversation on Letterman.

So.. That about does it for our Portugal adventure. The trip back home was terrible. The day started at 4:30am when we were woken by the dancing pandas on our alarm clock ("Hello!"). A cab driver rushed us through the empty streets to the airport, where we somberly waited for our flight home. Or rather, for our flight to Frankfurt, which is nearly 1,200 miles to the East. We milled about the Frankfurt for something like three hours before our plane to SFO was ready to go. Heh, that flight was kind of interesting because there was this rowdy block of French people in the middle of the plane. They only spoke French and were bewildered that the German flight attendants couldn't understand what they were saying. It was like they (the French) were Americans. As we were leaving, I heard one slowly recite some phrases from a guidebook. "Halllo." "thank...you...very...much". Heh.. good luck, buddy.

Anyways, Amy and I had a pretty good time in Portugal. It's good to get away, especially to a place where the people have such a strong devotion to pastries.

Wednesday was our last full day in Portugal. While we were a bit worn out from all the traveling, we made a valiant effort to visit Sintra for the day (pictures here). Sintra is a small town just outside of Lisbon that Portuguese royalty used to call home. It was a short ride on a commuter rail out to Sintra. Along the way you'd periodically see parts of this incredible aqueduct system that moved water between the two cities. While some of it was overrun by weeds, the whole thing still looked pretty solid. Let's hear it for engineering.

Once in Sintra we made the wise decision to purchase an all-day tourist bus pass. As our bus zig-zagged up the mountain to the castle, we caught glimpses of worn out tourists whose faces were covered in regret. We rode all the way to the top to see Pena Palace (many of the other famous buildings along the route were closed for the day).

Pena Palace is basically Portugal's version of Neuschwanstein (Pena Palace supposedly influenced Ludwig's castle, which is the one in Germany that looks like something from a Disney fairy tale). PP was kind of fun- it had all sorts of ridiculous towers, pathways, and castle walls for you to explore. I'm not sure the place would be all that practical if you had to live there, but I guess you have to find something to spend your money on when you're king. Amy and I wandered around the castle for a while before deciding to call it quits. We planned on walking down the hill, but we took some wrong turns, got severely lost in the garden, climbed back up the hill, and then waited for the next bus to do the job right. There's a lesson for you- if you're going to walk down a mountain, make sure you wind up on the right side of it.

We were cold so we took a quick ride around town in our tourist bus and caught the next train back into Lisbon. At the rail stop in Lisbon, you could see part of the giant aqueduct system, crossing a deep valley. Unfortunately, it was too far away to walk to or get a good picture of (try google). It was starting to get late so we made our way home to our Americanized hotel. Along the way we picked up some food from a corner grocery store, as well as a kitschy alarm clock (that has an lcd sequence of panda bears playing, and saying "Hello!" for no apparent reason). Ahh yes.. Nothing is more European to me than eating blocks of cheese on ripped-up bread slices in a quiet hotel room. If only the Kellegous had been there to trade us some of his Captain Jacques snack cakes.

Ahem.. Where was I? Oh right, Coimbra, windy, odd Chinese food. Tuesday we got up and caught the train back into Lisbon, the city that had intimidated us just days earlier. We still had a bit of the fear when we rolled into the train station, but this time we were equipped with a hotel reservation that guaranteed us shelter and a reason for being, provided we could find the hotel. Our public transit knowledge brought us within 10 blocks of the hotel, to a park where lots of older Portuguese men were playing unseen games (chess? dominos?) on stone tables. A cab driver stalked us and we were on our way. After a brief scare where the cab driver announced that he couldn't see any hotels near the address we'd given, we located the place, checked in, and happily collapsed on big beds meant for business travelers.

We could have just stayed at the hotel for the rest of the night, but oddly enough a phone book caught my eye. On the cover of it was a silhouette of that famous Portuguese castle that comes up when people mention Lisbon. "Hey, let's go there. What is that thing?" Amy consulted the guidebooks, found the place on the map, and warned me that they might be closing for the evening soon. We hurried down and grabbed a taxi, which was driven by a guy that seemed to take the rush hour traffic rather personally. He zipped us around to the waterfront, to a park with big monuments. Ah. There it was, the Torre de Belém (the Belém Tower).

In addition to being on the phone book, the Torre de Belém is famous because it was built in the river as a lookout tower in 1521. Since then, they've extended the river banks so you can just walk up to the thing, but it's still a cute place that looks like a miniature castle. We bought tickets and wandered about it until closing time.

From there we walked along the river bank until we came to the Monument of Discoveries. The MoD is a gigantic stone thing with a bunch of statues of Portuguese explorers (Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Henry the Navigator, etc) that are all lined up single file, looking towards the water. To us, it kind of looked like they were all taking a walk down the plank. The nice thing is that the queen and church figures are at the back of the line, giving everyone a good shove. We thought about getting behind the queen and giving her a push, but one thing we've learned is not to screw with another country's monuments.

Next we crossed the street to check out the Jerónimos Monastery. The books say it was a large monastery built near the river during the 16th century, and that it was financed through Portugal's spice tax. I assume the inside is all fancy-pants purty and what not. We got there after the doors were closed, so the best I can give you is this shot I took through the keyhole. Yep. It's a church.

It was starting to get a little dark, so we started looking for a place to eat in the area. As luck would have it, Amy spotted this cool kebob kind of place that looked like a college kind of hang out. They were super friendly in there, one of the cook guys was impressed that we had come all the way from California (aha.. there's our next travel tip. Don't tell people you're from the US, tell them you're from California. Ca is somehow much cooler, and not associated with US politics). Amy and I were overjoyed to be eating at a college hangout kind of place, especially since they had vegetarian options for her.

After dinner, we wandered down the street to Pastéis de Belém, which is probably the most famous Pasterias in Portugal. They've been around since 1837 and still have a secret recipe for their amazing pastries. The cafe was a labyrinth of oddly shaped rooms (try taking the tour on their website). I downed a lot of café com leite and several pastéls de nata. It was so good it made you think about quitting your job, learning Portuguese, and moving there. Ahh well. We strolled back to the bus stop, charted a route through the bus map, and caught a cross town bus that dropped us right by our hotel. Not a bad day at all..