I deboard the train in Frankfurt, and am surprised to find pay phones at the station. I thought this species went extinct with the typewriter and VHS tape. I toss in a few euros and call my Couchsurfing host, Christian, who says he´s standing in front of the nearest McDonalds.

Like most Europeans, he´s neatly presented, with a long navy wool coat, neatly ironed shirt and polished shoes. He greets me with a smile and a kiss on each cheek, tells me about his job as a pharmaceutical sales rep. Then he says he has a surprise for me. Would I like to be on television?

We go to a Chinese restaurant around the corner, where a Spanish news crew is interviewing couchsurfers and their hosts. I´m approached by a journalist about my age. She asks if I´d be able to do the interview in Spanish. I took a clue from the fact that she was asking this question in English, and said probably not. She insisted that I try.

Speaking Spanish into a videocamera, it turns out, is like playing piano in front of an audience: suddenly, you can´t hit half the notes that you could in rehearsal. I sputter through the interview, telling her that I´ve traveled for the last 10 weeks — 6 in Spain, 2 in Portugal, 2 in Italy, half a week in Austria, and today in Germany — and that I built a couchsurfing page with my photo and information on it; I tell her finding a host is sometimes easy and sometimes hard, depending on the country, and that my friend Kim has stayed with my current host, Christian, and reports he´s a wonderful guy.

Christian takes the pressure off with a joke; he tells the news crews that meeting Kim and I has convinced him that not all Americans own guns.

We wrap up the interview, return to the train station and pick up a Taiwanese couchsurfer. On our way home, it occurs to me that no one laughed at his “gun” comment, and I realize it wasn´t a joke. I mention this to him.

“So you’ve never fired a gun?” he asks with a smile. “In all your years of living in America?”

“I have,” I say immediately. “When I was in the Army ROTC, my freshman year of college. And then again in South Carolina at a firing range with my friend Luke, who is an avid hunter. And I almost went shooting with my last roommate, Eric, who kept two rifles in his closet and had a subscription to AutoPistols magazine. But then Eric and I got into a big fight about the electricity bill, and our shooting date never happened.”

“What’s it like?” he asked.

I begin describing how an M-16 has the same barely-there kickback as a 22-caliber, and stop mid-sentence. I’ve just surprised myself with my own gun knowledge. Perhaps Christian’s little joke had more than a hint of truth in it.

Karin, the woman whose home we are staying at in Villach, needed to travel overnight to Vienna for business. She wasn’t willing to let us stay alone in her apartment, so we needed to spend the night in Vienna as well.

Only one problem. The European soccer championships, held every four years, are happening in Austria as we speak, and all the hostels are booked. They’ve been booked for months. Vienna is flooded with people. There’s no where to sleep. A cramp in the Vienna visit, right?

Not at all.

This morning while walking to the bakery for some fresh pastries, Kim spotted a small family business boasting her same last name — Ehardt — and began talking to the owner. They suspected, but couldn´t confirm, that they might share a common great-grandmother. Or they might possibly a great- great-grandmother. Their family relation is tenuous at best.

Nonetheless, the Austrian Ehardts welcomed her as “family!,” embracing her as though she was a long-lost daughter returned after being shipwrecked for a decade.

The Ehardts immediately offered us a place to stay in Vienna, and telephoned their cousin — a VERY tenuous relation to Kim — to joyously proclaim that some long-forgotten family member from America is coming to spend the night.

We spent an evening in Vienna’s city center with this so-called cousin, watching soccer on an enormous flat-screen TV while surrounded by hooligans with the Austrian flag painted on their faces. Kim and the cousin poured over photo albums of great-grandparents, marveling over grainy black-and-white images of a relation they may or may not share.

Isn’t family great?

“I thought Italy would be the highlight of the trip,” Kim said, “and Austria would just be some place we pass through. But wow.”

We exited Italy with  characteristic mishap, buying train tickets that departed Florence at 2 a.m. instead of at a more reasonable hour, for the sake of saving 10 euro. (We promptly spent that 10 euro on a wine tasting held in the cellar where Machiavelli was imprisoned.)

Around 1:30 a.m. we grabbed our bags from our storage locker and scurried across town, but when we arrived at the train station, the gates were locked and the guard told us to go home.

We huffed for an hour, up a huge hill, to our former campsite, but the gates there, too, were locked.

We pitched a tent in front of the gates at 3 a.m., grumpy again.

The next day we learned that red-eye trains depart from a different station. Apparently this was written in Italian on our ticket, and was so glaringly obvious to native Italian speakers that they wouldn´t consider giving us a refund. Ten euro saved is 40 more euro spent, as the saying goes.

We re-purchased a ticket for 10 p.m., which landed us in Venice at 2 a.m., for a 7 hour layover.

The train station in Venice was empty except for sketchy men, crazy bag ladies and the occasional prostitute. We knocked on the door to the windowless police station, where the cops welcomed us but offered no help.

Needing a place to wait out the midnight blues, we boarded an all-night bus and rode it in circles around the city, figuring we´d be safer under the watchful gaze of the bus driver. We slept for an hour, then decided, “Hey, while we´re here, might as well see Venice!” We stolled by the canals at 4 a.m., Kim clutching a can of bear spray (über-mace) in her right hand. By 5 a.m., we re-boarded the bus for some more shut-eye.

In our daze, we then boarded the wrong train at 9 in the morning, but caught our mistake quickly. The conductor personally helped us de-board the train and explained how to transfer to the correct one. Five hours later, we were in an Austrian town we´d never heard of.

Villach, Austria is the home of Karen Haar, a woman whom I met while walking around in Thailand last December looking for a place to eat dinner. Karin had been studying menus, and I suggested we eat dinner together. Though we only met one that one occasion, we kept in touch on Facebook, and she had offered to host us during our Austria visit.
We had no idea what Villach would be like — we thought it might be a nondescript town, maybe the Austrian equivalent of Columbus, Ohio — but we couldn´t have been more wrong. Villach is BEAUTIFUL. Nestled in the Alps (which are still snow-capped, even in June), this town boasts crystal clear lakes, towering green mountains, and a quirky pedestrian mall that puts Boulder´s Pearl Street to shame. Twenty or thirty kilometers from both the Italian and Slovenian border, Villach is where the Austrians keep their summer cottages and winter chalets.

Kim and I load our backpacks with everything we need for a 2-day hiking and camping trip; the dress shoes, books and shampoo find a storage locker. With packs on our backs and SPF 50 on our faces, we wander down roads, up roads, across roads, slowly winding south through Tuscany. Brick and stone give way to cyprus trees and grape vineyards. Soon we’re walking along the narrow shoulder of a winding backroad, oceans of green spread in both directions.

^^^^^^^^^

Its night time, and we’ve pitched a tent in an olive grove off the side of the road. I characteristically worry that we’ll get caught; Kim characteristically does not. We leave our belongings unattended and walk 2 kilometers into the nearest town. Its too small to offer a restaurant, but we find olives, feta, toast crackers, two tomatoes and a box of white wine at a grocery store. We talk about our favorite childhood games and imaginary plots while we walk. Its raining as we return to the grove, and we race each other up the muddy hill, pretending our tent is our super-stealth fort. We dive into it and giggle as we lay out our picnic. Kim sniffs the boxed wine, pronounces it exquisite.

^^^^^^^^^^^

We arrive in Siena and wander into a cafe for an Italian cappuchino. Kim’s calves have the slighest twinge in them from our hours of walking. We feel good. We ask the barista if she knows of any cheap places to stay. She not only gives us the name of a cheap hostel, but she asks her associate, a Yugoslavian man named Ishmael, to walk us to the bus stop and make sure we get on the right bus. Ishmael wears a denim jacket over denim jeans. He is missing several front teeth, and those that remain are brown. Though he does not speak any English, he sees our reluctance in accepting the first hostel recommendation we’re given. He walks us to an official tourist information stand so that we can independently confirm that everything the barista told us is valid. Then he walks us to the bus stop, and directs us to the Number Ten.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

We befriend three brunettes, each with long unkempt wavy hair, who carry us back to Florence in their lime green VW bus, with its mantra, “l’amore,” painted on the front passenger door.

Yellow and clay-colored handkerchiefs with frayed edges hang off the driver and front passanger seat. A cardboard rainbow, frayed blue scarf, dried lavendar and a Native American dreamcatcher hang from the twine behind the front seats the holds the curtain. Beads and a felt frog dangle from the sun visors.

Kim and I sit barefoot in the back, next to a woman in a tye-dyed dress who is breastfeeding her naked baby boy. Rainwater leaks through the plastic moonroof, falling onto our backpacks. The interior paint has chipped off the door, revealing what appears to be a thin layer of plywood. A half-eaton melon sits in a clay bowl inside a wicker basket on the floor.

The driver tells us of her trip to America: a stopover in the D.C. airport en route to Mexico City.

“They were very cold,” she says, “and they had very large drinks. One liter cokes.”

A beautiful girl with ink henna on her hands looks at us from the shotgun seat.

“I do not think you drink one liter cokes,” she says. “You are not….” she motions with her hands to indicate a wide torso.

She unwraps a guitar from a hemp bag and begins to pluck. The three brunettes sing soft Italian songs through the rest of the ride.

When we arrived in Rome, it wasn’t without characteristic mishap: us staying awake all night so we could catch a 3 a.m. cab ride to the airport; Kim getting sick as soon as we arrived at baggage claim, and spending the bus ride to the camp ground clutching a barf bag.

Matt flew here with Kim and I, but only stayed for two days, during which time we did a whirlwind tour. Vatican, Sistine Chapel, St. Peters Basilica, Colisseum, and a dozen or more statues, fountains, ruins. There is no end of activities in Rome, Rome is the tiny city that gave us the 26-letter alphabet, the January though December calendar, and the Roman Catholic Church.

Matt’s departure at the end of the weekend marked the end of an era — and the start of a new era, the last two and a half weeks of my trip with Kim. In Era 1, Kim and I spent 6 weeks frugally camping, farming, biking and couchsurfing in Spain and Portugal. In Era 2, we”re taking a 2.5 week “vacation” in Italy, Germany, and Austria.

We slept at a campground about an hour outside of Rome’s center, although it is the most luxe campground I”ve ever seen, complete with jacuzzi, buffet and on-site disco.

We arrived in Florence without characteristic mishap — just a simple train ride from Rome.

Florence, Italy is a cute little city, a lot like Boulder without the mountains. Kim and I settled into a new campsite located walking distance from the city center. The walk is up a large hill, and from the top you can get a beautiful birds-eye view of Florence.

On Day One here, we flipped roles: this time Kim was the one venturing into the art musuems, while I stayed outdoors, wandered through the piazzas, and browsed at a used bookstore.

Kim and I have been eating like its an art ever since we arrived. Gelato, Italian cappucino, pastas, pizzas featuring top-shelf mozzarella, fresh tomatoes and whole basil leaves. The other night, in the process of trying tiramisu, we met a few guys who told us that Florence is a horrible place for studying medicine or engineering. All the social and parental pressure, they said, is to encourage Florentines into studying art. What a strange reversal.

Today we’re going to start walking from Florence to Siena, through the wine region of Tuscany. We have a haphazard map, no real walking route to follow, and no idea where we’ll sleep at night. It sounds like Bike Trip, Part Two, but this time at least we won’t be burdened with bikes.

I spent the weekend in Santa Cruz, Portugal,  a second-home community for the wealthy of Lisbon. It features aqua blue waters and enormous surf. During my visit, the beautiful sands were empty. The second-home dwellers all stayed at home in Lisbon because the weather was supposedly “cold.” (The Portugese seem to have a very liberal definition of the word “cold,” perhaps because they border Africa).
I was there with a pack of about 30 people, all united though Lisbon´s active local Couchsurfing.com group. These people aren’t couchsurfers themselves — they’re serial hosts for travelers dropping by Lisbon. These Lisbon locals met each other though Couchsurfing.com and engage with the Web site as though its their hobby. Some people play sports, some paint, these guys host couchsurfers.

Many of them host couchsurfers in order to meet people from around the world. They see it as a way to traveling abroad vicariously, by bringing the world to their couch. Others are hosts because they take immense pride in Lisbon. The spirit of the hosts is one of patriotic pride mixed with a strong hospitality ethos.

In Santa Cruz, we enjoyed the quintessential “weekend in a beach house” — we hung out by the beach during the day, danced though the night, and ate a group meal at 3 a.m. that consisted of more than two dozen people speaking various languages living in a four-bedroom townhouse.

Now I´m back in Lisbon and couchsurfing with a new couple, a police officer named Jorge and his Brazilian wife, who have a spotless, minimalist apartment and a tame, placid existance. They´re a stark contrast to the energetic youth culture I´ve been around for the last week, and a welcome reprieve. They go to bed by 10:30 p.m., serve me breakfast in the mornings and dinner in the evenings, and like to engage in conversations about wine and global warming. I’m going to spend the next few days with this quiet couple, and then Kim, Matt and I will fly to Rome.

Welcome to Lisbon, Portugal!

I arrived here by bus two nights ago and was promptly greeted by Frederico, a 34-year-old father of two whom I met on Couchsurfing.com. He’s currentl also hosting a twentysomething Asian-American couchsurfer from Brooklyn. We all share a single-room studio in the heart of Lisbon´s commercial district, just by the water. Both his shower and his stove are broken, but he does have an ironing board, futon and a collection of DVDs.

Lisbon is a beautiful city, with brighter, more cheerful colors and smaller, more detailed tiles and stones than Madrid. It takes on a much older feel; both the buildings and the lifestyle, the number of locals at sidewalk cafés, retain the quaint atmosphere of Old Europe.

In the Moorish district, women still lean out from their second-story windows to have conversations, and grandparents sit on the stoops at every corner. The streets are winding and narrow; in some spots, too narrow for even the trolley cars to pull through.

Frederico keeps taking me out in the evenings to see the ´Lisbon lifestyle,` and it seems people here are 35 going on 19. Monday night was what Frederico called an `early night,` meaning we got home at 2 a.m. Tuesday night, I stayed out until 5 a.m. until I saw that no one else had any intention of leaving; at that point, I bade farewell to my newfound Portugese friends and walked home.

`You see, we enjoy life!` said John, a thirtysomething Portugese who came out with us both Monday and Tuesday. `Leave the hard work to the Germans!`

Its a different scene than late nights in Boulder. No one drinks much alcohol. It certainly doesn’t compare to the levels of drinking in Boulder. But the Portugese stay out LATE, often until daybreak, having conversations and listening to music and dancing. I wonder how they don´t get bored of so many late nights after decades upon decades of the same thing, but maybe there´s not much else to do, or maybe it morphs into a passion.

The Portugese also have a lot of pride in their maritime history; they build lots of monuments to that time 500 years ago when they dominated the free world. Like the U.S., they love exhibiting all the native peoples they conquered. They proudly display maps of their sailors´voyages, and have oversized novelty ship anchors placed in parks and open fields; they erect statues not just of sailors, but also the poets who best commemorated those sailors.

Its fitting, then, that I´ll be spending the next several days by the sea, traveling this afternoon with my newfound clan of age-thirtysomething friends to a beach house in Santa Cruz, Portugal, where about 20 people will spend the weekend.

Even washing your clothes becomes an adventure while traveling.

Kim and I needed a laundromat for a good, through machine-cleaning, so we Googled ¨lavandaria,¨ the Spanish word for laundromat, and copied down directions to the nearest one. It was five or six blocks away — quite a distance, we mused.

We stuffed our clothes in big black gallon trash bags, and hauled them to what we thought was a laundromat, evoking stares as we trudged through the streets with massive trash bags slung over our shoulders, Santa Claus-style.

We were in for a disappointment. Turns out, the Spanish word for “laundromat” and “car wash” is the same.

We imitated Santa Claus all the way back home, did another Google search, and then hauled our overstuffed trash bags to a ¨tintoreria,¨ which our English-Spanish dictionary said was another word for laundromat.

Turns out, it’s  actually a dry cleaner.

The third place where we carried our trash bags of laundry to said they charged the U.S. equivalent of $22 a load. No dice.

So now, our clothes are still living in gallon trash bags, while Kim wears our friend Matt´s clothes (he´s over 6 feet tall) and I wear my mom´s clothes (she´s less than 5 feet tall). We look ridiculous — and we’re still dragging hefty gallon trash bags all across town. No wonder the Spanish stare as we walk by. We’ve become a spectacle.

After spending 3 of the past 5 weeks in Madrid, I feel like we’ve crossed the threshold between visiting a place and actually living there.

Madrid is like Boulder, Colo., in the sense that its a wonderful place to visit, but an even nicer place to live. It’s sunny year-round, filled with large lush parks, great public transit, and an active and lively city life. In the winter, its 30 minutes from the nearest ski mountain. All its missing is a beach

Here, we’ve transitioned from “vacationing” to “traveling.”

On a vacation, people take advantage of each day: you might plan to spend a morning on an architectural tour, the afternoon at an art museum, the evening at a restaurant or nightspot.

But when “traveling,” you re-create your daily life routine in a foreign setting, and the challenge is to navigate in a new setting and keep yourself entertained sans employment. You read books, watch movies, cook new experimental meals, and take long walks.

Thats our life here in Madrid: at home, we watch Wedding Crashers and Shrek 3, upload photos onto our MySpace pages and read business books. But each day takes on an international tinge, whether it be though asking the pharmacist in Spanish for contact lens solution, learning the Metro routes through greater Madrid, watching The Simpsons in Spanish, or seeing how the grocery stores shut down from noon to 4 p.m. each day for siesta.

But now its time for the next chapter in the journey: tomorrow I’m taking a bus to Lisbon, Portugal, while Kim travels to a farm in western Spain. (She really enjoys farm work; I want to explore a new country).

We’ve spent the last several days on the farm, living in a camper van, and doing some pretty tough labor. One afternoon we spent pounding rocks into smaller rocks with a sledgehammer and then pouring cement over it. Another afternoon we spent filling in the cracks between tiles in an old swimming pool. Another day we planted trees, and for two days we painted a room with lyme and whitewash.

Kim loved every momemt of it, while I thought the setup reeked of “free labor.”  I think this is the “Tom Sawyer effect” — if you enjoy the work itself, it’s fun, but if you’re doing it as a means to an end, it’s work — and poorly paid work, at that!

Eventually we left the farm and traveled to Granada, an old Muslim city in southern Spain that was ruled by the Moors since late 600 A.D. until the Catholics conquered it in 1492.

It is an incredibly culturally diverse city — it’s common to see street signs written in several languages, including Arabic, English, Spanish and  Portugese.

When we returned home to Madrid, we discovered that Kim has become a public health risk: she has lice.

She discovered this last night after using hair conditioner for the first time since the trip started and discovering four bugs as she ran her hands through her hair.

We looked up lice on WebMD.com and discovered, humorously, that adults most likely to contract lice are “People who live in crowded or unclean conditions and who do not or cannot bathe and wash their clothing regularly.”

Hmmm, let’s see ….. camping in muddy roadside olive groves? Check. Sleeping in a van in the middle of the forest? Check. Wearing the same 2 shirts and 2 shorts everyday for the past month, washing it on the rare occasions where we have an opportunity to be in one place long enough to let them dry? Check.

Success!! We found an avocado farm in Granada that’s happy to take us in. It’s run by a French-Polish couple with three kids, and its the very definition of the word “rustic”: there’s no electricity, limited running water, and we sleep in little yurts.

We forged agreement speaking in Spanish on a weak phone signal with the woman of the house.  We’ll be helping the couple paint a shed and prune their trees; in exchange, they’ll serve us Mediterranean food and give us a temporary home.

We hitchhiked down to Andalucia, the southern region of Spain where Granada is located. We were able to hitch most of this distance through only one ride: a delivery truck picked us up. “You remind me so much of my daughters,” the driver said, “I couldn’t let you stand on the side of the road with your thumbs out.” He was an upstanding citizen, of Bulgarian descent, who spoke zero English but patiently spoke with us in our broken Spanish. He blared Bulgarian music during the entire ride.

Andalucia is beautiful. When we arrived we were ecstatic to learn that our new home, Granada, is  a little beach town with crystal-clear aqua Mediterranean coastline stretching to the horizon.

Palm trees fringe the coast and the lush, blooming Sierra Nevada mountains dot the horizon.

Alexandra, the French woman who lives on this avocado farm, looks like an eco-hippie, with long dark flowing hair and a face weathered from too much sunlight. Crinkles form around her mouth when she smiles, and a bright glow eminates from within. She speaks softly, forming words with a gentle French accent, and she and carries a blond baby on her hip. Two other children, a boy and girl in freshly-washed and freshly-stained clothes, hide behind her skirt. She looks exactly like the kind of woman who you´d expect to move to the Spanish Mediterranean to grow tropical fruits and raise three kids on a farm without electricity.

We´re living in a green camper van in the forests of the lush Las Alpujerras valley, completely surrounded by earth. Sweet peas and tomatoes grow wild on the ground; almond, avocado and orange trees are everywhere, and a symphony of birdcalls wakes us up each morning. Yesterday we spotted a hummingbird the size of our thumb.

We work six hours a day in exchange for food and shelter, doing varied projects like planting trees, painting a room and filling in the cracks between tiles in a swimming pool. In our time off, there´s a nice hammock we lay in. Kim´s teaching me how to spin poi, and I´m reading a book on Spanish history.

And yet I can’t help but feel mildly dissatisfied with all of this, like I’m trading 6 hours of grueling, sweaty daily labor for a mattress inside a broken-down camper and a sandwich. The work we do is long and hard. We begin at 7, before it gets too hot, but by 9 we’re sweating.

Perhaps that thought comes from the fact that, until recently, I earned a paycheck for a living, and I’m trained to think of my labor in terms of cost per hour. But tiling a swimming pool for 6 hours is worth at least $80 in value ….

I know I should enjoy what I’m doing; I should enjoy the opportunity to live with a local family on a farm. But somehow I can’t shake the feeling that I’m getting the raw end of a deal.