Porto, PT: Change in the Wind, says I.

(Note: I've started going back through the notebook I wrote in throughout my trip. Entries from here on out with be jumbled, from different dates and countries and mindsets.)

To communicate. This is not a wish, nor an action. It's a necessity, something essential that I can't grasp here, a handful of sand, or a wet, new rope: I have it in the palm of my hand yet I cannot hold onto it. At the airport (Charles de Gaulle), in line and at the cafes, my French must have been passable enough-after one sentence, I'm swept away by a flood of rapid French, only half of which is understandable.

Here, in Porto as in Lisboa, I'm mistaken for Brasilian, sometimes for Portuguese. The flood comes again. To communicate with rapidity, with fluency, I crave like, right now, I crave food, preemptively imagining what it used to be like to ignore the shape of my mouth, the roundness of "o" or the slurring of "l-h".

Hunger. This is not it's harshest form, something I will not venture to liken to what I am: sitting in a hotel room, a bag of tiny pears in front of me, dreaming of French fries, a baked potato, steak. When I get to London, no matter how late, I will find a place that's open, that sells pies and chips and peas. The last week's subsistence on 5-7 Euro a day has yielded a sandwich, two cups of milky coffee, a piece of fruit, some chocolate. This is not yet a debilitating hunger. Rather, like one word's contiguousness with another, this one pear and this croissant, this cup of coffee and an apple, all blend together to create a lack of satisfaction, an unremitting lack of ending, syntax stilted, the hesitation of native speakers before my halting questions.

Unable to face another night of cold, wet sleeplessness, I've spent 30 Euro on a hotel room in Porto. I've been somewhat marooned: having braved the ICC (intercity) trains and another long ride on the metro, I arrived here thinking Brandon would eventually do the same. We'd head off to London, and from there resume our much-touted trek through the UK. It's been 12 hours. He's nowhere in sight. The young man working the night shift here is grateful for the company. I drink a too-sweet European Coca-Cola and sit up with him, in the lobby, watching British sitcoms and comedy revivals. He asks if the entire state of Alaska is full of bears. This time, I don't mind answering the questions. In the morning, Liliana, the morning shift girl, fixes me a pot of hot, strong coffee. She's someone else who's shocked: she swears I'm Portuguese. I'm tired, groggy, I apologize, but I have to switch to English. Again I'm floundering, hunting for some justification, some reason for my certainly jumbled syntax. Why have I bothered to learn at all, if I can't have a conversation at 8 in the morning? Liliana doesn't seem to mind. She ignores the rules about check-in and check-out. She says I can stay until noon. We laugh at the supposed silliness of all these questions about bears and igloos and snow; she wants to take a cruise to Alaska one day. Before I leave, she looks the other way, waives the 25 cent charge for making a phone call, and lets me call Brandon one more time. He's not picking up. I need to find a computer, and fast.

Before heading back to the airport, I stop round the corner for something to eat. For 2.40 Euro, I get a bowl of soup and an apple. The apple, though I pull it from the mini-fridge outside the counter, is washed and handed back to me by the smiling shop-girl. She gives it to me on a china plate, with a tiny knife for cutting it into slices. The soup she brings out to me, first arranging a white paper cloth on my table, then a silverware set. My apple on its porcelain plate glistens with the water on its skin. Its tacitness is perfect: it waits to be cut into and when I do, I find it perfect inside as well, and I can't eat it all at once, but linger, taking small bites, turning the pages of my book methodically. The shop girl brings out my soup, and that I eat ravenously, Portuguese news blaring behind me.

I can almost understand what's happening, the inflection of the male newscaster over the female. I manage a strong Muito obrigada. O sopa estas bem. The shop-girl says nothing back. She seems to know that this is all I can manage. Each table in the cafe shines. Liliana's address is in my notebook; I'll send her something, when I get home. Rain-slicked red umbrellas on the patio, and an elderly man with a black cane walking by the window. There's a freshness to this version of alone that I hadn't known before.