Ruth Pennebaker of Geezersisters.com fame

They say that virtual friends aren’t real friends, that people we meet online are a poor excuse for face-to-face social interaction. “They” are wrong. I met Ruth Pennebaker online perhaps a year and a half ago. I don’t even remember how I discovered her blog but I vividly recall being enamored with her self-deprecating, sugary-sarcastic writing style from the moment I read her first post. Her first adult novel, What Did I Do to Deserve This?, will be published in January 2011; the novel is about three generations of women living under one roof – so you could call it a horror story.

Ruth normally lives in Austin, where she blogs at Geezersisters.com and pens the Urban Cowgirl column for the Texas Observer, does yoga and frets. However, nearly a year ago she and her husband seized an opportunity to live in New York City for a year, which may have just whetted her appetite for travel writing. Although Ruth loves to travel, our styles are completely different. While I’m intrepid, she’s meek: “I always, always expect to die, even when I’m just going down the block. Miraculously, I’ve so far managed to make it in New York for almost a year, but am keeping my fingers crossed.” Since she has such a different viewpoint on travel, we thought it might be fun to publish her travel piece about little-visited Albania here on Hole In The Donut Travels. If you’d like to read more from Ruth, visit her blog, Geezersisters.com. So without further ado, here is “Albania and Me,” by Ruth Pennebaker.

My heart sank a couple of years ago when I saw the TV footage of one of George W. Bush’s recent trips. There he was – being cheered and embraced by a worshipful throng in the capital city of Tirana, Albania.

Oh, great, I thought. Just what I needed: Albania in the international spotlight. Next thing you know, the Bushes will be taking vacations there, basking in the sunlight and adulation, and Albania will be teeming with American tourists.

It wasn’t fair. Albania had been our country – my husband’s, son’s and mine.

No, I hadn’t been to China or Bali or Morocco. I wasn’t a big-time explorer. I didn’t like to rough it or take extreme trips. I was more the cringing, neurotic type.

But hold on, cowboy. I’ve been to Albania. Have you? No, I didn’t think so.

“You can’t go to Albania.”

“Albania? Are you crazy?”

It was the summer of 1998. My husband, son and I had spent three weeks in southern Italy, where my husband had been a visiting professor. Now, we needed to make our way to Greece for a conference.

Albania was east of Italy, across the Adriatic, and just north of Greece. As the crow flies, it made sense. My husband hated birds, but he’d found his guide for this trip.

The only problem was, every psychologist in Italy seemed intent on talking him out of it.

“Nobody goes to Albania.”

The more they objected, the more determined my husband became to go. He’s like that.

“Have you ever been to Albania?” my husband asked his detractors. Read the rest of this entry »

Twenty years ago today, the wall that divided Berlin fell, signaling the death of the Cold War. To mark the anniversary, the city will host a Festival of Freedom with a very different kind of wall. Under the direction of British artist and curator Martin Butler nearly 50,000 people will form a human chain along the exact 47 km route of where the Berlin Wall once stood. This unique living art installation is entitled: “Mauer Mob 2009: Recreating the Berlin Wall.” In addition to the human wall, an art installation of dominoes along the route will be toppled to symbolize the falling of the Berlin Wall. The final domino tile will signal the launch of a stupendous firework display.

People stand atop the Brandenburg Gate the day before the wall came down

Back in 1989, in order to witness the historic event, you would have had to travel to Germany. But today, courtesy of the power of the Internet and earthTV.com, the anniversary celebration can be viewed on your computer screen in broadcast quality streaming video. Throughout the day of the festival the earthTV Read the rest of this entry »

It’s happened again! A group of seemingly innocuous passengers at the Central Railway Station in Antwerp, Belgium suddenly break out into a dance when Julie Andrews’ “Do-Re-Mi” begins playing over the public address system. This is such fun – watch the video, and watch the reactions of the ‘real’ passengers.

Who says Brits are straight laced? At 11 a.m. on January 15, 2009, hundreds of people who had trained for eight weeks showed up at London’s Liverpool Street train station and unexpectedly broke out into dance. The event was organized by T-Mobile as part of its “Life’s For Sharing” campaign. And if the number of people who filmed the event on their cell phones, texted, and called others as it was happening is any indication, it certainly was an event that was shared. Frankly I think T-Mobile is on to something. Through music, we can change the world. Take a look at the video:

The synchronicity of the world constantly amazes me. Yesterday I wrote about traveling to India, and today I receive an email from my friend, Dorothy, who hails from Edinburgh, Scotland. Dorothy and I became fast friends when we both attended a very special Yoga retreat in a remote area of central India a few years ago.

Dorothy strikes a Yoga pose on a deserted beach

We ended up in adjacent bunks but we shared more than a bedroom – we both came down with a case of Delhi Belly and kept each other company from our sickbeds. Here’s what she sent me as a reminder: Read the rest of this entry »

I am sitting at the airport in Lisbon, Portugal, waiting to board my plane. This trip has been a wonderful adventure for me over the past six months. I don’t know why I was so driven to do it; I only know that it was extremely important for me. Perhaps I was feeling my mortality and wanted to make this trip while I thought I still was capable of doing so. Perhaps I just needed to go look for my true path in life. I can’t say that I’ve found my path along the way – yet. But I feel I am close.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I never made it back into Lisbon, nor did I get to the UNESCO World Heritage town of Sintra, just 30 minutes from where I was staying. Frankly, I needed a rest, so I gave myself permission to just lie on the beach for nine days instead of playing tourist right up to the last possible moment and wearing myself to a frazzle. I did, however, have an amazing experience in Portugal. Several days ago Read the rest of this entry »

It may be unfair of me to pick three words that define all of Portugal, since I only visited a tiny part of the northern coast, so I’ll say that the following three words define the coastal resort areas of Portugal:

Sunny: Practically perfect weather, mid-eighties during the day with gentle breezes and in the 70′s at night. Sleeping with the doors and windows flung open. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got packing down to an exact science. For this six month trip I carried only a small backpack and a carry-on size (22″) rolling suitcase. So I had to choose every article with great care. One of the most difficult decisions when traveling light is what shoes to pack, simply because they take up so much room. I opted for two pair – one a really good (and really expensive) pair of Mephisto sandals that can even be worn into the water as well as my good old reliable tennis shoes. And when I say old, I mean really decrepit. These tennis shoes have seen better days – the laces are frayed and the soles were already cracked when I started this trip. With the amount of walking I’ve been doing, well, you can just imagine the condition they were in. But the plain and simple fact is that they are comfortable. They are well broken-in. They fit my feet like they were molded around them. For all those reasons I have been fighting the idea of new shoes but when I got to Pisa, Italy a week ago and it started to rain, I discovered that the seams between the soles and the upper fabric had come unglued and by the end of the day, my feet were soaking wet.

Still, I figured they would last to the end of this trip. And they would have, if not for the SMELL that erupted from them after they got thoroughly soaked, inside and out.

Dos Condes De Castro Guimares Museum and Library

At first I figured it was more the socks than the shoes, so I washed all my socks and continued to wear the shoes. By the time I got to Portugal I could smell them when they were on my feet. I was certain that people standing near me were wrinkling up their noses in disgust and looking around, trying to identify Read the rest of this entry »

My incredible luck has not failed me as I near the end of my six month around-the-world journey. For my last ten days I have chosen Portugal because I have long wanted to come here, and Cascais specifically for its beaches. Somehow, I just knew I would be tired at this point and badly in need of a rest. And I was. Any one of a hundred beach destinations around Portugal would have provided me with the rest I needed before plunging headlong back into life in the States, but in Cascais I was fortunate to locate a family that has a studio apartment attached to their home, which they gladly rented to me, even though the family was out-of-town when I was scheduled to arrive, had never met me, and knew next to nothing about me. On the evening of my arrival, a family friend met me at the house, handed me a key, gave me a brief tour, and told me to make myself welcome.

Houses and cobblestone streets of Cascais

I slept until 10 AM the next morning (a luxury I have not allowed myself on this trip very often because there was always so much to see and do that I didn’t want to waste even ten minutes of daylight) and woke to delicious sunlight streaming into the courtyard between the main house and my apartment. I jumped into a bathing suit, shorts, and a top and headed out to explore. The street in front of the house leading down to the town square and beach was paved in chunks of white marble about three inches square, flat on top and rough on the sides, each piece laboriously hand-placed and butted up against its neighbor to create a relatively flat road surface. Thousands of cars and pedestrians over the years have polished Read the rest of this entry »