Hello from Portugal!

While I didn’t expect this week to be that busy, it clearly ran away from me a bit, as this blog post is a bit late. I’m counting that as a testament to how amazing this country has been! It sounds silly in retrospect, as Porto is obviously a popular tourist destination, but I did not expect to like this city as much as I did. It is small, relatively quiet, yet the more you explore the more you seem to find.

Last Wednesday started slowly, as I had arrived at about 3:00 AM the morning before. But I’ve never been one to sleep in when staying in a hostel, so when I couldn’t fall back asleep, I decided to book an impromptu walking tour to help get acquainted with the area. Porto is known for its free walking tours— I was impressed by how many people showed up at the starting point, the Avenida dos Aliados. We stopped at churches, train stations, bakeries (the pastel de nata were a crowd favorite), and even an oddly extravagant McDonald’s before ending our walk by the Douro River. The highlight for me was the view from the Luís I Bridge, which looks out onto most of Porto, the neighboring Vila Nova de Gaia, and down the winding Douro valley. From afar, the whole city shrinks to a mosaic of orange tiled roofs spreading towards the sea. I liked the view so much, in fact, that I came back later that evening to see the city glow orange and pink in the setting sunlight. There’s an incredibly popular park on the southern side of the bridge, in Gaia, where huge crowds gather to see the sunset with picnic blankets and Port wine. It reminded me of Mission Dolores Park in San Francisco: the hill, the live music (a cover band playing Weezers), the young people haggling for craft beer sold out of coolers. It made me a little nostalgic, to be sure, but more reassured to have found this slice of home in Portugal.

The view from Luis I Bridge as the sun begins to set.

 Even though I spent my gap year in Providence, Rhode Island (home to one of the larger Portuguese diasporas in the US), Portuguese food has never been on my radar. I had thought almost nothing of it before stepping onto that airplane from Athens, could not have named even one

I got this francesinha from Cafe Santiago, a neighborhood lunch spot recommended to me by my tour guide.

traditional dish, and might not have really called it a “cuisine” before this trip. But, to my surprise, it’s kind of great. Yes, it’s a HUGE amount of meat — I had a burger where the bun was seasoned with little bacon bits instead of sesame seeds. But I can’t help but appreciate its hearty, greasy warmth. My first real meal was a francesinha: a sandwich on thick white bread filled with a veal steak, bacon, and Portuguese sausage, covered with melted cheese and a fried egg, smothered in gravy, served in a bowl of fries. I think I actually broke a sweat trying to finish it. Other highlights have been cured chorizo and local Estrela cheese from Mercado do Bolhão and a cachorrinho (Portuguese hot dog) from a diner called Gazela (of Anthony Bourdain fame). 

For seafood, Porto locals will tell you to go to the nearby seaside town of Matosinhos, where the streets are filled with the smoke of fresh fish being grilled outside. My parents came to visit me this week to help celebrate my birthday (a very special treat) and on Saturday we went to Tito II, a local restaurant where the chef catches the fish himself. We ordered fresh-grilled sardines and traditional seafood stew, filled with whole shrimp, mussels, a crab belly, and partially cooked rice cooked in a rich seafood stock. The highlight of the meal was the whole dourado, so fresh that our waiter came to show us the fish’s teeth and fins before they cooked it. It was salty, crunchy from the skin and open flames, yet melted in your mouth as you chewed. I still think the fish in Greece was fresher, but this local specialty was pretty hard to beat. 

The tile bank! The wooden drawers, organized by both color and style, each have a handful of identical tiles to match the ones displayed in front.

Some other highlights of the last week include a walk through the Jardins do Palácio de Cristal where peacocks are just as common as the pigeons, and a walk through a Baroque-style church, complete with Catholic relics and a look into the priest’s quarters. But honestly, nothing compared to just walking through the city. Anyone who has seen pictures of Porto knows the city for its intricate hand-painted tiles: they give each building its own character. I love exploring a place that has devoted so much time and effort to such detailed beauty. At the Museum of Porto, we learned that they keep a bank of the most common tile designs for residents to repair damaged buildings and maintain this history. My mom and I agreed that they should have banks like these everywhere! And, if I’m putting my research hat on, it demonstrates a certain level of commitment to community — at least when it concerns cultural or historic buildings.

On Sunday, I turned 22! This summer has been so surreal and spectacular that planning one special day honestly felt redundant. But I celebrated with one of my favorite things: my dad and I rented bikes and went down the coast toward a small town called Espinho. If you know me, you know I love a good bike ride, and much of that love was born out of riding along the San Francisco Bay with my dad. This ride, although longer and windier, felt almost identical to those trips along the California coast. We stopped at a beautiful seaside chapel and a restaurant along the beach where you could watch families sunbathing and surfing as you ate. In the afternoon, we all went to try some Port wine at one of the famous wineries in Vila Nova de Gaia. I am extremely grateful to have celebrated with loved ones in such a beautiful city. Birthdays are always a time for reflection for me, and reflecting on this summer has been nothing short of profound. I’ve already grown so much both personally and academically, and I’m not even halfway done! I am endlessly grateful for all the people who have made this possible and my support system back home — missing them is the only downside. But I’m excited for all the joy and adventures this next year will bring. 

Capela do Senhor da Pedra, a chapel nestled along the coast south of Porto.

My next post will be a dispatch from Coimbra and much more research-focused (I have at least eight interviews here in Portugal!). I’m definitely hoping to return here someday, as five days was not nearly enough. But for now, so long Porto!

Hello from the Athens airport! I’m heading to Porto tonight but arrived painfully early to catch up on work. The past few days have been a bit quieter than my first week in Greece, yet full of research opportunities that more than made up for my slower start. 

On Saturday, I made the trip out to Mati, a beachside suburb of Athens. Although it’s only a 45-minute drive from the city center, I had to spend 45 minutes on the train, an hour on the bus, and walk along the side of a highway for 30 minutes to reach town. If you’ve ever been to Athens, you know that the city is filled with near-identical white apartment buildings. All multi-story and crammed together, with uniform balconies that almost make them look like huge dressers. Here, only a few multistory buildings punctuated rows of houses with lavish gates and big yards, even some with green lawns (I literally cannot imagine how much water that must take). It is notably wealthier than the city, and residents seem older on average. The exceptions were the families and other young(er) people staying at the several hotels along the beachfront. 

The Mati beachfront

While Mati is certainly charming, I wasn’t really there as a tourist. In 2018, almost six years ago to the day, this town suffered the second deadliest fire event in the 21st century. Two coincident, fast-moving fires engulfed Mati and nearby houses. For a variety of reasons (reasons that are central to my being here in the first place), residents didn’t know what to do; most tried to drive away or run into the sea. 103 people died, many having drowned or burned during their attempt to escape. 

When designing this research project, I selected countries with a major fire in the past seven-ish years. The idea was to see how communities reacted to that one event, and transitively, how it had impacted disaster management on a regional or national level. However, my conversations in Australia showed me that the event I had focused on, the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires, wasn’t as individually impactful as I had assumed. My interviews in Greece told me the opposite. When I asked about wildfires, almost every interviewee brought up Mati on their own and cited it as a major political event. One even told me it was one of the two deciding factors in the 2019 elections, which resulted in a party switch (although to be fair, other people I talked to would probably disagree).  News stories called it “biblical” and “a living hell.” The trials to hold officials accountable for these deaths are ongoing. 

In Australia, it was much harder to get to the areas burned in the Black Summer fires, especially without a car — plus, my interviews told me that other observation sites might be more fruitful. But every conversation I’ve had here, whether formal or informal, suggested that Mati was a core piece in the puzzle of how Greeks understand (and protect themselves against) fire disaster. This field trip would help me contextualize their stories about the event itself and see what recovery looks like several years down the road. 

A path leading up to the ocean. Gorgeous!

Luckily, my visit did help visualize some of the common threads that came up in interviews. For example, several people told me that part of the reason the fire had been so deadly was that many of the buildings in Mati (like those in Athens and other parts of Greece) had been designed and built without permits, which made evacuation much more challenging. The image most kept pointing to was how close the buildings were to the water: “If you see a house where you can go out the front door and step into the sea after five steps, that’s illegal.”  And it’s true; even the big hotel buildings seemed very close to the ocean. Interviewees also described Mati as a “resort” town where many Athenians go to get away for the weekend or longer holidays — this proximity, too, added to the disaster’s shock value. I’m glad I got to see the hotels for myself because they’re smaller than what I’d think of as a resort. But I did see their point. Wildfires are “supposed” to happen in small, remote areas near the forested mountains or islands of Greece. A disaster in this wealthier beachside vacation town — especially one that carried such viscerally tragic stories — was bound to be more personally and politically evocative. 

Two neighboring houses in Mati. Clearly a lot more done to renovate one compared to the other.

I also wanted to see how much progress the recovery projects had made in the past six years. I’ve seen dozens of photos of Mati in the days following the fire: the empty, blackened cars and structures make the town look haunted. But I had no idea what to expect after this many years. Walking through the residential neighborhoods, most houses showed little signs that there had ever been a fire. But every five or six buildings there would be an empty plot with scorch marks, if not a hollowed structure waiting to be revived. Many yards had blackened stumps hiding beside the otherwise green, curated landscaping. It begged the question: why was one family’s house rebuilt while their neighbors’ weren’t? And whose responsibility was it? I’m hoping further reading and interviews might give me some answers. 

I also noticed sticks, leaves, and other yard rubbish piled high next to residential garbage dumpsters. My guess is that they are evidence of a policy one expert had mentioned in an interview, where residents are required to clean a perimeter around their houses to create a kind of fuel break for a potential wildfire. Although the policy isn’t new, it’s been much more strictly enforced in recent years, and you can get fined or otherwise penalized for failing to comply. The streets are far too dense to do this kind of thing in Athens, but seeing such adherence to the policy in Mati tells me that the consequences of ignoring it feel more tangible. It’s also a visual reminder of an apparent motif of local fire management here: residents are responsible for the safety of their houses, loved ones, and communities. At least, they’re made to believe they are. The actual effectiveness of these perimeters is debatable, as they are often small enough for a major fire to jump over anyway. But placing this physical, mental, and ultimately financial onus on residents undoubtedly sends a message about their role with respect to the fire disasters that threaten their livelihoods. 

A (blurry, very sorry) photo of the organic waste piled along the road.

The next day involved less adventuring, as my trek to Mati had tuckered me out. But I did go on a tour focused on the social and political history of Greece. So many of my interviews involved discussions of Greek politics, and I am pretty lousy at feigning any knowledge on the subject — I thought it would be a great opportunity to gain more context for my research and to hear what non-expert locals had to say about fires. And it was! (It was also a lot of fun.)

I went on a little too long about Mati (sorry) so I’ll just give you a couple of my favorite tidbits: 

• Politics in Greece seem to align on a more West vs Anti-West spectrum than in the US. For example, the more establishment party recently legalized same-sex marriage, but the communists were against it. Whaaaat? The tour guide said it’s because LGBTQ rights are seen as a Western phenomenon and the communists are pointedly anti-West. I’m blaming homonationalism. 
• There is no separation between church and state, to the point that the ministry of education and religion are the same thing. Apparently, to be anti-Greek Orthodox Church is to be anti-Greek. But, our guide said, the priests can be bribed with salary increases or threats to their tax-exempt status. The church is the single biggest landowner in the country — they own, and therefore have exemptions on, everything from resorts on the Athens Riviera to gay clubs (I know right). 
• There’s a neighborhood, Exarcheia, that’s internationally known as a historical center of anarchism and political activism. Its reputation was born in the 1970s when students at a nearby university occupied a building to protest their authoritarian government and were killed by the military-grade tanks called to disperse them. Today, the activism in the neighborhood is in part focused on preventing the gentrification driven by AirBNB and plans to build a new metro station. Police were completely banned in Exarcheia from 2015 to 2019 (a product of the debt crisis and resulting protests), which is what allowed the political community to flourish. Now, it’s almost impossible to walk through the streets without seeing a squadron of police equipped with full riot gear — presumably protecting the construction of the subway. 

While I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Greece, I am happy to be moving on to my next location. I’m starting a new phase of my trip today — these next few weeks will be filled with more travel, less touristy places, and will overall lack the consistency I was getting used to in Sydney and Athens. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit anxious. But for now, my excitement is far stronger than my nerves. See you in Porto!

Hello again from Athens! Long time no blog. Honestly, the days have been flying by here — I didn’t realize it had been a week since my last post until just a few hours ago. But I’ll do my best to make up for it now. It has been a very busy week: because most of my interviews happened to be scheduled for the end of my time here, I’ve been able to take full advantage of the many (MANY) tourist attractions Athens has to offer while doing my best to make observations that will aid my research.

The (slightly sad) cactuses on the Lycabettus hillside.

The first observation is that it is hot. Duh. Almost everyone I told about this trip warned me about how hot Greece is in July, and to be fair, I have been checking the weather near-religiously in all my destinations for weeks. But while I knew it would rarely dip below 95 degrees while I was in Athens, I was not prepared for what such heat would feel like for days on end, nor how it would seem to put a trance on the city itself. It’s so hot that the candle sitting on my balcony melted completely after only two hours in the sunlight. Even the night is so hot that I can leave soaking wet clothes outside at midnight and they’ll be dry before I wake up. It’s also dry, so dry that the cactuses, such as these ones on the sides of Lycabettus Hill, have shriveled with thirst. The wind is almost hotter than the air itself. In Sydney, I was averaging almost 20,000 steps a day, but that goal has proved completely untenable here; walking only a couple blocks in the late afternoon leaves me craving a nap.

I don’t say all this to be overdramatic, but rather to emphasize how perfect the conditions are for wildfire. Locals have told me that this dry heat is emblematic of the weather they have had all year. And, as one of my interviewees pointed out, heat like this builds. The longer residents (particularly those without consistent shelter, the elderly, or otherwise at-risk people) must endure such high temperatures, the more likely it is to induce a health crisis. Likewise, the drier and hotter a spring season is, the more likely it is to bring wildfires in the summer. Athens has seen hotter days in July but my interviewees tell me that this sustained heat is not normal. One scientist used it as proof of a changing climate: it’s getting hotter and “you can feel it.” Uncoincidentally, there are currently several wildfires raging across Greece, including one close enough to Athens that I received an emergency alert on my phone about it. While this will undoubtedly prove valuable to my research, and the opportunity to visit a site post-fire would otherwise be very rare, I have a hard time getting excited about something that comes at the cost of so many people’s well-being.

Street art in Exarcheia, a neighborhood known for its counter-culture history.

Another very obvious observation about Athens is the street art. Murals and posters cover every inch of available wall space, and then some, on nearly all the buildings under two stories tall. Honestly, it makes me wish I could read Greek, as the Google Translate image capture feature does not do very well with graffiti print. But the stuff that I can read is nearly all anti-establishment messaging: ANTIFA, ACAB, the anarchist A, etc. For me, it is a reminder that Greece has a very specific political and economic history that starkly contrasts the tourist traps (and the national narrative they try to paint). It’s not all blue-domed churches and columned structures; to visit Athens without remembering its recent economic turmoil or the role it served in the refugee crisis is to not understand the city at all. I asked several of my interviewees if the leftist street art is reflective of the contemporary political climate, and they all disagreed, although ironically displayed disapproval towards the Greek government themselves. No matter its ideological origins, mistrust of government (and, relevantly, of their ability to protect their constituents from harm) seems to be a through line. I’m hoping to learn more about this history this weekend, both to soothe my own curiosity and contextualize my research about disaster management.

On a more fun note, here are some tourist highlights of this week:

• Of course, I had to visit the Acropolis at least once. I was told to get there as early in the morning as I could to avoid the crowds and heat, but the sheer amount of people there was overwhelming even at 8:30 a.m. The highlight of the day was definitely the excavation site underneath the Acropolis Museum, which is down the hill and tucked away from the swarms of tourists. They had all sorts of artifacts  — hairpins, beads, frying pans — that offered an intimate look into everyday life in ancient Greece. Very cool!

The Erechtheion, my favorite building at the Acropolis.

• On Tuesday, I took a day trip to Agistri, one of the closest (and cheapest) islands to get to from Athens. I rented an electric bike and winded my way through hilly countryside, small coastal towns, and pebble beaches. I swam in water so blue it looked like a ceramic glaze and ate fish that tasted like it had jumped out of the water and onto the plate. Best 15 euros I’ve ever spent.
  

  The dock at Mariza, Agistri — perfect for jumping off of!

• One of the highlights of this stop has been climbing up the many hills in Athens. I will never get over how quiet a city seems from so high up, no matter how busy it is on the ground. While hiking up Philopappos Hill offered unreal views of the Aegean Sea, I preferred Lycabettus Hill, a steeper hike that afforded a much greater panoramic reward. I went in the early evening to escape the heat and found that the late sunlight glistened off the cityscape as if it were the ocean. I thought I’d seen the last of Cicada Summer when I left Chicago, but I was sorely mistaken: their humming overpowers the sounds of engines and car horns, especially towards the top of the hill. It was stunningly!

The view from the top of Lycabettus Hill

I’ll have some more updates before I leave for Porto next week, but until then, enjoy these pictures!