Lisbon to Boston!

Aaaaaand we're back! After along day of flights/waiting around for a billion hours in an airport in the Azores (I think I would have guessed they were in the S. Pacific if you had asked me a few months ago), we were finally back Stateside. We had a gracious pick up from old college friends Nick & Robyn (Thanks Nick & Robyn) and enjoyed a lovely few late night, how-the-heck-are-we-still-up, hours sharing the giant Toblarone bar (the perfunctory thank you for an airport pick up) and some Duty-Free whiskey along my brother Luke and girl Larkin. After a full day back, complete with 45 minute brunch lines, enormous food portions, beer + sports in a bar that has large screen TVs occupying just about any spot of the wall you could try to look at (although we were watching the Eurocup Spain/Italy final - which was a fun tie up after watching a bunch of preliminary rounds IN Spain), home cooked burgers (fi-na-lly) + cheap American beer in a can (if any foreigner ever tries to rag on American beer, know that there is just as much awful, absurdly cheep, mildly alcoholic swill over there, you just can't find it in 30-packs at mind boggling deals), marble birthday cake with impressively neat, loopy cursive "Happy Birthday Lukey!" inscription (happy birthday again, dude!), and many other wonderful little American moments on a muggy east-coast city summer day. There will be plenty of time for bigger scale reflections on national identity and mining of the tiniest of cultural idiosyncrosies (like the fact that our toilet bowls seem to hold an absolutely enormous amount of water in their non-flushing state - the telling differences among different national toilet-style trends have numerous fascinating implications), in the meantime, overwhelming nostalgia and constant rush of thousands of different memories aside, it's great to be back! We're on to Denver tonight for a week with Cindhu's family (so maybe not completely "back," let's call it the home stretch), which with any luck will be ripe with expansive national parks, grilling, and plenty of fireworks.

Somebody's excited to turn 24!

Huge quantities of brunch leftovers and gas half the price of any other western country. Sweet.