Gibraltar

Still full on breakfast schnitzel from Poland, I touched down in the south of Spain and waited for a bus heading further south. Three hours later I was in a cab to the very bottom of the country, the last little southern tip of Europe. From there I hopped out and walked through a plain cement building, and arrived in Great Britain on the other side. 

Walking into the one man stand that is the Gibraltar border stop is a trip. When the door behind you closes, a lively Spanish town of street peddlers and paella disappears from view. When the one in front opens, you are greeted by a classic red telephone booth, Give Way signs on the street and proper English tea. Surrounded by British pounds and English accents, it's easy to forget that over to the left is North Africa, to the right is Europe, and you're standing in Gibraltar, the tiny country and member of the United Kingdom, sandwiched on a rock in between. 

I was in town for the Gibraltar Open, seeded first in qualifying with the expectation, or at least the hope, that I would get through two rounds and into the main draw. I knew nothing about accomodations, which made for a shake of disbelief when my taxi pulled up to La Coleta hotel on one side of the rock and I pulled back the curtains in my room to see only blue in every direction.

The country of around 30,000 people is truly one big rock, and winding up toward the top gets you to the Gibraltar Squash Club, home to a handful of refurbished courts and a nice bar in a remodeled building that an Englishman named Barry Brindle pioneered several years back. His pride and joy is the Gibraltar Open, and each year the squash team of the British Army come down to compete in qualifying. For my first match I slipped past an older Army veteran of many combat tours in the Middle East under his belt. After taking out a top local in the next round, I was into the main draw against one of the top seeds, Jan Koukal of the Czech Republic.

I threw whatever I could come up with against the longtime Czech #1 and a true veteran of the tour: fifteen years of playing in every corner of the world as he reached as high as the top 40 in the rankings, a guy who I watched once play a pro event in my hometown as a kid. It was a bit of an honor, a rite of passage, to compete against Koukal and while I lost, I was proud that I didn't make it so easy.

That night I met some local players who invited me to the beach the next day - what that meant was packing a camping bag and driving away from the rock, an hour car ride with two new friends and their terrier, cruising over an ancient Roman bridge along the water until arriving at something altogether unreal: the beaches belonging to the fishing town of Tarifa, in the region of Andalusia, the southernmost point in Spain. The point where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, Morocco staring at you from the distance, eight miles off the land.

Pulling up to the distant beats of a DJ, the scene was something else: an all day Spanish-style fiesta in the sun, groups of windsurfers, beach goers and bachelorette parties, best friends and some families, drinking mojitos from the pop up bar and jumping in the salty mix of oceans- considered to be the wind and surfing capital of the world. I met a couple windsurfers, one from Oregon the other a Penn grad living in Morocco, both web developers working remotely from the beach. Not bad. My squash friends took me to the mud pits where we decked ourselves out in what apparently is magic skin cleanser, then had a few more mojitos. 

When it was over we pitched a couple tents in a nearby set of trees, used the communal showers to get off the last of the mud, headed into the small Spanish town and wove around its cobblestone streets for a late dinner, and one more mojito. The sun was long gone by the time I was back in the tent. Couple hours later and I was out, catching a taxi to a bus to a plane out of town. The rock, new friends, and Andalusia resting behind in the darkness.

Poland

Last October on a train heading to the airport in Casablanca, Morocco, I sat next to a fellow American named Zofia Stark, a student at the US Naval Academy currently studying abroad. As we traded introductions, Zofia mentioned her Polish roots and her mother Beata's sixty-plus (correct: six-zero) cousins who still live in the country. Before we parted ways, Zofia suggested I stop by and see some of them next time I'm near Poland. Eight months later Grzegorz, husband of Marzena, one of the sixty cousins of Beata, the mother of Zofia, waited for me with a smile and a handshake at an airport along the Baltic Sea in northeast Poland. 

Grzegorz was a thirty year veteran of the Polish Navy, now serving as a warship inspector in the town of Gdynia, the Polish equivalent of Annapolis- a place dedicated to the Navy, it's ships, academies and people. Marzena welcomed me with excited Polish shrieks and big hugs into their second floor flat on a quiet apartment complex near the town center. Marzena didn't speak English but that didn't stop her from taking me in as her long lost Polish son, and before I dropped my bags I was plates deep in local tomato soup, dill marinated chicken and mushrooms, fresh mozzarella and a garden salad, eating through the specialities to the pure delight and wide grin and Polish exclamations of Marzena who looked on with pride. "Chicken is good!" I gestured to Marzena with a thumbs up. She beamed and looked at her husband who looked back at me. "Good! Finish it." The Polish naval vet replied with a smile. I laughed until I realized they were serious. Five plates later and chicken gone, I tapped out and passed out on the couch that would become my bed, waking up an hour later to the family ready and waiting to show me the harbor and boardwalk, downtown and beachside of the city, introduce me to their lives and their world in Gdynia, Poland.

I was only in Gdynia for a couple days en route to my next tournament, but that was enough to experience the way Zofia and her mother talked about Polish people and their culture. I was one of them, given a key to the house a bus pass and a map, careful directions on what to see in nearby Gdansk, what to eat (potatoes), where to go in the neighboring village of Sopot. Smiling with frenetic spurts of excited Polish, Marzena filled me up on chicken and spinach dumplings, pork schnitzel and dill spread, spring salads and cheese blintzes. 

After dinner on my last night, the family showed me a photo album from Beata's last visit and I took them through a slideshow of my sisters wedding, Grezgorz translating my commentary for Marzena who smiled and sighed with Polish satisfaction as my family photos slid across the screen. We had met less than two days earlier, and here we were. The Polish family and their son for the time being, bunched together at the dining room table.

Before I went to bed, Grzgorgz appeared at the couch with a gift- a hat bearing the seal of the Polish Navy, and a coffee mug with his official title and the seal printed across it. In the living room of his third floor apartment in the sleepy industrial town in Gdynia, the decorated Navy vet and husband of Marzena, a cousin to Beata, the mother of Zofia who I just happened to sit next to on a train last fall in North Africa thanked me for coming to visit and hoped I would come to Poland again. I tried to tell him how I felt and how special our time together has been and how I don't think I can look at another potato again for a long time. We smiled and shook hands and I put on my new hat and promised his Naval mug would be on my next desk, wherever that desk may be. 

For the "Friends I've Met" section of my blog, I ask each host to tell me why they decided to help me out. Grzgorz handed me a piece of paper with his response. On it he wrote his favorite Polish saying: Gość w dom, bòg w dom. He explained, "'Quest at home, God at home'. It means always welcome quests with honors, respect, and a smile."

I looked up as Grzgorz and his wife joined together and chanted for me one last time, their voices filling the living room of their quaint suburban Gdynia apartment: "Gość w dom, bòg w dom!!!"

New food & family in Gdynia, Poland

G'day say the ladies of Gdansk

Beach volleyball along the Baltic Sea in Gdynia, Poland

Apparently there is a potato in there somewhere

Couch surfing the tour

Lithuania

The last of my Baltic bus rides rumbled through trees and villages and toward the drab industrial outskirts of the capital city of Lithuania, the prized end goal of the Baltic roadtrip: the country of my ancestors, the place my great grandfather left by boat for New York City as a teenager. A hundred and twenty or so years after that boat ride, I was coming home.

I was met at the station by Mantas, around my age and the Lithuanian national champion. He led me into Vilnius on roads that in his childhood as part of the Soviet Union, were one lane dirt paths lined with frail wood buildings on each side. "I don't see how anyone could say Communism was a good thing," Mantas explained, telling me about growing up with lines around the block trying to buy bananas, unable to regularly access basics like toilet paper. 

That was then. We rolled through the new business district and along the river, past the square entrance of the old town and into a city in full swing. Across from the towering remnants of a medieval castle we pulled into an apartment complex where I met Domas X, a local squash player who replied to Mantas' group email about a player coming through looking for a couch. Now it was my turn to talk, and I found myself in the now-familiar position of explaining to Domas just why exactly I was here standing in his kitchen in Vilnius, Lithuania.

I tried to keep it simple- I assumed English wasn't his native language and because I hadn't heard much of it lately, made sure to make my story basic, talk slow and pronunciate everything. "I grew up in Cal-I-for-nia" He nodded along. I used hand gestures to act things out when needed. When I finished, I asked for his story. A pause and a polite smile, then in perfect American English, a quick reply: "I grew up in the States and went to Middlebury."

I was standing in the kitchen of a guy who went to a top university just down the road from where I studied, at the same time as me. We had spent four years in tiny nearby towns in the woods of New England half a world away. And now we were meeting in Vilnius. I awkwardly sped back up my English.

I've learned enough times that the people make the place but man was this reinforced yet again from my weekend in Vilnius. Domas and his fiancée Agne became real friends, the type you meet as a kid or in college but harder to come by in the real world. Over mussels and beers I learned my first Lithuanian words sitting in the middle of a narrow cobblestone street from sometime in the 13th century, the table brought out by Domas and his friend the waitress so that their guest could take in the start of "Culture Night" festivities in the city. 

Later we bobbed and weaved through crowds of Lithuanian families and teenagers, around young couples and grandparents, passing by an arts performance in the courtyard of the Presential Palace and a tent blaring American hip hop, through a light show along the river. Along the way Agne, from her day job as special advisor to the new Mayor of Vilnius, gave me the inside scoop on the city. "This riverfront development will be something else...this future here is just so exciting...did you know Lithuania has one of the fastest internet speeds in the world?"

I pushed past Mantas on the court next morning and afterward Domas took me into the countryside (as I learned, Lithuania is 70% forest so it wasn't too hard to reach) and toward the hundred person village of Paneriai, the home of his aunt a ways out of the city. Paneriai was established a few decades ago when The Soviets built a school on in the middle of the woods. Next to the school was built an apartment building for the school teachers and admins, and as part of the deal each person got a small plot of land. Years later when the school folded, the teachers stayed. 

Domas' aunt was the former headmaster and now spends her days tending to her garden plot where we found her on a sunny Saturday in the woods that is the village. For the afternoon we took over picking strawberries and chopping wood, mincing mint and peeling carrots. Set up a rusted barbecue set on the garden and grilled what we picked, Domas and his Lithuanian buddies from the city and me. Domas told me Lithuania had a lot of lakes and he wasn't kidding- we passed three in the five minute drive leaving Paneirai, stopping by a small one tucked away off a dirt path a minute off the main road, the type of lake you wouldn't find unless you were lost or grew up in these woods. Wet and winding through country roads, Mariah Carey and other 90s jams busting out through the open windows of our car, we headed onward to the next lake pit stop. I thanked the Lithuanians for bringing me along. They shrugged and simply replied this is what you do on the weekends here- leave the city for the lakes. 

On Sunday Domas and Agne drove me to a resort village of six thousand along a river a couple hours out of Vilnius, because a cafe there served special potato pancakes that just couldn't be missed. In the afternoon I organized a training and coaching clinic for a handful of the local players who were truly fanatics- asking if it wouldn't be too much for video analysis, staying with me to do my sprint intervals after the clinic had ended. At night we treated ourselves to the crown of Lithuanian cuisine, "didžkukliu" - a boiled potato filled with a pork meatball - at a restaurant that proudly displays on a chalkboard the number of didžkukliu's served to date: 2,502,700 when we left.

Afterward we walked off the didžkukliu by wandering the centuries-old streets filled with new energy, signs of new beginnings in Lithuania. The walking pushed on as the last touches of Sunday and the weekend slowly edged toward empty. From above, the remnants of the castle faded into darkness as Domas and Agne led me one last time through the last circles of mishapen, untouched cobblestone paths of an old city in the midst of reinvention. My hometown roots and new friends showing me the simple, raw beauty that is the lakes and potatoes and life in Lithuania.

Domas + Agne + the American third wheel