Happy Birthday AnneTerese

About a month before Kate and I set off on our epic 8-month, 21-country honeymoon, we discovered Global Freeloaders. The concept of the site is simple - to put travelers in touch with like-minded people who might possibly host them in their house/flat for free thus accumulating good karma, hopefully to be repaid when the hosts themselves go traveling at a later date. It was through this website that a lovely French couple let us use their flat for two days in Nantes, while a Basque couple let us park Sheena in their drive and use their bathroom. Sadly, what with living in a campervan and then flat sharing with three others, we haven't really been in a position to host people ourselves and restore the Karmic balance. Until now...



Today is AnneTerese's Birthday and she's 23. Feliz cumpleaños! AnneTerese is from a small town in Oregon, in the USA, and this is her first trip to Spain, somewhere she has wanted to live for a while. After many plane delays she finally arrived on Tuesday night and was initially somewhat dismayed to discover that without a work permit she wouldn't be able to find an official English teaching job here - she had been misled by the TEFL course she did - and that getting a work permit would take about 2 years. However, she was not to be denied and with admirable determination AT started trawling newspapers and websites for au pair and governess work, thinking that if she could get accommodation sorted for free, then she could probably do a few private lessons on the side, to keep her hand in. She's also signed up for Vaughan Town next week to try and broaden her contacts here, as well as getting to see a bit more of Spain for free. Hers is a wonderful example of that "never-give-up" attitude we've so often come across in Americans and she's clearly a hit with the friends we've introduced her to so far. We're pretty sure she's going to fall on her feet!

North American Chums

Lil and B are not Americans. They were, back when they first met at Woodstock in 1969, B using the awesome chat up line of "have you got any uppers?" However, a few years later they were Canadians, and now they're in Italy for a month and may even meet up with some distant relatives they didn't know they had down in Sicily. But yes, distinctly Canadian and keen to make the distinction, as had Thor, Monica and Matt back in Bremen. But regardless of their distinct North American identity, B and Lil are a lovely, chatty couple and we were very pleased our tiny table in the tiny Venetian Pleasure Cafe ("good things come in little packages") was pressed up next to their tiny table.

We had been equally pleased when we bumped into the International Student Brigade again on the shores of Lake Bled, having first met them up the top of the Ljubljana Castle the day before. Two of the Americans in their midst, Noah and Keith, promptly gave us their email addresses and told us to drop them a line if we fancied a trip to Trieste. Which we did, so a few days later we met up with both of them in Trieste's stunning Piazza Dell'Unita and were treated to a guided tour of the city plus a blagged pizza in the University Cafeteria.

Both Northern boys from up near the Canadian border (Keith from Montana, Noah from Vermont) they were full of enthusiasm for their new situation and stunned to find out how popular Americans are in Italy. (This may have had something to do with the fact that Trieste only remained Italian after World War Two thanks to the presence of Allied forces, otherwise the city - previously Venetian, then Hapsburg - might have been absorbed into Yugoslavia along with the rest of Istria.) We had a great evening hanging out with them and, depending on their travel plans, may very well end up seeing them again.