Portugal
Portugal was the part of JoaFruit I mostly failed to blog. I had become happy, which was marvellous for me and frankly disastrous for a weblog powered by romantic emergency, inappropriate disclosure and the belief that every emotional wobble deserved its own web page.
Kenken and I began in Faro with matching backpacks, too much luggage and no proper plan beyond moving onward through Europe and fulfilling Kenken’s long-held dream of a year-long Euro-adventure. We travelled up the coast, camping beside dramatic seas, before landing at a campsite outside Lisboa near Ikea and several industrial estates. After roughly four weeks of 45-minute bus journeys, unsuitable pillows and my increasingly theatrical insomnia, we were still hunting for an apartment.
At 2am the car-based adventure began to look less like freedom and more like an administrative hostage situation. Japan-to-Portugal bank transfers, buying and insuring a car threatened to move life from happily messy to messier than even Joa could tolerate. I convinced Kenken to stay in Lisbon and spend our travel savings studying instead. He took sculpture and I enrolled in the grandly titled “New Media and Video Art” at ECA. We found a quarto in Lapa, met Eduardo the Judge through art school and Mel T. through Kenken’s job at Novo Bonsai, then built a life from ferries, museums, drawing, leftover sushi and long afternoons at Belém. We began art school in October 2004, and I later recovered the rhythm in Sunday Companionship.
The 11 months were eventful. What disappeared was my rhythm of reporting them, and perhaps the appetite for disclosure that had powered early JoaFruit. The blog had been born from confusion, loneliness, love-life drama and the thrill of manufacturing a self in public. In Portugal I was busy living with Kenken. Happiness did not end JoaFruit, but it made JoaFruit less necessary. Much of the chapter survives only in photos, half-sentences and the memory of 2 boys deciding that staying put might be the more adventurous option.