Lisbon and miscellany

Last Thursday my comrades and I took the train to Lisbon, Portugal’s premiere city by the sea, capital, and San Francisco knock off—in the non-chronological sense, that is. We arrived early on Friday, and wandered groggily, taking stock of the immediate neighborhood surrounding or Residéncia. From our admittedly superficial investigations, it seems that that the city offers, in no particular order:

1) Public spaces wavering between extreme friendliness and unfriendliness to pedestrians—on one hand there are ample and monumental plazas and parks scattered about, as well as an almost pathological, though aesthetic, ordinance about paving sidewalks with white and black cobblestone. Moreover, the citizen public art (read vandalism) is highly evolved and often lovely. On the other hand, sidewalks are often non-existent or laughably narrow owing to massive and poorly managed public works, and the traffic signals favor automobiles to a bonzo extent.

2) People speaking Portuguese—which reads like Spanish but sounds like Polish, at least so said Yelena, who speaks Russian. This made communication frequently awkward, and conducted in English more often than Castilian. We learned only the word for “Thank You”—obrigado—which, legend has it, exists in Japanese in the corrupted form “arigato.” As in the Styx song.

3) West-Coasticity—delicious sea smells and air, the sun descending behind the water nightly, suspension bridges, temperate climes, dense, old housing development on hills, rumbling street cars and on and on.

4) Indian food—bizarrely paired with Italian food in a number of restaurants dotting the downtown-most areas in Lisbon. We didn’t try any.

Later, we would willingly chain ourselves to a tourist trap Fado floorshow restaurant, watch Olympic ice skating in Portuguese at our dubiously self-proclaimed “four star” hostel, and argue frantically at every meal about whether tipping is customary in Portugal (it is not in Spain). We would compromise to tip, but poorly. We would visit another wacky monastery and that landmark, unintentionally poignant statue commemorating Portugal’s squandered and brutal Golden Age of imperialist sea faring.

The highlight ended up being a half day trip outside of Lisbon to Sintra, an incredibly quaint town ensconced in Eucalyptus that houses a former royal palace. Idiotically, we walked a mile or two on an uphill against car traffic and without the benefit of a sidewalk to the ruins of a pre-reconquista castle, which had closed an hour earlier. Yet the air was so gorgeous and the views so deliriously golden, it was even better than gazing at more piles of old rocks.

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