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,
... read more
