a love for lisboa

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As with all my european breaks, i will start with how i came to know someone in the country to stay with them, why im going and a small drama about getting there...

So, i was visiting my favourite portuguese friend, Joana, whom ive known for almost a year now, and my meeting of portuguese people has risen exponentially since i started my PhD in January, and unsurprisingly took a major leap up as i met her parents and closest friends and animals...

i was here on the pretext of seeing a muse concert in Lisbon, exotic not only for the fact the band is from Devon in the Uk, but also because we were already planning to see them in London later on in the month on the same tour; but we needn't get into that...

If anyone can mention a worser time to be flying, then it would be London Luton to Lisbon using easyJet...amazingly, the only flight to Lisbon departs at 6am, which means check in earlier etc...basically, i had to be up at 2am and catch a 3am coach??!! insanity, so i was like: whats the point in sleeping? so i didnt, and i arrived in Lisbon at 9am, a bit knackered in a rain battered city...hmmm my ray of sunshine though was seeing Joana after so long and i even kept her waiting for an hour in her busy working life...but bless her she waited as my baggage was carried by what was surely an army of small ants between the plane and the conveyor belt - judging by the speed of delivery (i should say the airport and indeed Portugal dont have ANY ants :P)

not really thinking clearly as i hadnt slept, joana fed me some of these biscuits for which i craved and in exchange i fed her some of the shortbread addiction!! and we kinda caught up a little and tried to plan the day...instead of roaring straight into the city centre, map and camera in hand, i instead ended up taking an extended tour of Joana's lab (well the lab she works in) which is in a super modern building by the university of Lisbon hospital.  met her supervisor and her colleagues and had coffee with this particularly hilarious Spanish girl who even gave me a map and told me where to check out; like Joana didnt really know any places in Lisbon yet, being from Porto...

anyway, it was suddenly midday and suddenly time to make a decision and i thought best thing was not to ruin my day and not sleep so i got back to her dad's flat near Salvanha, walking through the hospital attracting the first of the strange looks i got from resident Lisboans with my backpack, forgetting the map, and took a 2hr nap.. When i came back to consciousness, the sun was beaming and mopping up the moisture from Lisbon, and from then on, i didnt see a cloud again until immediately after i landed back in the UK...

Just how long had i slept i wondered around the streets of Salvanha dazzled by the sun, the clean buildings and my sudden return to reality.. it was still thursday and still was seeing Muse in the evening! so as i and you the reader have grown accustomed to, i started my wander into a foreign city in an empty aim to quench my desire to walk everywhere in my adventure sandals, to regain the feel of travel of yesteryear and to get lost in a novel culture and absorb a laid-back atmosphere. ..

As i strolled down towards Marques de Pombal, basically the big roundabout in Lisbon which spearheaded the Edward the VII park in the background, i got my first whiff of the impatient bustliness that i was expecting, and the sound of pneunmatic drills rested my soul assured that the people are actually doing something, and this parky ascent was one of these clues, soon to be a great monument and remembrance piece for an event i could neither fathom or ascertain.. (much of the Lisbon spiel that follows is essentially what i can vaguely remember as i was dazed, hungry and deficient in portuguese language and history, so it wont be tremendously detailed. in fact, poor in the details...) then i wandered around, with camera strapped in hand, warm enough to wear shorts, though the residents were wondering if it was really hot enough to be doing so, snapping their eyes at this weird foreigner gliding the wide avenues towards downtown... now, two things that seem to be a constant for Lisboan nature was a) the whole place is built on a constant hill which would go UP in absolutely every direction that one may care to go...and b) in every corner there would be suntanned people with aprons, setting fire to walnuts and emiting a dense suffocating smoke in absolutely every direction, well,  one may care to go...very strange, and i was wondering whether anyone could be enticed by pure carbon treats? Whats great about wandering aimlessly without previously reading up the attractions of the place that you are visiting is not that because i was a guy, i wouldnt ask for directions! but actually that on a higher than 50% probability i might actually stumble upon something interesting...

and indeed, after about 2hrs trepassing peoples' gardens and going in random shops selling tat, i was in central downtown, which has a random portuguese term (some help Joaninha? 1)..and caught the first glimpse of the Castelo de Sao Jorge that everyone raves on about, perched in a strategic hill above the city and offering good sniping and/or tourist view opportunities!!  the castle merged seemlessly with the city as the roofs of the white-washed houses provided a visual red staircase to the battlement.. I wandered in the sort of grand squares containing statues and fountains that i had seen in Brussels, Berlin and most recently Warsaw, surrounded with the gridlocked thin but high buildings shading the square from neighbouring squares that are accessed by small corridors on the corners absent of building.  However, one would not habitually witness a really old elevator being a tourist attraction, but Lisbon has one and its the only thing that is left of the building it used to serve, an observation tower rests, perched on chicken leg structures through which the elevator shuttled hapless tourists up and down...now being one of those unwarrantly arrogant travellers, i wasnt about to fall into this tourist trap and waste euros travelling up an elevator...there are better views from the castle, but i still took the requisite photo of the artificial wander :) pottered around the markets and the grand gate to the city of Lisbon and discovered a few more side streets and squares and more statues of whom i imagine were important people in history, before Joana finally called to say that she was finally finished with her PCRs... as i had the keys to her flat, i started on my wander back even though there was a perfectly new metro that would whisk me back in minutes. like i said, i like to walk everywhere.

Joana got back to the house with a group of her closest friends and it was here that i met the wonderful Mara, her best pal, with whom we would spend a lot of time in Porto and later in life :)...also present was Joao, this ridiculously handsome fella who was safe and was a musician in some band and this cool guy called Hugo..also coming to the Muse concert was a guy from Joana's lab. anyway, maybe a bit naively, i trusted that Joana was to make us all a sumptuous banquet at her house, especially as she had been going on for months about her shy, but real ability to COOK!! lol! you know, my tour of lisbon probably would not have been enhanced if Joana had been showing me around, because she herself had no idea where she was...not just Lisbon, i mean, most of the 7 months she was in cambridge, she had no idea where she was...:P and as we went to look for some ingredients, she had no idea where any supermarket was in Salvanha...hehe and then when we accosted some locals, we found one and got some ready made Lasagne and Pizza and importantly some Sangria :P so there goes the banquet idea, as we ended up microwaving everything as we had some power issues with the oven causing the fuses to go out in the house!!!! with bread, the food was fine, but rather lacking...but i just lined my stomach with alcohol as we all came up to the brim with excitement to see, for some the first time, MUSE!!! joana's flat is in a great location and it was only a short walk to the Campo Pequeno venue, where there was already a long snaking queue towards the entrance to this bull-fighting venue...

we were to stand in a real mosh PIT! so another constant of portuguese culture, is that they operate on a time zone 3hrs into the future, so that everything to me, seemed very late in the day...ie doors opened at 9pm, when it was more normal for 6pm in the UK, and any other normal country (:P)...anyway, the english extrusions from my mouth surprised everyone around my group as it does when im abroad, but none more so than the dirty portuguese swearwords the guys were all teaching me lol; they then switched to asking me chinese swearwords but i refused as it just wasnt proper...thus they persisted to force more sangria down my neck, but come on, you will have to do more than that to inhibit my self-control! anyway, we queue jumped when we got there and once we had bought the tour shirt and visited the loos, we were soon in the pit talking excitedly at what we were about to witness watching the general public taking their seats in the arena above...

i kept thinking of the scene in Gladiator: "are you not entertained?!" anyway, after the forgettable support band, we were very close to the stage already and i was very giddy as the crowd were erupting with a synchronised call for "Muse", whilstling and performing mexican waves. and then they came, Took a Bow (:D), and that is history. it was an incredible and memorable as Joana and Mara first Muse-experience...i wont bore you with the set listing, but it was in promotion of their fourth album: Black holes and revelations! and a few of their previous hits.. it was just amazing and there had been 2 albums since i last saw them, and they have improved a lot since then! so with only 2 hrs of sleep in the previous evening, i will asign my adrenal glands as the sole reason i got through the concert at all and i was completely lost in the moment. as the others rushed off to catch the last train/buses back to Porto, some 300km away, me and Joana went back to flat where i would finally meet her father who was hard at work still at around 1am.. even though my ears were ringing from the excitment of Matt's soprano tones, i was still able to hold a polite and decent conversation and dispense more shortbread biscuits, before i showered, drank 5 litres of water and crashed on the huge inflatable bed :)

27.10.06 

as crazy as Joana is, she still got up around 7 to start crafting her hair and select her earrings and one of the 14 belts she has?! to go to work in a lab...her dad also went and i slept in a bit more as lets face it: i needed it! another lovely day, it was actually pretty hot again, so with shorts, bag and camera, i went roaming again and walked into downtown again. with some advice from my amigos, i went off to find where these funiculars were, which were essentially these cool trams that take people from the city centre all the way up to castle taking a rather nice scenic route.. i climbed many hills and finally stumbled on some tram lines and was like bingo, if i can just find where the rails ended, i could get on there and get the complete experince. there was an even more useful reason for such a pursuit as if one even talk a quick glance to these small carriages, the people were packed like sardines, and some were sticking their heads out of the windows just to breath...i didnt want that, i wanted a seat...so i just carried on walking following the track watching many heaving trams going past :)

LONG story short, i never found the end of the line :S and i had been walking for almost 2 hrs as i walked west pretty much out of the city... i mean, i was so convinced after the spanish girl told me that the start of the line was around this area she placed her index finger on her tourist map..but i guessed her index tip still covered like 5 square miles in reality :D nevertheless, i did get to wander some interesting side streets and some very beautiful architecture in their pastel colours and descended a huge rolling concrete hill and ended up as i later found out at the municipal government of Lisbon :) i was very much enjoying the sun and becoming dehydrated; its been a long time. but when i was close to giving up, i stumbled on this random funicular when i thought i struck gold!! got on, and the driver refused to accept payment and waved me in! so the thing seem to use gravity to come back down to sea level with this lever in the ground that acted as a brake - hilarious. it took a good 10 minutes to get down and surprised me just how high i had ascended in my aimless wander... however, the line ended as we got to the bottom and not at the castle as i had hoped: d'oh!! even better, you pay at the bottom to get out and that was 2 euros for the pleasure. hehe. so ejected into some random riverfront, i was back on foot, and not wanting to climb back up the rather steep hill i just slid down, i decided that instead of finding some nice tourist bus to get to the castle which was to close in 2 hrs; already that late...i decided to follow the scenic waterfront as i knew it was bound to pop into view as i walked back in the centre of town...

So I wandered around for a bit amused by the palm trees and the big bridge named after some random date in history and a distant figure of a large cross…and I was musing how relatively few tourists there were even including myself and I guess it was off-season though unfathomably warm for this time of year…this still didnt stop me from attempting to find my own way up to the castle, and once I saw it in the distant I quickened my pace of this migration. This made me somewhat tired so I sat on the coastal wall for a while but then grew nauseous of the canodeling couples beside me, so I moved off in a huff through some squares laid with mosaic flooring and was welcomingly distracted by the impressive gated entry to the city, which distinctly reminded me of Brandenburg tor in Berlin, but in this case, it was offset by some gherish yellow building erupting from either side.. Lucky this city is protected by another statue of a chubby guy on a horse (I must look up the history!!) Granted, it’s a nice statue but its for some reason standing on snakes?.

So instead of heading to the centre of town as I regained my bearings, I decided, with absolutely no rationality or logic, that there must be an opening in the long coastal façade of buildings that lined the dock, which would let me in and begin my ascent.. but after twenty more sweat inducing minutes still nothing but stone wall…luckily as I was about to call it a day and resign to the fact that ill visit the castle now on my next visit to Lisbon…this small open archway (size of a front door) appeared, and in desperation I bolted towards it not caring if it was actually some resident's front door!! Luckily it was a staircase. And I started to climb and by this time I had lost sight of the castle as the small alleyways and high buildings in front of my ascent were blocking my view as I climbed towards the attraction. So I had to trust my sense of direction (jeez!) and pretty much guessed where the castle “must” be, but I started to doubt myself as I was twisting in and out of little streets being stared at by local residents sitting on their doorways, climbing stairs to then descend some further on, and it seemed like an eternity feeling like I was lost in a maze of Lisbon neighbourhoods, when I finally saw etched into a wall in chalk “castelo” and I was like YES! Followed a few of these signs and I was finally there and through gaps in peoples walls, I was catching glimpse of the beautiful scenic views of the city that were promised if and when I got to the summit!

Frig, I was hot when I arrived, but most of all relieved as I downed an ice-cold coke! And even more so when I bought some postcards and a Portuguese flag for my rucksack! Entered the compound with a student discount and to my surprise there wasn’t actually that much to see of the castle and the ones back home are honestly much more magnificent and grand…what was great was indeed a view and I took some time to take some panoramas and also map out where I had been walking in the last few days and even where joana’s flat was. It was really cool how the whole hilly landscape was densely covered with little red roofs which must offload their rainwater onto the interspersed squares with fountains and statues of commanders. I trundled about climbing up and down old turrets to get better views and pictures and getting rather tired by the process, but I was able to chill to the tones of a local choir who were practising hymns in the courtyard.

To get back to town, I just wandered in the general direction of a square I remembered through unnumbered streets with graffitied back alleys and I was back in town in no time at all but not in the square I was intending…anyhow, its funny how coming down took a quarter of the time it took to get up there!

With conquering the castle achieved, I finally felt worthy of a quick lunch and once I sat in rossio square for my stomach to contemplate its reward, I was once again approached by a drug dealer selling me weed for a “good” price, saying “I give you good price” its funny just how international this phrase is… I must have drug abuser written on my face or something?!

Joana had finished, so I used her travelcard to finally stop walking and get the tube back to the flat, where after she had finished packing to go back to Porto, she proceeded to try and take me to Belem for the famous pasteis de belem, which all the Portuguese rave about if you mention about visiting Lisbon, and certainly for Joaninha, hell would break loose before she let me leave the capital without eating some at the original factory/restaurant in the old romantic Belem area north of the centre…

Instead of taking the tube down to central station and catching a fast train connection, Joana decided to be adventurous, and try and find a bus to get there…and after wandering around for a bit near Saldanha, she had to call someone to see if there was some truth to her imagination that such bus existed lol!! There was, said one of the ladies at the bus stop. Lucky. We proceeded to try on each others sunglasses until the bus arrived and after that got boring, Joana went back to texting everyone she knew and calling her friends that I was visiting tonight when we got to Porto. My sense of the Portuguese language was a lot of “sh” sounds and for Joana, I swear half of what she said in a phone conversation was “ta-bem” which I later understood was short for “esta bem” which is “ok” hehehe.

After the packed bus wound through town and everyone on the bus got an eyeball of the foreigner, I then found out Joana didn’t actually know where to get off and it was only after I saw the word Belem on a sign that we pressed the buzzer to stop the bus..which was lucky as we stopped pretty much outside the restaurant! We were in quickly as it was darkening and also as we were meeting Joana’s dad soon! But not before she said another long phrase with plenty of “sh” noises pointing at the rather beautiful Geronimo’s monastery which is famous here, looking rather dreamy like in the falling dusk and red lighting… what really was dreamy were the little custard tarts, just out of the oven and coated with sugar and cinnamon, just in case the whole experience wasn’t sweet enough…Joana had no problem, with a high threshold for them, and promptly scoffed them down using a napkin. I could only managed 2 though they were delicious with coffee. She ordered about a million-more for her friends for tonight’s house party that they were throwing for me :P

Joana then tried to explain some important statue nearby, but I have forgotten the significance of it already and even its name, so im a dead man.. sorry. The dad then picked us up in a rather nice car and took us to the flat where I met yet another Joana, who told me I would meet ANOTHER Joana when I got to Porto… we got all the luggage and cakes into the car as it was late already, and I chatted with the newly met Joana in the back for 3 hours mainly about STIs in broken English (hilarious) and also watched Joaninha in the front slowly head banging her way to dreamland (with her mouth wide open, even more hilarious – im definitely a dead-man now for saying this)