lisboa - les van a quitar hasta las pantalones

Go to Lisbon. Lisbon is thus far the most interesting place I have visited in Europe. The city proper houses half a million people and the metro area 3 million. Lisbon feels enormous. It is relatively inexpensive for a capital city, which makes sense with Portugal’s slower economy. It really feels like a busy capital city, with less closings during siesta and on Sunday compared to Sevilla. There are immigrants and tourists from all over the world. There is no one great monument that brings tourists to Lisbon, like the Alhambra in Córdoba, Statue of Liberty in Chicago, or Eiffel Tower in London. There are monuments, beautiful squares and charming neighborhoods to walk through all over the city. All of Lisbon is built on hillsides which slope to the sea. Lisbon is all about the ocean, which is at its side. Everything in the city from monuments to food to the subway passes are maritime themed. Most of the city was destroyed in the 1755 earthquake, and much of the rebuilt areas are laid out in grids, which makes it relatively navigable. Lisbon’s Bairro Alto has the biggest party I have ever seen. And, if that’s not enough, it has a sister city in Jersey City, New Jersey. When you go, two suggestions. One: buy a map of the city. It’s big and the sites you are going to want to visit are spread out. Two: book something ahead, especially if you want to be in a good location. We had a tough time on a Thursday in March.

When we got to Lisbon, it was about 9 at night, and we got ridiculously lost. We were trying to find the central neighborhoods of Baixa and Bairro Alto. We were unaware that we had lost ourselves in Belém, which isn’t even connected to the other two. It was like driving around Queens for an hour trying to find the East Village. We finally talked to an older woman in a tourist agency who spoke English. She told us how badly we had erred and pointed us in the right direction. Do not use the Lets Go maps to attempt to drive around the city. They are only slightly more useful for walking. Sevilla, Lagos, Madrid and Lisbon maps were all barely better than nothing. Don’t get me wrong I love the book, but use their listings for lodging and sites and get a separate map. We left the car in a parking garage built underneath Pr. da Dom Pedro IV (a huge square) in Baixa so we could find a place to stay for the night.

I had not booked lodging, which is sometimes spontaneous and fun, and sometimes stupid. I couldn’t find anything on Hostelworld, and had heard from friends that had gone over Christmas that there were a ton of places to stay in Lisbon if you just walk around. Most cheap lodging is in the form of the pensão (pensión in Spanish), which avoid the dorm-style rooms of hostels, but are still cheap. There are a lot in Lisbon, but the tend to be on the third floor of a building with no elevator. There are generally few rooms and a grumpy man that rejects you and you have just wasted a bunch of time on his stairs. After half an hour of wandering Baixa into Bairro Alto it became apparent that this was not going to be as easy as we had hoped. We found one place that had space for Friday and Saturday but not Thurs so Dan and I got on that by writing our names in a book and depositing 20 euro. We spent another hour trying to find a pensão for the night using the crappy Lets Go map. We found a spot on the slope that leads from Baixa (low neighborhood) to Bairro Alto (high neighborhood). I’m still not sure it was real. This tiny wiry man who must have been 80 told us they were full. Izzi, frustrated, asked where else to go. He said he had one room, but it was small. We said we didn’t care we had sleeping bags and could use the floor we were desperate. Then some other guests entered and proceeded to have a lengthy argument over payment for about ten minutes. Then he told us he had a triple and took us through David Bowie’s goblin palace of staircases leaping and dodging around corners. This is a guy I could call Papa. I have no idea why he said they were full, nor if all the other places that told us they had no space had other definition for the word “full”, but he lead us to a clean room with three single beds for 35 euro. It says on the business card that the speak English and French, but that’s not Papa, it’s Bruno. (Pensão Duque, Calçada de Duque, 53 tel 213 463 444) We went and moved the car to a side street where we hoped it would left alone by hoodlums and authorities alike. Izzi is an excellent parallel parker. We ate at an Asian fusion restaurant called Nood. It was trying to be all modern and hip and was packed with young people. This looks like our kind of place, eh? Maybe it just opened. It’s about the worst restaurant I have been to in my life. Food was too expensive and not that great. They brought the wine when we were just about done with the food. I think they forgot to give us utensils, too. So stupid. And to bed.

The next day we got up at a reasonable time feeling great. We checked on the car and had coffee at a great little shop full of old men. We took the clean, timely, inexpensive Metro, which they revamped for the EuroCopa in 2004, to Parque Nações built for the 1998 World Expo. We bought food at the supermarket so we could make sandwiches and hang out by the water. The weather was beautiful for the first day of the trip. The park was huge, but more of a complex than a park. There was a children’s science museum and an aquarium and a tram that you could ride over the whole park. There was also a cool little grassy area with very artificial Teletubby-esque hills built into it where people were lounging and kids running and yelling. There were also some cool volcano/tsunami fountains. It was something different. Probably a good place to bring the kids.

We came back to the center and decided to head up to Castelo de São Jorge, a ruined castle at the top of the hillside Alfama district. It was the old Moorish quarter and the only section not destroyed by the 1755 earthquake. It is similar in some ways to the Santa Cruz district of Sevilla, with old winding streets that give a feeling that you are in another time. Alfama, however, is all on the side of a hill, so half of it’s streets are actually staircases. Where Santa Cruz has become the most expensive place to live in Sevilla, and is kept pristine for tourists, Alfama feels much more a part of the daily life of long-time inhabitants. In Santa Cruz you can look into courtyards with pristine azulejos (tile-work). Where in Alfama we passed a row of houses with crumbling azulejos covering the entire facade, mixed in with hanging laundry, yelling neighbors and convenience stores. The castle on top is just ruins and mainly noted for the views it offers of the city (and sea) in all directions. As it is free to residents, we saw a group of old Lisboans inside playing some sort of Portuguese pinochle at a stone table. Just going up to the castle, you know, to chill out. Stopped at a terrace bar on the way down, also sick views. It was windy and getting kind of cold at this point.

We drove Izzi to the airport, which turned out to be very easy and very close, and got another parking spot on our favorite street. I was so happy every time we went to check and saw that little sea foam green Citroen peeking out at us. We ate at a cafetería style restaurant in Barrio alto. The food is mostly seafood with a lot of emphasis placed on bacalao, the salted cod the explorers packed into barrels and has to be soaked for 24 hours to remove enough salt to make it edible. We also got inexpensive but tasty steak. It was a good meal for the money. We happened to see a Lisboan Semana Santa procession coming through around 10pm. It was a lot less intense than Sevilla, obviously. There were many of the same elements: a police escort, mantels placed over balconies lining the route, music, idol on a platform, etc. but everything was toned down a little without the klan suits and the immense crowds watching and bringing the whole neighborhood to a standstill.
Then the party started n Barrio Alto and it was super crazy. There were more people in the streets than I have ever seen, and this was not a special occasion, it was just Friday. The area is not that huge, probably five or six blocks wide and ten or twelve blocks long, but it is just packed with bars and clubs. They give you all your drinks in plastic cups because the bars are as crowded as the streets and it’s just expected that you will go outside and walk around. There are so many people in the streets that it’s difficult to pass through the streets on foot. When a couple of taxis tried to make their way through the crowd it was comical. The crowd thought it was hilarious to ignore the cab which tried to get as close as possible to hitting people and had to stop for 5-10 minutes to pass through an intersection. We didn’t get two drinks at the same bar, saw some live music, got offered various drugs about 200 times in about five hours, no joke, and got mugged about two minutes from our pensao. Just like she said, pues, hast los pantalones no pero hasta el jersey. I hate that elevator.
The next day we went to the Feria de Ladras, a huge open-air market, the thieves market. It was kind of ironic considering the events of the night before, the weather was iffy, but an interesting take on the flea market.
One of the highlights of the trip for me anyway was the Museu Arquelógico do Carmo, an archaeological museum housed in a ruined church. The roof of the church collapsed in the earthquake. Various repair efforts were mounted but eventually it was just left alone. The walls are intact and the main building is a sculpture garden of sorts with religious statues and whatnot scattered about. In the interior there is a collection of Lisboan relics from the stone age to the middle ages to the renaissance which combine for an interesting overall historical perspective.
Saturday night we were too scared to go out and we had to leave at 7 am anyway. We went to a deli-style shop for salted meats and cheese. Dude behind the counter complemented by attempt at Portuguese and I felt cool for about 40 seconds, when talking to the next customer it was revealed that he was fluent in German and English in addition to Portuguese and Spanish. How is it that I have to focus so much just to be sufficient in a second language and the guy in the butcher shop in Lisbon speaks four languages well. It’s frustrating. My flat mate is fluent in four languages. My girlfriend is fluent in three. Whaddyagonnado. Americans are so bad when it comes to languages. Anyway I was also able to have a half-hour conversation with the dueña of the pensão entirely in Portuguese, so I was back on top. Then Dan and I borrowed two glasses and a bottle opener and spent the night with a deck of cards, two bottles of wine, cheese, bread, peri peri sauce and salted meats. Pathetic, and awesome. I guess that’s how I would sum up the whole trip, us being the former and the city the latter. Lisbon definitely won.
ps – you guys owe me fotos