Sandra eats more pastries.

February 19, 2006
Back to Lisbon

Woke up late in the morning and had a quick bit of Muesli for breakfast with the girls. Some went off to do sketching for classes I’m not taking, so Sandra and I braved the rainy weather (fortified by roast chestnuts that we bought on the way) to go see the legendary Capella dos Ossos. As we walked through town, we collected other PortCitians (in this case, Francois and Brady) to go see this chapel. It’s attached to the church of Sao Francisco and is a meditation space to help people go beyond materiality etc. etc. etc. In modern terms, imagine a room with an exquisite painted ceiling, and walls papered in bones. The bones of 5000 monks, to be exact. It is morbid, grotesque, and wonderful. It is beautifully constructed, and apart from the desiccated body nailed to the wall, isn’t disgusting in the slightest. There’s even a charming saying “We bones who are here await yours”.

After that uplifting experience we walked back through town to find the aquaduct and ran into more PortCitians (Lynn this time, we’d left the boys behind after the bone adventure). It promptly started raining dats and cogs, so we stopped into a coffee shop for sustenance.

We wandered off (picking up more PortCitians on the way, this time it was Teresa and Teigen) and took some more pictures of the aquaduct after we traced it through town.

Shortly thereafter we had a cobbly walk back to the hotel to pick up our luggage and head off to the bus to return to Lisbon. On the way back to Lisbon we stopped at a vineyard for a bit of a tour and a mini tasting. Very yum and very pretty indeed.

Back to town, laundry, and a meal in an Indian restaurant.

Funny thing – this was the first full Sunday that we’d been in Portugal, and it was rather fun to watch all the people scrambling because they discovered the shops weren’t open. I’d been expecting it all along and was surprised at how many shops were indeed open. Hehe. Welcome to Europe, kids.

February 20, 2006

Woke, had breadfast, yadda yadda yadda. We were supposed to tour a black box theater on the other side of Lisbon but it got cancelled since they didn’t have the insurance necessary to let groups in yet. Hm. Interesting.

Instead, our landscape architecture Prof (Lance) took those of us who were interested (basically, all the landscape students) to a nearby city via the metro and the train. The city is called Sintra and is the hilly town where the wealthy Lisboans and royalty had their summer homes. It is hilly and gorgeous, and I liked it even more than Evora. There are picturesque Moorish castles on the hill, and tons of hilly gardens. We got to tour one of them called Monserrate that was mainly built by a series of homesick and worldly Englishmen with more money than sense. It was wonderful, and the tour was led by Gerald, a nice expat who works there as a Landscape Architect. We tossed around the idea of doing a series of projects to help reclaim the site and protect the ecology that has sprung up since the site was abandoned in the 1974 revolution. I’m considering rolling this into my final project for my degree, but we’d have to see how the logistics pan out. ;)

February 21, 2006

Breadfast as usual, then we went to some lectures over at the literary center. Afterwards, we were to meet in front of the hotel at 2:30 to get the tram over to the other side of town to look at the aquaduct’s terminus at the ‘mother of waters’ building. Lance took the MLA students early (whoops, missed lunch) and we walked up there instead, stopping by the most excellent botanical gardens. When we finally ended up at the mother of waters, it was a really cool room. Big, and vaulted, with a massive and very deep, very clear pool in it. It was being used as a gallery, with lots of wall hangings. There was a dock in the pool that you could walk out onto, and the light coming in through the very small windows made these awesome tubes of light in the water – luckily they photographed well. There’s a fountain that originally carried the aquaduct water into the space at one end, and it has been completely covered by mineral deposits so that it’s starting to develop into a massive rock of its own right – similar to those at Yellowstone.

Sandra and I took off a little early to walk back to the hotel and had a great time navigating our way through town. We had a little hilarity too, and she’s gonna kill me for telling you. We walked by one of the city’s many excellent liquor stores that had a large display of port in the window. Sandra must always stop and look at the these since she loves the vile stuff and even researched it as part of our pre departure study. One of the things that she found out was that only 23 or so years of port production have been designated ‘vintage’ for their excellence. Thus, the word on the street is that vintage port is very very expensive, and very very rare. Well… it turns out from our survey of liquor stores, that vintage port is in almost every store, and is not that expensive (though certainly not cheap). Hm, this is an awful lot of setup for a bad joke, oh well. Sandra and I walk on by the shop, and she remarks in a rather flustered way “Hm, they seem to have a lot of Vinto Portage around here.” Well I just about died laughing, and she dived rather unexpectedly up a side street. Apparently she got all tongue twisted and rattled by a man soiling himself right in front of us. Bleach. Glad I didn’t see that.

Dinner was a simple affair – we drank a bottle of the wine we got in the Alentejo region up in Sandra’s room with various friends and colleagues stopping by. Then we headed down to the Baixa district for a bite to eat, avoiding the rowdy and inebriated Liverpool United fans who were thronging the city and trying to pickle themselves.

My meal was charcoal grilled sardines, and it was excellent – but the were large and gave me four of the damn things. Only managed to wind my way through two of them before we gave up the good fight and picked our way through the meandering throngs to the hotel for some well deserved rest.

February 22, 2006
Lisbon

Ugh. I have a disease. Seems to be a cold. Lynn, Bret, and Erica all have it too. We’re taking the bus up north tomorrow for a five day trip, so I imagine we’ll all sit in a row and infect the rest of the bus. Charming. Aren’t we going to be popular?

Also, in other bad news, I have to announce the untimely demise of a faithful yet short lived power adapter. It is impressively melted, and has blown a series of fuses – indicating that it is ready for the big dump truck in the sky. Luckily, the only thing I need it for is my camera charger, and many other people on the trip are happy enough to tuck my batteries in with theirs for their nightly rejuvenation. This is also made easier by the fact that we are all taking a lot fewer pictures these days – we’re down from averaging 400 pictures a day, to about 40. I can’t imagine doing this trip with film.

So, today, we went with our diseases on the metro up to the Lisbon City Museum, that tracks the development of the city from the original Phoenecian settlement close to Sao Jorge all the way through the Romans, Moors, Christians, etc. It was very very good and when you all come to Lisbon, it’s well worth a visit (take the Metro Blue Line to Campo Grande and it’s about a five minute walk).

After that we went with our diseases, plus some less infectious friends too, to walk to the next site. Since we had about two hours to kill, and we figured it was about an hour’s walk to the next stop, we walked it. Lynn and I just about died with our snuffling, sneezing, and itchy noses, but we did finally make it. After a brief and satisfactory repast (I had bacalhau do casa – or salt cod of the house, imagine fish and chips where the chips are crisp shaped, the fish is rehydrated salt cod, and it all has an odd onion sauce over it) we went on to the Gulbenkian Foundation.

The Gulbenkian is a large and wealthy foundation supporting the arts and sciences, and they have a really nice building that was designed and built in the sixties. There’s a great garden around it, and we got to meet the original landscape architect as he led us on a tour. It was marvelous, and they just did a rehabilitiation/rejuvenation of the garden. It was so good that at the end of it we all applauded the guy (we couldn’t talk to him as he spoke about as much English as we speak Portuguese).

I’ve learnt enough of the language and local sign language to be able to order in restaurants, get the kind of coffee I want (sometimes bica/espresso, sometimes café dupplo, sometimes café con leite) and the particular fizzy water that I love (agua con limao … agua frize). I’m good at the sign language for “just looking thanks” as well as “please bring the bill” “how much is that” “do you have this shoe in a 42?” “no I won’t give you a Euro for juggling fire”. Well, actually I can say the last one in English because the dude is from Manchester.

Most people do speak a bit of English, and politely suffer through a few minutes of painful Portuguese before they break down and start speaking English to us.

Yesterday, I was dying for a loo and couldn’t face the long climb to our hotel at the top of the hill. Sandra and I ducked into a café that had a WC prominently displayed at the back (well, the *door* was prominently displayed). Since it was such a small place, we felt we should order something in return for my desecration of their loo. As we walked in I said to Sandra “order something” and told her to buy me an orange as they had a large display of them handy. If the display had been of squid beaks, I’m sure that’s what I would have told her to get for me. As I made a beeline through the little café to the back, I locked eyes with the owner, pointed to the loo, and raised my eyebrows. It must have been pretty obvious that I was desperate because he gave me the tiniest of nods, as if to say “go ahead love”. I dove in, did my business, and left much refreshed to find Sandra rolling with laughter sitting down eating a pastry (man, can that girl pack away the pastries!). She did not, however, have an orange near her. Apparently, when she asked where the orange was (that she had ordered by pointing at the pile of oranges and saing ‘una’) they had made a sort of squeezing twisting motion with their hands. Aha, the oranges are for juice! They brought the juice through, and I had to have Sandra help me with it because I’m turning into my father and am having more trouble eating fruit as I get older – no matter how sweet it is, it’s often painfully sour. I’m not kidding about the ‘painfully’ bit either – pineapple eats through my skin and my lips flake right off. Well, we gave the hand-on-heart thank-you bow as we left chanting a little chorus of “obrigada”. Dude said “your welcome”. Rrg. We could have spoken English! Heh.