Assault on the summit

I hauled myself out of bed a little late, having entirely forgotten which very limited hours breakfast would be available, and hoping that no one would be occupying the single shower that was shared between four rooms. I believe I had the facilities all to myself for much of the weekend, but also didn't particularly want to appear at breakfast with my hair still suffering the ravages of yesterday's weather (my hair doesn't exactly frizz with humidity - it looks more like I ran glue through it and forgot to comb it out before it dried - apparently this is the price to pay for the dyed-out-of-a-bottle black I prefer). The Merith is one of those rambling old buildings with a creak in the floor and just enough mildew in the shower grout to make you wonder exactly what year the establishment was last refurbished. But it also has just about the friendliest owners and staff imaginable, which entirely makes up for the fact that the in-room heater has only two settings (burn + freeze). And just across the street was a nondescript park with a somewhat shaggy trim of grass which was nonetheless a top contender for the birthplace of golf - although this was hotly contested by a couple of other equally scruffy parks around the same part of town.

At breakfast an extremely cheery woman (who I took to be the wife of the gentleman who charged my card 700 pounds yesterday) brought out toast and tea while I helped myself to cereal and juice. Then, to my surprise, she came over again and asked what I would like to eat - toast and tea apparently being just the precursor to a full Scottish breakfast. Without thinking, I ordered eggs - scrambled - and hash browns.

Now, reaching way back into the depths of my memory of my first visit to the northern end of the British isle, I could just glimpse a promise I had made to myself that I would never, ever eat scrambled eggs in Scotland again. This oath was the result of a week-long stay at a rambling old mansion in a rural part of the country from where, as I mentioned below, my mother and self toured around the local castles while my father was hard at work. The hotel had been quietly nick-named Fawlty Towers after the British comedy of the same name, largely because every evening the John Cleese look-alike owner would get sloshed while one hotel guest or another clamped his hand firmly on the owner's wife's bottom. The place was set on a golf course, where in the wee hours of the morning one could hear the mingled shouts of "fore!" interspersed among gunshots from pheasant hunters prowling the perimeter for prey. The only note-worthy flaw about the place was the morning breakfast, which inevitably consisted of a few pieces of toast accompanied by an enormous plate of scrambled eggs so large and so soggy that it must have taken several hens and a pint of water to produce eat helping. On top of that was a taste of some spice that gave off the vague odor of a pig stall - which, many years later, I finally identified as white pepper. To this day, the taste of white pepper makes any dish virtually inedible.

But I had forgotten about my prior experience of scrambled eggs in Scotland when I ordered the same breakfast on my first morning in Edinburgh. The white pepper was missing, but the remainder of the recipe was strictly intact, and I found before myself a pale four-egg plate, slightly too soggy for any amount of salt to soak up. I ate as much as I could stomach, and hid the remainder under a napkin that also held an open packet of something called "brown sauce," which I had read and mistaken for "brown sugar," which I was attempting to pour into my tea until I realized that it was more or less a thick sort of teriyaki sauce. I escaped back up the stairs before the friendly owners could notice how much I'd left on the plate, grabbed enough gear to last me through the day - rain or shine - and headed to town.

I meandered out with the vague intent of arriving at Edinburgh Castle sometime before mid-day, but without much more plan than that. I knew the vague direction I was heading (or thought I did), so instead of taking the long route back through Waverly Station, I cut up across a park that turned out to be Calton Hill, full of various unrelated monuments and markers. I came down off the hilltop and got a glimpse of my intended destination - the castle - which was well farther than I thought, and on an entirely different hill. I scanned the horizon for a short-cut, but it looked like after gaining all that altitude, the only option was to descend back toward the valley floor and go up the next hill where - one would hope - I would actually reach the castle.

I made my way back toward the train station where this adventure started yesterday, then cut upward onto the stretch of road somewhat ironically known as the "royal mile." Apparently it got that name because it stretches from Hollyrood Palace to the castle on the hill, but by all accounts, the street itself was the center of all squalor in Victorian Edinburgh, where the sewage was largely disposed of by shouting the warning "gardeloo!" (a corruption of the French "garde l'eau") which roughly means "watch out, for I will soon throw a bucket of fecal matter from the fourth floor onto the open street below." Far from squalid, today it is a collection of cute cafes and the same general variety of boutique shops that afflict most gentrified sectors of old cities. But, being Scotland, it has a variety of kitschy outlets selling all shades and varieties of woolen plaid products. Tucked among these were a few store-fronts selling the odd combination of Celtic-inspired jewelry and plastic statues of Buddha - which wouldn't have surprised me in, say, San Francisco, but seemed very odd in the context of a place where swirly Celtic symbols are actually a local cultural artifact. One of these places had in the window perhaps the oddest slogan ever invented, which I repeat word-for-word because I couldn't make it any more perplexing if I tried: next to a giant fake trilobite etched in sandstone (I know it was fake because there was an identical one in the next store-front window) was a sign that read, "This fossilized sea creature promotes leadership and management skills."

Huh.

Interesting.

After staring at that for some time - wondering if perhaps it would make sense if I thought about it long enough - I continued up the royal mile to the castle, which was firmly guarded by a line at least 200 people deep to get to the ticket office. Being so firmly repelled by the idea of waiting so long for entrance into an edifice which was already going to contain the several dozen people ahead of me in line, I retraced my steps back down the royal mile, only stopping once into an establishment that boasted a replica of a wool mill. It did indeed have several mock-ups of various pieces of an old factory, but I was most taken by a knee-length black cape with red trim - for a mere 150 pounds, I could see myself dashing through the streets of London trailing behind me this gorgeous coat. Then I could see myself coming across the un-worn garment in my closet a year down the line wishing I really had that money for rent instead. I didn't buy it. But some day, many years down the road when my school debt is under six figures again, I will own that cashmere cape and go dashing about London. Some day. Or maybe not.

I kept on my way down the road and eventually bottomed out near Hollyrood Palace, which itself was closed but which had an attached cafe that boasted the dual advantages of a heated indoor patio and an admirable variety of desert dishes. I ordered a sandwich (brie and cranberry - how come no one in America ever thinks of that brilliant combination?!), a Greek salad, and a beer. I generally don't drink beer before 6 pm (heh, that's a nice way of saying I don't drink beer at all), but I've found that any wine that costs under about $10 a glass in Britain contains sulfites, which area quick trip to a bad headache. And I needed some hearty fortification to complete the next step of my journey in any case.

Nearby the palace cafe was the city park that housed an old volcanic plug called Arthur's Seat. Towering above the rest of the Edinburgh skyline, the peak is a target of the more stalwart sorts of day visitors, which I of course considered myself to be. After resting my still-sore feet over a long lunch, I set out for mountain.

From the base of the slope, I could see a gradual incline that graded gently but steadily upwards. I also stumbled across a much steeper trail that bore straight up the back of the hill, much more precipitously (and directly) toward the goal. I chose the latter and started the forced march upwards. I crested what looked to be the highest part of the hill, egged on by a man and his ten or so year-old son who hardly looked back when they breezed by me. At the crest, thinking I was virtually there, I found to my dismay that in fact I was on a side butte beside the main peak. All that altitude gain, and what lay before me was a modest drop to the valley floor on one side, and a saddle route across to the path that switched-backed up the real hill. The saddle dropped to just a couple hundred feet above sea level, virtually down to where I started. Just warming up. I hiked over to the main slope, into which was cut a vertical stone-lined drainage route and next to it a zig-zag flag-stone path leading to the peak. I sighed and started up, readying for my final assault on the summit.

About a half dozen turns up the switchbacks, I paused to take a breath and wiggle my feet around - I was wearing my Sensible Walking Shoes, but they were not hiking boots by any stretch of the imagination (I usually wear them only over the challenging terrain of linoleum hospital floors). I turned to take in the view of the city, when I noticed something out toward the horizon that was just about the last thing I wanted to see about that moment. The gray curtain of a squall line was cutting its way across the Firth of Forth (a name that up til this visit I had assumed was an invention of some Monty Python skit). A stiff breeze was backing around the compass, and I couldn't get any sense for which direction the storm was headed. I hesitated, then headed up another switchback. Stopped again, and unless my mind was tricking me, the forward edge of the downpour was slightly closer now than it was two minutes earlier. I made one more upward switchback before I decided that no matter where the storm was headed, I did not want to be several hundred feet up a near-vertical rock if it passed overhead. I had promised myself a large piece of the chocolate gateaux that was on offer back at the palace cafe if I made the summit, but at this point I decided that my only goal for the afternoon was to rocket back down the hillside and be back inside the cafe eating cake by the time the squall passed overhead.

I was off the hillside and skirting along the grass path around the base of the hill when the first winds picked up, followed by gust-blown splotches of rain, drops the size that a seagull might leave on a parked car. I scrambled to find the umbrella I had tucked into my pack that morning. I opened it, and a gust of wind caught the fabric like a sail, immediately and irrevocably kinking several of the weak aluminum spikes. I folded it back down to a lumpy package, put my head down, and charged into the wind as best I could. I was long out of sight of the peak by now and do not know if the edge of the cloud just missed it or rammed it straight on, but from my position, I was satisfied either way that I'd dodged a somewhat wet, wind-blown, and unpleasant fate.

I did indeed go back for that chocolate gateaux, though as is inevitable, it was far sweeter in anticipation than in the final reality. Or perhaps the reverse, as it was more sugar than chocolate. But I happily packed in the couple hundred extra calories and rested my ever-more aching feet. I still had a mile or so to go back to the hotel.

By this time it was getting to be late afternoon, but the skies had cleared in the wake of the squall and it was pleasantly sunny out again. I set out back toward Leith, getting turned around and just lost enough that I found myself off the map and unsure of how to get myself back onto it besides wandering around til I found a street sign that matched a name on the paper. I got as far as the hotel and realized that if I went in now, I would probably find myself sitting there for hours waiting for the sun to go down with little else to do. There are not many eateries in that part of town, and nothing in the way of coffee shops to while away an evening in. This is a fairly working-class area of the city, just enough such that none of the bars looked at all inviting to a single foreign woman traveling alone. So I kept walking toward the docks at the far north end of town. The area has gentrified in the last decade or so, enough that the hotel owners had assured me there were many shops and restaurants up there, as well as a shopping mall. I figured any shopping mall must at least have a coffee shop open on a Saturday evening if nothing else, so I headed in that direction. Ten minutes past the hotel, now almost limping from new hot spots on both feet, the sunlight took on that eerie glow of thunder coming: bright and warm against a background of grey that sucks the sun right out of the sky. Again I was caught out in an open shower; I reached for the umbrella, figuring I couldn't do any more damage to it now. As soon as I opened it, the remaining spokes collapsed under the stress of the wind; I tucked it under an arm, headed straight for the open door of the mall. Once I got inside I popped open the umbrella once more just to see if there was any salvaging it. There was not, and I threw it in the first trash bin I came to. Normally I hate throwing useful things away, but at this stage there was no making anything useful out of the flapping remains of nylon and twisted aluminum, so I sighed and chucked it.

I looked around for the cheapest place to grab a snack in the mall, which turned out - no doubt - to be Starbucks. Second night in a row. But their sandwiches are good! And cheap! And just enough calories to get me through a half-hour of ads and two hours of one of the most inane films currently making the first-line cinema rounds: The Da Vinci Code. So much potential, such mediocre execution. This I already knew, since I'd read the book once when someone was passing it around a dredge and - having exhausted all my own reading material - read through it in about half an afternoon. But with Tom Hanks in the lead exhibiting his inevitable Oscar-winning small-mammal-in-the-headlights schtick and some cheap special effects that made the whole thing out like a bad episode of CSI, the movie was even worse than the book. However, sitting through it did accomplish my main goal, which was that after two hours with my bare feet on the cool theater floor, the swelling went down enough that I actually could walk home under my own power. The sun was just going down after ten o'clock, and I carefully mapped out and memorized a route along large well-lit streets before I left the mall, only to find myself turned around and cutting through a very well-lit alley followed by an unreasonably dark park. I skirted back around toward my intended destination and somehow arrived back at the hotel with no worse wear to show for it...except in my feet, which had collective burst out with three new blisters, including one that had neatly healed over since I left Lisbon, sealing itself nicely shut so that a new one could form right underneath the old one. I gladly climbed into bed - this time at least after dark! - and rested up for another day tomorrow.

Edinburgh

My last classes ended Thursday, and before my next major project starts after the bank holiday this weekend, I decided to squeeze in one more journey out of London - perhaps my last before I leave to come home at the end of June. I haven't been to Scotland since I was eighteen and my mother & I spent a week visiting at least two dozen ruinous castles (or was that two dozens every day?!) while my father was otherwise occupied, and I couldn't see being this close and not going up north at all. So Edinburgh it is.

I had a hard time sorting out train schedules online Friday morning - partly because I didn't realize that unlike local trains, there are discounts to be had by booking early, which I had entirely missed out on - so I just hiked myself and a small backpack over to Kings Cross and hoped for the best, realizing all the while that this might end up being a $350 round-trip train ride. That wasn't quite the case, since for reasons that I don't understand, it is about a pound cheaper to go round-trip than one way, so the eventual price was under half that, though still far more than I'd really been expecting (I've flown to other countries for less than that over the past year). With a hotel room booked a credit card, I didn't really have any excuse to back out now, so off I went.

On the train I searched for one of the few unreserved seats (another disadvantage of late booking: no guarantee that there will actually be room on the train), and settled into a backward-facing seat in the middle of a car. I noted a sign on another car that I passed that said "Quiet Coach," but didn't think much of this til later. I alternated between watching the scenery go by and reading a book I'd been meaning to pick up (Notes From A Small Island, travel writer Bill Bryson's memoirs of his farewell tour around Britain after deciding to move back to the US after a couple decades in the UK) until around York, when a gaggle of cowboy hat-clad college-age boys (including one in a pink cap with sparkles I could see shining from my seat 10 yards away) hopped on. They were entirely inebriated when they arrived, and their entrance to the train was accompanied by an overhead announcement through which a female voice asked her male companion if he would marry her. From the hoots that went up from the cowboy hat posse, I assumed that among them was the lucky suitor. This was all rather amusing for about half an hour, but with several cases of beer now under their belts, their shouting only got louder until finally a mother with several small children went and said something stern to them, at which they apologized but didn't quit with the shouting. By this time I had earplugs in and was starting to feel motion-sick from the rear-wards orientation of my seat. From many months aboard various creaky vessels (including weathering one storm that was a couple knots shy of a hurricane aboard a converted barge off the coast of Louisiana), I've long known that hours before I actually get nauseated from motion sickness, I first get a headache that could kill a horse. And that's roughly what happened. By the time I got to Edinburgh every shout from the rear end of the car made me want to take a mallet to those cowboy hats and whoever's head they were perched on. The fresh air of the Edinburgh train station livened me up a bit, though it still took me ten minutes or so to escape that moronic crowd, who were now loudly singing something that appeared to be a version of When the Saints Go Marching In altered into a fight song for some local footballers club.

I got my bearings and made my escape as soon as possible. Waverly Station lies in the heart of the city, with trains arriving beneath the now-benevolent walls of a the town castle, perched high on a bluff above. Most of the downtown looks like another century come alive. I made a couple of wrong turns and finally exited the station out an alley that led out of the downtown section and toward the northern suburbs. At some point I managed to lose the map book that I was carrying; I knew I had had it in my hands not a dozen yards back, but now it was gone. Relying on that as the only means I had of finding the hotel I was booked in at, I searched in every pocket and fold in my pack to no avail. I was just getting ready to resign myself and go buy another one in the train station, when I unbuckled my pack and out fell the map, from where I'll never know.

I finally got going in the right direction, but had to stop a couple of times to add layers of clothing. Scotland seems to run about six weeks behind London in the arrival of spring (although I suspect that with the passing of the solstice in June, the reverse occurs, with winter rushing headlong into Scotland six weeks ahead of its entry into London); with a four-hour train ride, time seems to have reversed. I was glad I had packed a heavier coat than I'd worn since Easter as well as an assortment of fleece accessories - all of which I wore on that journey toward the hotel.

I had booked into a place up where Edinburgh meets the old dock town of Leith, largely because anything I could find in town over this holiday weekend was running about a hundred pounds a night - far out of what I was able to pay out of my ever-diminishing student loan funds. After about twenty minutes on foot through a mist that was just a hair sort of rain, I found the place and rang the bell. The friendly owner gave me a hearty welcome and invited me into the office to complete a bit of paperwork. Amidst friendly conversation about the weather, he ran my debit card and handed me a receipt, which I glanced at briefly and began to sign until something caught my eye that didn't seem right. Where the total was supposed to say "70.50," it actually read "770.50." I stammered out something to the effect that I thought there might be some mistake, and he indeed was horrified at what he had done - largely because the signature was only a formality, and the charge had already been entered against my account. While he hurriedly ran a refund and new a charge, I did some quick math in my head to determine whether there was actually enough in the account to cover an extra seven hundred pounds (roughly $1400 at today's ghastly exchange rate of nearly 2:1). There was, but not with any wide margin. I hoped that Barclays would be kindly enough not to run the first charge then delay the refund while last week's rent check cashed out the account somewhere below zero - though this was the bank that dumped an extra $50 charge onto a wire transfer without telling me, so my confidence in their generosity is fairly minimal. In any case, I figured there was nothing I could do for a couple days until all those charges cleared to see what the final damage was, so I let it be.

I hustled my pack upstairs, re-dressed in a couple further layers of fleece, and headed back in the direction I'd come to see the downtown strip of Princes Street. I must have looked at half a dozen maps before I was finally convinced that Princes Street indeed referred to plural male royalty, as I had guessed on the first map that it was merely a misspelling of the female royal singular. Exiting upwards from the train station via a subterranean mall, I broke out onto the main drag under the sort of sunlight that is made for photographs. A bag-piper in plaid tartan played for tips beneath the skyline of Edinburgh castle, which was lit with a golden swath of sun against the backdrop of a thunderhead-grey sky. The moment passed before I could think to retrieve my camera, but it is etched in my head for long time to come.

I wandered the length of the street and eventually decided to seek out some form of dinner, but with most of the shops closing, there wasn't a whole lot to chose from - odd, on a Friday night nonetheless. I hadn't eaten much for lunch and quickly settled on the ever-reliable option of Starbucks, which in the UK always has a selection of toasted sandwiches which I have - to my great shame - relied on in many a moment when little else was available. It was only when I was in the top-floor cafe inside the walls of a well-known chain bookstore that I realized I was carrying a copy of the Cadogan guide to Edinburgh from a different branch of the same outlet, and I hoped I had remembered to remove the electronic tag I found inserted in it rather than have to explain why I was setting off alarms leaving a bookstore with a volume tagged with the same seller's label. Alas, I was not caught with my contraband purchase, and left the premises after consuming my sandwich without setting off any alarms.

I wandered around Princes Street and down into the park-like ravine that splits the downtown in two. The sun was nowhere near setting and I figured it couldn't be past seven in the evening until I realized that with the journey northward, the days were that much longer and it could be hours before it got dark. Indeed, it was closing in on nine o'clock, and I realized that I had actually been walking for close to six hours, since my train arrived at three, with only a half-hour break at Starbucks. Which would, of course, explain why my feet were aching and why that tickle in my right small toe where I had a left-over healing blister from last weekend's adventures in Lisbon was starting to burn again. I felt silly going to sleep while the sun was still up in the sky, but as it neared ten o'clock I went back to the hotel and called it a night anyhow.

Belem

After my detour inland yesterday, I decided to spend my last full day alongside the waters, both rolling seas of the Atlantic and the current-laden freshwater of the Tagus river. I hit up the maritime museum first for a brief tour of one of my favorite topics that nevertheless often reeks of deadly bore to others: boats. Especially boats with history. Preferably bloody, battled history with maybe a little pillage and pirated booty thrown in for good measure. I can't drive a boat to save my life (and my several attempts at sailing have laughable at tops), but oh, the feel of a well-worn wooden vessel. Inside they dry-dock in the rarified air of historical preservation, while outside their modern counterparts - of fiberglass, of light tin, even some still of tempered wood - rock softly on their anchors in the harbored seas outside.

Afterwards I wandered the river and the sea-fronts, stumbling first on the Tower of Belem. Like the fairy-tale castle at Sintra, the twisting turrets and intimately carved detail of the Torre de Belem brings to mind the Costa Brava - that stretch of Spain as far to the opposite edge of land one can go and still stand foot on the Iberian peninsula. The Costa Brava is the home of Dali and imagination of Gaudi, the architect-visionary that gave Barcelona its distinctive style and the church of ever-unfinished construction, the Sagrada Familia. Even long before rapid transport and global communication forced the homogenization of local style, these two opposite-ended towns possess a sense of the surreal, a sense of curves where others see linear, a sense of ornate in places where function usually predominates - like the tower that once guarded the river entrance to the heart of the city.

Down the coast I went, mostly just to spend a day at the beach. I dipped my toes in water that Homer never called wine-colored, but might as well have for how well the Mediterranean and the Atlantic look alike on reverse coasts of Iberia. I stopped a while in Estoril, an unassuming tourist trap that hit its heyday during World War II when it was a hotbed of spy-versus-counterspy activity in neutral Portugal. Or so say some pop historians in their attempt to account for why Ian Fleming located his first breakthrough novel Casino Royale in this otherwise sleepy town; other less sanguine scribes suspect Fleming invented most of the intrigue both to ameliorate for his own tragically uneventful tour there during the war, as well as to provide an apt facade for his once-unassuming detective novels and their hero, James Bond. No matter, these days it's a sandy beach between rocky outcrops where the kids toss about in the tepid waters while their parents watch from beach-front cafes, cocktail in one hand and cell phone in the other. Its days of intrigue have most definitely passed.

I lounged, I ate, I basked, I rode back into town along the same railway as yesterday. The next morning I took a break-neck early cab ride to the airport - traveling in the neighborhood of sixty miles an hour over surface city streets - and thusly having survived by far the most adventurous moments of the trip, returned to London.

Sintra to the coast

I had thought of going out to the river-side suburb of Belem today, but over breakfast with the guide book in hand, I found out the maritime museum (the main reason for my intended visit) was closed on Mondays, so instead I took an impromptu ride out to the hill-side village of Sintra, which was once called "a glorious Eden" by the ever-poetic Lord Byron. This journey was hampered somewhat by my arrival at the Rossio train station, which was walled off, covered with scaffolding, and quite clearly not open. I finally stumbled across a sign in English saying that one could detour via the nearby metro station to a train station further north and catch the line from there. I did manage this maneuver with only minimal trouble, and hopped off the train at Sintra, the end of the line.

The only guide I could find to the Lisbon are before I left London was a Time Out guide, which was more oriented toward nightlife and expensive eateries than getting out and about - which left me a little lost in trying to figure out which way I should be going (and left me wishing that Lonely Planet hadn't discontinued its Lisbon edition, since that series does a much better job at logistic information than this one). Not having a good map or directions, I randomly picked one of two possible directions to walk and started out downhill; since everyone else was coming off the train was just about as disoriented as me, about half of them went the same way I did while the other half wandered off in the other direction. This first try sent me toward a pleasant but entirely nondescript tourist strip full of overpriced cafes and trinket shops. I was about to be very unimpressed with the whole affair - what exactly was so special about this place that poets would compare it to Eden on earth. I walked back to the train station, and with a heavy flow of tourists now arriving with the late morning, it did seem as if more were headed off in the opposite direction, so I followed them in a last-ditch effort to discover what exactly the hidden treasure of Sintra might be.

It didn't take a long walk, just a few curves along a snaking road cut into the hillside, to see what the fuss was all about. In the distance, set against a background of nearly tropical lushness, was the twin chunky white spires of the National Palace. And high in the forested peaks beyond that, the fairy-tale Moorish castle. Like Monserrat just outside of Barcelona which I visited several springs ago now, the people who built the monumental edifices at Sintra chose a place as imposing for its spirit-soaring monastic beauty as it is for its strategic military position.

I wandered around the wide square at the foot of the hills, perusing through town for the various eatery options and fingering lengths of lace and embroidered cloth before I decided to wander uphill toward the tantalizing palace above. I should not be allowed to travel with other people, as most would not tolerate my version of an afternoon stroll. Or maybe I should only be allowed to travel with other people, other people who have more sense than to let me start off on several mile-long uphill treks when my feet are already torn up and bleeding from blisters, and who have the gumption to tell me to cut it out before the looping journey back is shorter than the journey out, obligating one to forward movement only when retracing one's steps is really the only reasonable thing to do. In any case, half a dozen busloads of tourists riding the easy way up passed me as I journeyed the steep incline toward a peeks and flashes of Moorish colors slipping out between slopes, usually at about the interval I was about to turn back.

The views were spectacular, the blisters epic, somehow I survived the walk back down and the train ride back to Lisbon - detoured by the notion that I might as well triangulate back toward the city via a lengthy bus ride out of the mountains and down toward the beach. Cooled my toes in the white sand and gentle Atlantic swells, and hopped the surface train system home from there. Well worth the trek.

Castles and gardens

In the early morning I started the uphill trek toward Castelo Sao Jorge, a massive edifice sitting atop the highest hill this side of the river. The walk itself took most of an hour and most of that was up slopes that rise so precipitously from sea level up to the castle that some of the narrower ways are replaced by winding staircases snake around houses, replacing road with footpaths in neighborhoods that predate automobiles by a respectable century or ten. The solid rock walls and precipitous ramparts are open to the casual pedestrian, and a few traverses across these handrail-free passes reminded me both of why people put safety guards around such remnant wild places, as well as the thrill of visiting places where such civilized niceties as rails aren't mandated by the ever-present threat of lawsuit. From the castelo the city spreads below like a penthouse view, nearly three hundred sixty degrees of it should one choose to seek out all such views.

Which all reminds me of just how strikingly Lisbon looks like San Francisco. The river Tagus that splits Lisbon is spanned by a bridge that might as well be the Golden Gate taken apart piece by piece and transported across an ocean and continent to a new home in the old world. The cut of white sails marking triangular fins across the blue shallows of the local waterway looks just like the bay on any sunny summer day, and the view can be enjoyed from the peak of any number of surprisingly precipitous hills. In the botanical gardens I visited that afternoon, the same African acanthus whose stalky spikes of purple and white blossoms grace the outside of my parents' house, and I do believe I even saw a slender shoot of a redwood spiraling skyward between the native and foreign flora surrounding it.

Of course San Francisco doesn't have medieval churches tucked in between neighborhoods that have seen several hundred years' worth of history, but it does share that creeping mid-afternoon fog that turns the atmosphere more liquid than air and drives even the hardiest tourists inside in search of heavy jackets and wind-breaking layers. How at home the Iberian conquerors of the Americas must have felt when, after several generations wrangling through the semi-tropics of Florida and Mexico, the highlands of South America, and the scorch of deserts in southern California and the Baja peninsula, they wandered into mid-latitudes of California and found the valley that surrounds the San Francisco bay. In reverse, I travel from there to here. The language is unfamiliar and exotic on my tongue, the customs slightly to the left of incomprehensible, but it feels like home.

Lisbon

With less than a couple of months left before my projected date of departure from London back to the west coast, I'm still trying to knock a couple of destinations off my list of places that I want to see before I leave. It just so happened that the weekend before classes end, I only had one lecture scheduled Monday morning and was otherwise off til Wednesday afternoon - which sounded an awful lot like an invitation to a four-day weekend, so I checked around to see where the cheap flights were going. At the same time, now seems like a good time to see a few places that I probably wouldn't come all the way back to Europe for...Italy, France - I'd cross the Atlantic again to see those regions, but probably not Portugal. So Portugal it was.

I flew out non-stop from Heathrow to Lisbon on Saturday morning - just a quick couple hours. Across the English Channel, clipping the northwest corner of France, and down the length the Iberian peninsula. The Lisbon airport is so close to town that the descent gives a close-up view of the city center, and it's just a few minutes' ride from one to the other. The cabs are cheap here, but the busses even cheaper, so I gambled on the chance that I'd actually see my stop as I passed by it and not wind up back at the airport after whizzing right past where I should've gotten off. And it worked - somehow I happened to catch and fading sign that said Rua da Vitoria, and though I overshot by a stop or two, it was plenty close to walk the distance back. Certainly this was easier than my last arrival and the three-hour bus journey across Malta that accompanied it.

I stayed in a neighborhood called the Baixa, the lowlands between a series of precipitous hills that marks the skyline of the rest of the city. Most of the dozen or so blocks of the Baixa are limited to pedestrian traffic, with a collection of street-front cafes and the same assortment of retail outlets that seem to be uniformly present in every European city now. I did a turn around the neighborhood and then figured I'd take a walk along the waterfront. The guidebook I had picked up noted that the walkway along the river Tagus was torn up for refurbishing with no end in sight, but I figured that since the book was a couple years old, this was probably all fixed by now. This was not the case, and picking my way around leftover (and apparently long unused) construction equipment was not charming for long, so I took a turn inland. I knew that on the top of the nearest hill was an old castle overlooking the city, so I headed up that way through a maze of alleys too narrow for most cars and staircases where it's too steep for driving at all. I didn't make it all the way to the castle, instead losing myself in a part of the city that has survived earthquake, fire, and a host of other disasters to be one of the few neighborhoods that dates back to Moorish times. I happened on one of the old cathedrals, solid as a fortress set half way up the hill to the castle.

The sun was starting to come down by that time, so I headed back to the Baixa. There was a sandwich shop open just outside the hotel Duas Nacoes where I had checked in - traveling on my own, I could just as well do without eating, except that of course that doesn't exactly work. So I was glad to find a place where I could get something quick and cheap and move on. Afterwards I wandered up to the Placa Figueira at the north end of the Baixa, where thumping hip-hop music accompanied an exhibition of rollerblading and trick bicycling, with a gaggle of young men turning impressive flips and jumps over a series of wooden structures. About half of them had tell-tale braces on one or more limb, some even still in a cast indicating some kind of recent visit to the hospital to fix one broken bone or another.

I watched for some time - alternating between the skating and keeping on eye on the inevitable two or three men scoping the crowd for loose cameras and wallets - something I remember very well from Barcelona. After the sun went down I took one more circuit around the Baixa and headed back to the hotel to turn in.