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.