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.
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.
posted by skylanda at 2:47 PM
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