San Francisco, Portugal (2)

Our whirlwind trip to Lisbon: Part Two 

Lucky for us, Portugal and Spain had a daylight savings event that weekend, and we scored an extra hour. Rebecca and I devoured more fantastic hostel breakfast, checked out, and headed out again fairly early, to pack in as much Lisbon time as we could before our bus ride home that evening. 

Our first stop was the now-infamous tram. Since we never got to catch it the day before from the basilica, we decided to go the other way: catch the tram from the hostel to the basilica. It was as crazy as it looked. These trolleys are little wooden things, painted a bright canary yellow, and boy, do they rocket around. The ride is a thrilling one: particularly jerky, usually jam-packed, and doing a lot of rattling, the trolley is already an adrenaline rush before you look out the window and see how fast you’re going. I’d estimate these rickety things get up to a good 25 or 30 miles per hour, flying up and down the narrow cobblestone streets, cresting hills and thundering around corners like there’s no tomorrow. 

We managed to arrive in one piece however at the basilica, where all was high and dry once more. From here, we had hoped to jump back on our tour bus, but the first one to arrive was so full the driver didn’t let us board. That worked well. So we took a local bus instead. We were heading for Belem, a section to the east in Lisbon that was dedicated to the ocean and old-time maritime Lisbon. Along the way though is Lisbon’s enormous, famous red bridge, called the 25th of April or something but more commonly known as the Golden Gate. We jumped off the bus underneath to check it out. 

The streets out here were quieter, definitely residential. Strolling along the road, looking for a smaller road to take us to the water’s edge, we came across a little old man in a beige fedora walking a fluffy white dog. Clearly, we were walking around with neon signs that blared “TOURISTS”, because the guy took one look at us and started pointing around and talking in what we think was Portuguese (at any rate, something unintelligible to us). It took us a moment to decipher the signals: he pointed towards the bridge, pointed up some stairs off to the right, and then made a very italian kissing-the-fingers gesture to indicate “lovely!”. 

We took the hint and climbed the stairs. Everything was very quiet; Sunday morning I suppose. We hiked up the stairs and found a deserted church at the top, padlocked shut; but even cooler was the view of the bridge from its terrace. The old man wasn’t kidding. We took a bunch of pictures there and marveled, as well as laughed at the uncanny resemblance between this and San Francisco’s golden gate. 

When we had had our fill, we headed back down the stairs and started walking on the main street again. Two blocks later, just when we are about to turn left to go towards the water, the old man with his fedora and dog turns a corner and spots us. “No, no!” he called, pointing straight ahead and making the “lovely!” gesture again. We nodded and laughed. Well, he’d been right once. 

After going straight for a few more blocks, we see another opening towards the water’s edge, and turn left there. The old man knew his stuff: as it turned out, there were railway tracks between the houses and the bay, and this street led us straight to a pedestrian overpass - from the top of which was another fantastic view of the bridge. Several more pictures later, we made our way down to the water and hang a right, walking through the broad park along the shore towards Belem. We watched, admittedly wistfully on my part, a whole bunch of small sailboats crisscross across the bay beneath the bridge as we walked. 

Belem itself was pretty cool too. We passed bunches of sailboats packed together in a couple marinas, the names of which amused us for a while (my favorite was "Speedy Nice"). Belem's biggest monument is an homage to the oceanic discovery ages and Portugal’s legacy on the high seas. The Tower of Belem was also neat; it was apparently strategically matched by a twin across the bay, between which any enemy ship would get destroyed in a crossfire before it could pillage and plunder Ye Olde Lisbon. Rebecca and I had some fun exploring the two structures, dutifully taking reels and reels of pictures. 

We hopped on the tour bus from Belem and hitched a ride back into Lisbon proper for some lunch. What should have been a quick look around for a restaurant turned into a bit of an adventurous wander as we got thoroughly lost in the labyrinth of Lisbon’s real residential neighborhoods. Laundry dangled from balconies over narrow cobblestone alleyways, casting light shadows on the pastel-colored buildings walling us in. Once we came across a group of kids kicking a soccer ball around in a slightly more open space. As this was hilly Lisbon, we were up and down stairs a lot, and occasionally we’d catch a glimpse of the bay or some big church tower and try to orient ourselves. Some of the windows and balconies had bird cages in or on them, where a rainbow assortment of songbirds trilled non-stop. For the most part the streets were devoid of people, but we came across one guy smoking a cigarette outside his back door once. He smiled when he saw us. “Hello!” He proceeded to teach us “good morning,” “good afternoon,” and “good night” in Portuguese, completely without prompting. We got a laugh out of his eagerness, but were too hungry to stay long. 

Eventually we resurfaced nearby Lisbon’s Pantheon. The name confuses me; it’s an enormous building, beautifully constructed, but devoted to the Christian faith. We stopped by for a quick second before abandoning our explorative search for a restaurant and heading home. Lunch, we decided, would be homemade again. The Pantheon was right by a tram stop for our trolley line, so we went for a second ludicrous ride in a hurtling yellow tram. We were squashed in right behind the driver this time, which was a pretty fun experience. He’s got this swiveling lever that he wrenches around periodically, which to me seemed to have no other effect than to send us all lurching to one side or the other.  

Our little supermarket served us well: baguettes, a different kind of cheese, ham, tomato, and mango on the side pretty much sums up lunch. Several sticky fingers later, Rebecca and I decided some ice cream was in order for our final afternoon ramble through the local downtown Lisbon area. We were really impressed by the general variety and skill of the local street performers, actually. One guy, who we’d seen in all parts of downtown Lisbon at various moments, would make enormous bubbles from a loop of string drooping from two sticks. We also saw one guy really going at it on a cello. We really enjoyed that, but then realized that it was more the instrument we thought was awesome than the performer. A woman dressed in a victorian white dress, with a white painted face and a sun umbrella, became a living statue, but turned the process of setting up into its own kind of performance, deliberately pulling on her elbow gloves, arranging her skirt, and delicately opening her umbrella, before freezing in place. Two other guys we saw were apparently floating in midair, although both were holding some kind of cane or walking stick that did touch the ground. Rebecca and I stopped for a while in front of them, trying to figure out the ruse. I’m going with metal stand hidden down the clothes. 

Unfortunately, the hour approached for our return bus trip home. After fighting several evil portuguese machines that ate various coins of mine, we managed to make it to the bus terminal with ten minutes to spare. As we climbed onto our bus, one girl tapped us on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” she said in accented English, “but did you take the bus from Seville on Friday?” She was on that same bus with us, and recognized us on this one we were about to take together again. We briefly compared our experiences and laughed about the coincidence. 

All in all, our trip to Lisbon was absolutely fantastic. We ate lots of cheese, kept having to stop ourselves from automatically speaking Spanish with the locals, and really enjoyed the surprisingly clean public bathrooms (ironic, considering they all smoke a ton). Although we may not have been so keen when our bus pulled into a sleepy Seville at 5am the following morning, Rebecca and I loved every second and would do it again in a heartbeat.


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