The thoughts & opinions of Sassarella, the Queen of Sass as she cavorts in 's Gravenhage & beyond. Brought to you by CES's (Chief Executive Slaves) of Big Skanky Ho Inc.
We arrived in Lisbon around 11pm on the Friday... so our first impression of the city was that it was pretty damn dark.
Still, we didn't have very much time, so after dropping our stuff off at the hotel, we went for a walk. The city centre, according to our hotel's handy-dandy information guide was a 20-minute walk away. So we wandered over to a nearby park which had an excellent view of the city, and realised that what the booklet actually meant by 20-minute walk was a sheer drop straight down. You can actually walk this... it's a bit steep, but manageable. Us, being the lazy sods that we were, hopped on the funicular and rode down in comfort.
We wandered around the lower part of the city (Baixa) for a little while, and eventually ended up in the Praça do Comércio, a huge square you reach through a giant arch. The square is basically right on the waterfront, and is centred around a statue of a guy on a great big horse.
Baixa has a lot of squares like this, though none quite so large and impressive.
At this point, my travelling buddy decided she was hungry and we spent a fruitless hour searching for food. We were probably just in the wrong part of town as we managed to find nothing except for a bar where a drunk guy tried to talk to us in English. He may have been impaired by the fact that he probably had no idea what we looked like as his eyes were buried somewhere in Joanne's cleavage.
We got out of their fast, and headed back up the funicular to our hotel. Luckily, there was a convenience store nearby.
The next morning we woke up late, and decided to spend the day shopping. I have to say, we didn't do so good... we ended up in both Zara and H&M, both of which are stores that can be found in any European city, including the Hague. We gave up on the shopping eventually and headed up to the great big castle that overlooks the city, the Castelo de Sao Jorge.
The castle is a central part of Portuguese history, being the site of the original Moorish castle that was reconquered by the Portuguese in the Middle Ages. It's also the site of a yearly beer festival, which, lucky us, we were right on time for. They had massive barbeques going on there and the smell was more than I could handle. I cracked and ended up eating some serious shish kebabs. Yummy. We ended up sort of lost on the way there and sort of lost on the way back, which turned out to be a good thing because we kind of stumbled on Lisbon's massive cathedral, the Se. The Se is not only really huge and scary, but it also has an archeological dig in its courtyard where you can see ruins going back to the Roman era, and encompassing everything in between. There was a Roman road under a moorish shop under a... well, you get the idea. Pretty neat.
That evening, we went to an awesome tapas bar in the club district and then ended up wandering the bars. Lisbon has an odd little club district where a lot of the bars are also stores. I bought myself a t-shirt that I thought was on sale, only to discover that it wasn't. The owner/barman of the store offered me and my friend a free glass of porto to make us feel better... so I basically had my first taste of porto... which I have to admit, doesn't really go down easy. Still, it was free and it wasn't completely awful, so I was okay.
We eventually ended up in a fado bar, trying to choke down several litres of sangria, while listening to really depressing music. I have to say, maybe it was bad fado, but fado is really not my thing. By the end of the night I was drunk and kind of depressed.
The next day, we went to the ruin of a convent (whose name sadly escapes me right now), which is also an archeological museum, holding bits and pieces of other ruins. This building has no roof, so this is basically open air, and it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I took tons of pictures, especially of their resident cat, who had gotten seriously fat on the amazing amount of mice in the area.
We hopped a tour bus that took us to the more out of the way places in Lisbon, most notably the Tower of Belem and the Mosteiro do San Jeronimo. The Tower of Belem is an old fortification, about 15 metres from the beach. You get there on a catwalk. The Tower of Belem was built in the 15th century, and also has all sorts of historical significance. It also had a lot of stairs, and, for some inexplicable reason, a dog show on the grass across from it. So what did I get out of that trip? An amazing view of the Tagus and some dressage. Hey, whatever floats your boat, I say.
The Mosteiro is also amazing, a massive Manueline complex (did that sound like i know what i'm talking about? Suckers.) with a cloister and a massive cathedral and all sorts of fun wings and attachments. If it had been at night, it might have looked a little bit like how I imagined Gormenghast.
I think that basically the Mosteiro was our lowest point in Lisbon, the place where we taught children that it's okay to steal. In the middle of the courtyard of the Mosteiro, we discovered a small fountain that people had thrown coins into. Now, half the people we work with collect the different euro coins, so we basically had to bring five full sets of Portuguese coins back to Nederland. We discovered that they really don't use the 1 and 2 eurocents much, so you really have to go looking for these things. This being a flying trip, we really didn't have time. So, as you've probably guessed by now, we ended up up to our elbows in this fountain picking out eurocents.
Predictably, some kids saw us, and figured that if we were doing it that they should too. Stupidly, I'd thrown in a two euro coin to make up for what we took and not surprisingly, this is the first thing the kids went for. What could I say? I was doing the exact same thing that they were doing and I was pretty sure that my explanation was going to sound pretty thin. Anyway, we eventually ended up with enough and left, but not before throwing in some more Dutch coins, which I'm pretty sure went the same way as my 2 euro coin.
Nice. Dragging people off the straight and narrow is apparently my fate in life.
That night, we went back to the Castelo to check out the end of the beer festival. I had even more of the scary barbecue, this time opting for some kind of really chunky sausage which made me unbelievably ill on the way home. I didn't try any of the local beer... I don't really like beer and I have the feeling that the Portuguese version wasn't going to be any better than the Dutch, German, Austrian, Danish and whatever other versions I've tried. If nothing else, in Europe I've learned that I really don't like beer.
We had to wake up 3am to get to the airport on time, so the end of our trip pretty much consisted of the two of us, sitting in an airport and not talking because it was too damn early for conversation.
