Lisbon
On the sidewalk in San Francisco just before I left, a friend made a quick introduction, and I took Isabel's phone number. She was visiting from Lisbon, and would be back at the same time I was there. She ended up spending a couple of days with Kathryn and I and was fantastic company and a great guide. We are glad to have a new friend in Portugal!
The following are five photos I took in the Alfama, near Elinor's house, and they're quite typical of the entire neighborhood:
I managed to take very few photos of any of the tourist sights, but this tiled house must be on the list:
Some of Lisbon's best nightlife is in the Bara Alta:
Kathryn and Elinor at the dinner table:
Elinor at one of the hip bars:
Elinor's Door
As we arrived in Lisbon by hired car, a friendly taxi driver showed us how to get to the Alfama district. He had us follow him!
The Alfama is the most beautiful district of Lisbon, a working class neighboorhood where families have had the same apartments for generations. People live on the stone walkways and roads, as well as on their balconies. There are always people just hanging around on the street talking, kids playing, dogs and cats to be petted. Their is always laundry hanging in front of the balconies. It all feels very little changed from a hundred years ago, or 500 years ago. Yes, there are cars and electricity and the like, but none of it seems to really have changed the look of the buildings or the way that people live their lives.
Anyway, once we met Elinor who showed us a place to park, we had to carry our lugguge up 170 stairs from the riverside street to the plaza in front of her house. Once in her front door, it was another 53 very steep and narrow marble stairs to her top-floor apartment. The streets near her house are closed to cars which don't have a special permit, and the little barriers in the road sink away for those cars and then pop back up to enforce the policy.
At the elevator in Lisbon, we found a postcard which shows Elinor's house, and in this photo similar to that postcard, Kathryn is standing in front of Elinor's door.
Here's the plaza in front of Elinor's door at night:
Elinor's apartment is truly amazing. It has fantastic views out each window, and each is different. It's huge by the standards of the European hotels we'd stayed in, and really is large even by comparison to San Francisco apartments. Here is a picture from her living room window...
Elinor was called to work at 1am on Saturday morning as we returned from dinner and drinks, just hours before her flight to San Francisco for a three week holiday. I've been with her before when she was called away to report on an Internet worm and had to go in to the local office to file a story. From Lisbon, she was reporting on something
equally interesting.
Salamanca
En route to Portugal, we decided (again, following Steves' advice) to stay a night in Salamanca.
Though filled with tourists, it felt like a uniquely Spanish old town. With a university established in 1200 and a "new" cathederal built in the 1600's as an addition to the old one, Salamanca certainly has history.
The Plaza Mayor, or central plaza is called by some the living room of the Salamancans. They live out their lives here, and just having a drink on the Plaza and people watching is quite entertaining.
The new cathederal has some pretty amazing "easter bunnies" in it's carvings, including a demon eating ice cream and an astronaut!
The Garden of Earthly Delights
We've found Rick Steves' Guide to Spain and Portugal to be excellent at recommending the best highlights to hit and a fantastic help in deciding between destinations. (Steves' has a show on PBS and several other guides for Europe.) In Madrid, there are two key things he recommends: the Prado Museum and the Palace Real. I picked the Prado to do something "touristy" in Madrid before we left.
I had no idea what a treat I was in for. Though there are many other things in this museum that are quite worth seeing, there is one in particular that I was surprised and thrilled to see, that I would have gone quite a ways out of my way to see...
Prado museum's page on The Garden of Earthly Delights
Can you give us some picks?
After all the craziness that came with changing everything in my life on very short notice to travel the world for a year, there was an enormous amount to do, and things that were left undone.
When I arrived in Madrid, I expected to spend a little time unwinding, I guess having a vacation before I started traveling. I knew, however, that I needed to get one of the final shots in my series of vacinations and that it was actually due the day I left San Francisco, so we needed to find a clinic to provide it. (Kathryn actually needed another shot for hers as well.)
I thought this would be the simplest thing in the world. I had no idea that it might take three days and provide adventures all over the city.
Some highlights:
-The hotel staff directed us to a hospital where the front desk guy was reading a Spanish Playstation magazine. He spoke no English. (Actually, no one in Spain seems to speak English. We found out later that all their movies are dubbed, whereas Portugal's are subtitled, so it is much easier to find someone in Portugal who speaks English.) Anyway, he eventually pointed to Kathryn and I, and waved his hand over his belly, pantomiming "pregnant." We shook our heads, then looked around more closely and realized that we were in a maternity hospital.
-We found another hospital where we eventually conveyed what we needed. A kind nurse (or some kind of employee), walked us to another wing of the hospital and spoke with someone there to hand us off. The new person took us to admissions where they wouldn't talk to us but gave us the address of a clinic. That clinic told us we were at the wrong place, and we gave up on that route.
-On Thursday, our friend John (go to Malaga, Spain, to the city square, and ask for John the Australian -- they'll find him for you) served as an interpretter while we went to other clinics. One told us that there was no doctor until Monday. We asked if we might get a referal to another doctor and were told that there were no other doctors who could do it before Monday. In all of Madrid. A city of 4 million people.
-After the fifth or sixth Farmacia that we went to, finally a pharmacist gave us the vaccines we needed. Now we just needed needles and syringes and we'd be set. I asked John to see if the pharmacist would give those to us, and he said there was no way, but maybe he could go find a needle exchange and ask if they could give us some picks.
-We went to other clinics and asked elsewhere, and couldn't find anyone to just give us the damn shots now that we had the vaccines with us. Someone finally had the sense to look in the packages we'd been given only to find that they included miniature syringes and needles along with the vaccine.
So we went back to the hotel room and gave each other injections.
The Whirlwind
It all started at the door to a private party, and I've been caught in a whirlwind a bit more than a month now.
It seems that the whirlwind is meant to take me away from San Francisco in less than 48 hours, and to carry me around the world in a 35,000 mile circle on a year long trip...
