Lisbon and Sintra

We arrived in Lisbon late in the evening, and wandered along the white cobblestone streets of the "Baixo" region. Lisbon has several tiers, and the Baixo region is the lowest. It is also the historic/social/shopping area.

Our hostel in Lisbon was one of the two highest-rated hostels in Europe, and it still surpassed our expectations. Pedro (or Paulo?), the hostel's chef, made us delicious dinners each night. As I recall, one of the best was a Portuguese lasagna.

I had been waiting our entire trip to use my Portuguese. Unfortunately, Portugal's portuguese is dramatically different. I would actually say it is similar to the difference between American English and Welsh. That may be a stretch, but I struggled to understand people throughout our time in Portugal. I really knew things were bad when, after several attempts to communicate, people would just start speaking English with me. I actually started to worry that I had forgotten everything until I met a couple of Brazilian travelers. We had a two-hour talk about everything from civil engineering in Curitiba to religion, to the similarities between Lisbon and the cultural city of Salvador in Northeast Brazil.

After we had settled in on our first night, we decided to hit up the Lisbon night scene. We had heard that Lisbon was the place to hit up a club or two. Now, Jenny and I aren't your everyday club-hoppers, so we really didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. We were told that the Rua Nova do Carvalho was the center of the club scene, so we walked to that street from our hostel. We passed a few seedy looking places, and settled on the MusicBox - a harmless looking club. It turned out to be a little too harmless. The entertainment that evening was a German comedian talking (in German) about an invisible, Marxist kangaroo with whom the comedian roomed. His spiel was translated into portuguese onto a screen for the majority of the crowd to enjoy. Had Jenny and I not paid a 20 Euro cover charge to get in, we would have left immediately. To put it another way: you could not have paid me to listen to the guy in English. However, we stayed to listen to a band that played a forgettable, listless, brand of jazz. Fortunately, on another night, we were able to find some traditional, Portuguese Fado music, emanating from a bar in a residential neighborhood. Fado is very dramatic, shouty folk music, and our "cantor" was a mildly obese man with a glistening forehead and a thick, black mustache.

During the 3+ weeks prior to our arrival in Lisbon, we saw plenty of churches and museums, so we decided to take it easy. On our first day, we caught a bus to the Portuguese country town of Sintra, where the Portuguese royal family built their summer palace - Palacio de Pena (?). The best part of traveling broadly throughout Europe in one trip is that you can start to make connections with various parts of history. It turns out that King Ludwig of Bavaria (now a southern state in Germany) - the same King Ludwig who built Neuschwanstein, the "Disneyland" castle - had a nephew who married into the Portuguese royal family. This same nephew, Ferdinand, designed the royal palace in Portugal, which bears a striking resemblance to Neuschwanstein.

The connections don't stop there however. Ferdinand was also the 1st cousin to Leopold II, King of Belgium in the late 1800s. It was this King Leopold who colonized the Congo. The book "Heart of Darkness" was written about this colonization, and Jenny and I visited the Belgium Museum of the Congo while we were in Brussels. King Leopold was responsible for the deaths of millions (some say 10 million) of Congolese during the hunt for ivory. The museum is amazing, and, among other things, is home to the largest collection of sub-saharan butterflies in the world.

Back to the connections:

Ferdinand (a Saxon, from the lower part of what is now Germany) married Maria, the daughter of Pedro IV, King of Portugal. Pedro was driven out of Portugal by Napolean (whose stuff we saw in Paris), and he eventually settled in Brazil, establishing Rio de Janeiro as the first capital of his empire (He renamed himself Pedro I, because he was the "first Emperor of Brazil"). I had read all about this period of Brazilian history during my mission, so this was particularly interesting to me. Pedro's wife hated Brazil (malaria and other discomforts were more prevalent then), and went back to Portugal with her daughter, Maria, who eventually became Queen. This Maria married Ferdinand, and we are back where we started. Ferdinand was well regarded among the Portuguese for his emphasis on cultivation of the arts. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting how this one palace, that I had never really thought about, connected so many places and pieces of history that we had seen/read about/etc.

On the same range/hillside as the Palacio de Pena is the Castle of the Moors. This fortification was built by the Moors during the 10-11th century, and reminds me of a cross between the Great Wall of China and the game "King of the Mountain." The castle sits on top of a small peak and overlooks the Portuguese countryside. I imagined Moors pouring oil on Christian invaders, and had other politically-incorrect mental images of the area's history.

Jenny and I caught the (wrong?) bus from Sintra to the beach town of Cascais. The hour journey, over hill and Portuguese dale, took us past the Eastern-most point of Europe -- the edge of the world pre-Columbus. This made me think of my time as a missionary, just several blocks away from the Western-most point of the Americas. How long would the drive be between the two points?

In Cascais, we were simply relieved to be off the bus. Portugal is the least developed country in western Europe, and the roads are windy and bumpy. We walked down to a small beach which had very little open real estate in the mid-afternoon. While clothing on Iberian beaches is notoriously scant, the only buttock we saw was that of an adorably overweight 5-year-old girl, whose pink bottoms refused to stay up as she ran to and from the water, fetching wet sand in her equally pink bucket.

The next day, we walked along the Tagus river that separates the two sides of Lisbon. We stopped at Lisbon's newest acclaimed attraction -- The Oriental Museum -- which houses a collection of the artifacts that Portuguese colonizers brought back from their travels to the orient: Blue and white porcelain vases; Indonesion costumes and paintings; hundreds of glass and porcelain snuff boxes; and a set of Samurai (?) armor. The museum was actually a surprising highlight of the trip, and a reminder that, at one point, Portugal was the center of the world. I think of Portuguese explorers as hybrids of astronauts, businessmen, and diplomats. They had to be daring to go to absolutely foreign places, and adept at managing cultural relationships and trade once they arrived. I'm sure that power was often abused, but it's still fun to think about the wildly adventurous lives these people must have led. I lament that I will probably never have a similar experience or cultural shock that they had. We live in a time where you can eat a Big Mac in Tajikstan, buy a Gap shirt in China, and watch Gladiator in Uruguay. Even African tribes set themselves up as tourist attractions. Where is the last untouched culture? According to that logic, is it even right to go see that culture and possibly contaminate it?

From the Oriental Museum, Jenny and I sauntered along the river, passed the bridge which spans the water. The bridge was built by the same company that built the Golden Gate Bridge, and is virtually a twin. On the other side of the body of water is a replica of Rio's Christ the Redeemer statue. I couldn't help but take a photo of several of the gentleman fishing alongside the water. They epitomized the relaxed culture that Brazil and Portugal share.

Further along the water, we came to the neighborhood of Belem (Bethlehem). There are several monuments and buildings in Belem, but the only one open on Monday was the Monument of Discoveries, which depicts the painters, priests, cartographers, writers, and sailors who influenced the discovery missions from Portugal during the Age of Discovery. Important figures on the statue include Ferdinand Magellan (first person to circumnavigate the globe) and Vasco Da Gama (first to find a sea route to India).

The main reason why we decided to make the walk out to Belem, was to try the pastries at Pasteis de Belem - the most famous pastry shop in Lisbon. "Pasteis," which are a distinctly Portuguese thing, are the most incredible finger food I've ever had. I'm not exaggerating. Here's how it works:

Pastry dough is folded many times to get a light, crispy, croissant-like (but thicker, more substantive) bowl-shaped pastry. The pastry is then filled with custard and baked until the custard is golden brown on top. The pastry is then dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon. We shared a half-dozen.