Mon 18.Apr.11
Lisbon, Portugal
A whiz of airports... San Francisco, Chicago, Dublin, and finally... ta da, Lisbon.
Sleep round the clock, then stagger out to have a look around.
A cheap room in the heart of town. Outside is the Praça da Figueira,
just off the main square Rossio.
Not business class, but clean, cheap, and friendly as the language situation
allows. A couple of the desk clerks can manage English, but not the one who
checked me in. The maids and such do Portuguese and whatever their native languages
may be.
Let's hear it for my Lonely Planet Portuguese phrasebook, and my memories of Spanish!
Very central, and with vacancies, unlike several others nearby. Did I mention cheap?
Lively place, the Praça da Figueira. Cabs, busses, trams,
pigeons, skateboarders... no lack of entertainment here.
That colorful car belongs to a driving school, not a cab company.
First Sightseeing
The ruin of a cathedral, destroyed by an erthquake in the seventeenth century.
The quake struck on a Sunday morning when the faithful were all inside,
resulting in a huge loss of life.
Honest-to-goodness Cable Cars
Three-railed track, the center rail has a slot, through which you can hear the
cable humming along underneath. Uncannily familiar to a San Franciscan.
There is an open-air elevator to take the sting out of climbing one of the seven
hills of downtown Lisbon. From the observation deck at the top, the shaft looks
like this. From here a catwalk leads through a cafe terrace to the ruined church.
If you have hung out in Mexico, this looks like "Drunk Woman House."
In Portuguese, borracha means "rubber" or "eraser".
This is the first of these posts produced mostly with a new script I've been working
on, using a text-processing language called awk. (Unix people will know about
awk.) The awk script makes it much easier to move the photos around and resize them.
Whether it makes things easier overall, we shall see.
One awkwardness (so to speak) is that awk tends to garble non-English characters, e.g.
the ç in praça. So I still need to hand-edit the page before posting it. Oh well.
Contents Copyright 2012 Jeff Bulf