My Midspring's Lisboa Dream
A week since arriving back at school and I haven’t quite managed to place my finger on the coordinates I’ve input, somewhere, for Lisbon in my brain. At face, it was a welcome escape from my email and text messages (no data and international roaming, no problem). I didn’t realize how often I went to bed stressed and already burdened by the tasks of the next day until Lisbon took all of those responsibilities and threw them into the Tagus River.
We decided to go because the flights were relatively cheap and Phil Rosenthal, our most trusted travel documentary host, told us to. Most of all though, I think we were looking for what we thought would be an a-typical spring break adventure. Nothing tropical, please, we want 60 degrees and rainy with lots of grafiti and street art.
Culture shock usually precedes eventual appreciation and even adoption for me. Food portions, lingering at your table for an hour after the meal, strange electrical outlets, people you can barely communicate with, and tiny toilets – God forbid. But this past week, back in Ithaca, I was eating a meal at a restaurant and before I’d even scraped the plate clean of my portion which was far more than I needed, the check was sitting on the table. I was startled. No lingering? No lingering.
Lisbon is an incredible marriage of the best parts of the world’s most celebrated cities – Phil tipped me off to this so I kind of knew what to expect. Café lined streets like Paris, piazzas like those in Florence, a street trolley, and winding, steep streets like San Francisco. But when you take a historical step back to realize that Lisbon preceded all of these metropolises by a solid portion you start to surmise that perhaps all of these great cities took their cues from Lisbon to begin with. You can feel the weight of the city’s history, especially when walking through the Alfama district, the oldest portion and a part of the former walled city, or when peering down to the city below while exploring the turrets of the 10th century castle of Saint George. On too many occasions I thought to myself, this is the authentic “old world” so many emigrated from (and now many are immigrating to) and that is portrayed in story books. The first grader in me would have assumed that in such a place it would be possible for Strega Nona or some over-burdened princess to walk down the street to greet me.
And the streets! Paved with limestone mosaic to create the most beautiful patterns. Everywhere you wander, art is under foot. Again, to cite a question posed by my friend Phil: what does it say about a place when even what’s under foot is beautiful?
Lisbon came like a dream. It whisked me away from the seasonal depression of my complicated relationship with Ithaca and gave me, instead, a maze of beautifully tiled streets to explore and get lost in.
Over the next few days, I’ll be writing in more depth about some of my favorite Portuguese adventures and eats. There was just too much to confine to this one post and I want to do each experience justice. Come back and stay awhile.
