And yet I'm drafting this as I sit in one of those tiny little restaurants with only 20 seats (enough to seat the entire WA Liberal Party, by the way), and one of the three other people eating here is from Melbourne.
This is the second time in recent days that I've been struck by how small the world is. The first was on Thursday, when I, an Australian, was served lunch on a United Arab Emirates plane by an Indonesian flight attendant, and that lunch included mango chutney from India, cheese from the UK, biscuits from Sri Lanka, and breadsticks made in Italy but distributed from New Jersey. And Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump think you can press reverse on globalisation? Three continents had to collaborate to make my lunch (not very well, I might add, but that's besides the point).
Anyway. I am in Lisbon. A long way from home. And I may have violated EU immigration law on the way in by lying to a border control agent, but it'll be fine. The woman checking my passport noted that I wasn't flying home until September and asked if I was aware of the 90 day limit for the Schengen visa (I was) and whether I was planning to stay in the Schengen zone for more than 90 days (I am).
Obviously those two answers, if put together truthfully, could have greatly complicated my path into Portugal, but I probably understood certain relevant provisions of EU visa laws better than she did and, well, a white lie was better than getting as many as five embassies involved. More on that at a later time.
As I'm travelling sans mobile data (I wanted that authentic 2007 travel experience. Also it would have cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars.), I had plotted my route to the hostel on Google Maps and screen capped it before leaving Dubai. I only had to walk about 400m from the train station to the hostel, which I figured I could manage even on three hours sleep.
Except precisely 276 of those 400m were going uphill, at an average gradient of 18%. I'd come out at the base of the Gloria funicular, a sort of mountain-climbing tram that the Portuguese are so proud of they named it a National Monument. Not proud enough to wash all the graffiti tags off the tram, but a National Monument none the less.
This thing cost €3.70 - about $5.70 - to ride. I was damned if I was going to fly -km and have the very first thing I do in Europe be paying that much to ride a tram, even if it can climb mountains. So I climbed, backpack, insulin bag and all. And stopped climbing to rest. And started climbing again.
And stopped. And started. And got the damn tram the next time.
At least at the top I was rewarded with a view:
After recovering at the hostel I went for a wander, with no plan other than to head downhill, and later find a bus back. A couple of minutes after leaving I saw a couple with cameras walking out of what looked like a fairly non-descript, plain stone building. If people with cameras were walking out, there was no reason a person with a camera shouldn't walk in, too.
It was a church. It looked like this:
I've since learned that Igreja de Sao Roque is, naturally, a major Lisbon landmark. But happening across it like that was an immensely satisfying way to start my journey across Europe. I'll never know for sure what is hiding behind a plain stone facade (though at some point it will be private premises, which is when I pretend to only speak Albanian and beat a hasty retreat).
Even evading my first attempted street scam didn't manage to dampen the mood too much. I'd found my way to a major town square near the water, where I was suddenly and persistently pursued by a man dressed as a Minion (three days later I was there again, and this time he was Pikachu). This man wanted to shake my hand. Too much. He pleaded to shake my hand, even insisting, in case I was scared, that he really was just a human inside a Minion costume. And if that weren't enough when I'd refused loudly enough another fellow appeared out of nowhere and said he "can really recommend" shaking hands with The Minion.
A couple of minutes later I perched beside a statue and watched this pair in action. The Minion asked a female tourist for a hug (where was my hug?). The Minion's hand slid to her side, and when she left his confederate came over and appeared to low-five The Minion's hand. I'd seen enough and raced across to the woman to check that she still had her wallet. It was in her bag; she wasn't going to be outsmarted by a Minion either.
We're now approximately three hours into a four and a half day stay in Lisbon, so I'm going to have to speed this along. Day 2 was spent in Belem, a suburb of Lisbon full of monuments and little museums. A very enjoyable day, though one without much in the way of stories to tell. The highlight was, without hesitation, Jeronimos Monastery. Here's why:
Day 3 was spent mostly at the Lisbon Zoo. It's a ramshackle, romantic throwback of a zoo that looks much like I imagine Taronga did 40 years ago. That's not a criticism: people often falsely equate 'old' with 'bad' and 'new' with 'good' in zoos, when it's much more complicated than that. New zoo exhibits too often emphasise aesthetics over usable, complex spaces for the animals. An old style 'cage' is excellent for primates, for example, because the wire becomes one big climbing frame. One thing that a cage should do, though, is keep animals in. This isn't supposed to happen:
Day 5 was a day trip to Sintra, a village on the outskirts of Lisbon with no fewer than five palaces, a monastery, the ruins of a Moorish castle and so on. Of course it's over-run with tourists, and that's fine. I'm a tourist, and sometimes things are heavily-toured because they are worth touring.
Sintra is definitely worth touring, but it's a frustrating day out. Having gotten off the train in 15 degree weather and seen the castle at the top of the mountain overhead, I recognised that the light jumper I'd bought the previous day wasn't going to cut it. So for €22 I bought another jumper from a tourist shop... which of course has a tram on it. So I'm now a bearded vegetarian lefty Melburnian abroad with an ironic hoodie, but I am NOT a hipster.
I bought tickets for two palaces - the Palace of Sintra and Pena, both of which were homes to various Portuguese monarchs - and the Moorish castle, of which only the battlements remain. I spent about an hour at each site, which was matched by the hour or so I spent waiting buses between each site. This was a cold weekday in the off-season; how they cope with demand during summer weekends is beyond me.
The Portuguese royal family knew what they were about. The Palace of Sintra has a room called the 'Swan Room', where the roof is decorated with painted swans. It was unfortunately followed immediately afterwards by the 'Magpie Room' which obviously had magpies. But the Swan Room is both twice the size *and* much nicer than the Magpie Room. Just as well.
Random observations:
- If you have a relative who is impossible to buy for, Lisbon has you covered. There's a shop on the corner of the busiest city square that sells sardine cans with your year of birth on them. Because why not?
- Beer. You can buy it here. You can buy it there. You can buy it on a chair, on a stair, or to share, if you care. You can buy it everywhere. Cafes sell beer. Train station kiosks sell beer. A little corner shop might have a tap serving Super Bock beer. It's all over the place. And Lisbon has no problems with binge drinking that I could see, and they certainly don't have any lockout laws. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a man from Munich at my hostel in Tokyo. He divulged that during Oktoberfest they try to channel all the Australians towards a single beer hall, which the locals then avoid. The Aussies are the ones with the greatest reputation for not being able to hold their alcohol. Perhaps we are our own problem.
- I was offered marijuana in the street seven times in five days. This city must be as high as a kite.
- In addition to Portuguese people I met and talked to people from Italy, Poland, the US, Spain, France, Germany, the UK, Sweden, China, New Zealand and Australia, including a young guy on the train with me to Madrid from Essendon. The world is, indeed, a very small place.
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