A multi-pronged Aug-Sep 2018 trip to Boston to visit Allie, then to Lisbon via Dublin to spend time in Portugal with Laurie, culminating in a return to Boston to meet Barb for a long weekend.
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Saturday, Sep. 1: Cascais – Belem
Laundry day. One thing our apartment lacked was a washing machine so if I was to last another week on the road, this was my day to scope out a local laundromat. There was one on the map not far away; it turned out to be tucked very nondescriptly in the basement of an apartment building along with a whole subculture of neighborhood shops including a bakery, hairdresser, nail salon and more. One just has to know where to look. There was no attendant and no other customers in the laundry but a touch screen panel with directions in several languages. After a couple of minutes my wash was underway with detergent already included in the machine, very civilized.
There was an official list of “Good Self-Service Practices” posted in English and Portuguese on the wall. I especially liked Rules #5 and #6.
Rule #5: Be reasonable and always maintain calm and civility.
Rule #6: If anyone ever irritates you and takes you seriously, apply Rule # 5.
Words to live by. I also loved the clarifying Examples #1 and #2 provided. We understood there would be no math.
One other curious thing about the laundromat is that it looks like there are five washing machines, but in fact there are only three. Two of the slots are filled with full-size pictures of washing machines. “Watch this space”, I guess.
An hour later as my clothes were drying I was able to help a Portuguese lady get her quilt started in the one large washer. After establishing we couldn’t speak each others’ languages, we signaled our way through the process with hand gestures and smiles. I felt like a pro. Good thing I had read the Good Self-Service Practices rules.
The only thing I wasn’t a pro at was that I should have headed over to the bakery for some breakfast and fresh rolls. I poked in after I was done and it looked good. But when I got back to the apartment, Laurie was up and ready to make a nice spread of eggs, toast and tomato that was even better.
At about noon we caught the train to Lisbon to explore the neighborhood of Belem. This was the traditional port of Lisbon and base of operations for the explorers who sailed from the 15th century on. There are several museums clustered here, but our first stop was the shop that reputedly invented the pastel de nata or pasteis that is Lisbon’s signature food. The Pasteis de Belem cafe was founded in 1838 and is quite the full bore tourist attraction with a busy takeaway counter and seating in the back for more than 400. And it was full. We did find a table and each ordered a single pastel, and I decided to try the little sausage pastry I’d seen in a number of places. Both were decent, though honestly the pastel we had the first day at the cafe in front of the Lisbon Castelo was lighter and flakier, and the sausage turned out to be basically a little hot dog. This felt more like a tourist obligation than a real treat, but it sufficed for a light lunch as we headed into the afternoon. A nod here to this post from Traveller (an impressive Australian travel site) from whom I stole the photo — he seems to have better appreciated the place. And a nod to a later Washington Post article that hit some of the same spots we did searching for the best pasteis.
Virtually next door is the imposing Jeronimos Monastery which is an architectural gem in its own right, houses some exhibits of its own, and is next to the Archaeological Museum. We find a fairly long line to buy tickets and waited in it for more than 30 minutes, not being clever enough to use the time to poke in the adjoining church which houses tombs of Vasco de Gama and other notables. By the time we finished the rest of the monastery the church was closed, so missed seeing the tombs, though we did get a view of the interior from the upper chapel. The courtyard cloister of the monastery is very lovely, but in the whole place there were only two rooms of exhibits. One was the tomb of Portuguese notable, Alexandre Herculano, a 19th century writer neither of us knew about. We learned a little there, and a little subsequently but the exhibit seemed to ascribe greater impacts on Lisbon and Portuguese society than his English bios indicate.
The other exhibit was an room-sized timeline of the past 500 years placing the Monasterio in context of other events in Portugal and the world. This was an exhibit that was done in 2012 to commemorate The timeline was fascinating; Laurie and I spent nearly two hours walking through the entire display. A cross-cultural selection of world history events went across the top, developments in the monastery were in the middle, and key events in Portuguese history went in parallel below. Along the very bottom was a running indicator of the reign of Portuguese king or government leader. Since we knew very little about Portuguese history, the exhibit proved very useful, and the inclusive list of global events was fascinating. We didn’t really learn all that much about the monastery, but we had a great time in that exhibit. At the end of the exhibit was a panel with an interesting commentary on history and “facts” made even more relevant by recent Trumpian events (“Truth isn’t truth“).
Innumerable and infinite are the narratives of the world.
Any choice of facts on which a story may be told will always be incomplete and imperfect owing to inclusions or exclusions of events, peoples and works.On past events every conceivable fiction may be construed.
We have endeavoured to create a record with a leit motif comprising the 500 years’ existence of this important monastery and the physical alterations made to it over the course of time, conscious of the fact that they reflect the various uses to which it has been put, its inhabitants and the persons who have taken decisions in respect thereof.We have articulated this private history of the Jeronimos Monastery, Belem Tower and their surrounding areas with the history of Portugal and the world. It is our aim to indicate trails allowing all of our visitors to “navigate” through time, space and the history of mankind, enabling them, based on this specific selection of facts, to reconstruct an individual, subjective journey making everybody aware of the common legacy which has been passed down to us and to create an imperative need for a more fraternal and united future for each and every one of us.
And may we thus find our place in our own time.
This timeline exhibit resonated deeply with both of us and sparked more thinking about timelines, history and connections (see Timelines post).
Unfortunately, by the time we finished with the timeline it was nearly 6pm, the church had already closed and the Archaeological Museum was about to. We hustled over and had just a few minutes to poke in a couple of the rooms. Based on a very superficial glance, I don’t think we missed much. Laurie was looking for more early history of the Iberian people but the exhibits we saw did not offer much explanation and frankly the English translations were not very helpful.
We crossed the street to see the imposing modern Monument to the Discoveries, dedicated to Portuguese explorers. The monument is on the banks of the Tagus, an impressively grand river with lots of boating activity, large and small. The 25th of April bridge (originally the Salazar Bridge but renamed in 1974 to commemorate the Carnation Revolution) is lovely, very reminiscent of the Golden Gate bridge. The monument is impressive but not so lovely and there’s no ready explanation at the site (that we found) of the individual explorers. There might be one inside the monument, but we elected not to pay the fee or take the elevator to the top (and later found the listing in Wikipedia). The monument’s past is a little more sordid than we realized, being commissioned in 1940 under Salazar’s reign and originally located in town as a temporary exhibit to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Prince Henry the Navigator; the map of the world in front of the square was donated by the Republic of South Africa in 1960 (prime apartheid time…right wing dictators have few friends) when the monument was rebuilt in its present location. Serene in our ignorance, we snapped a few pictures and elected to go have a beer and bruschetta snack at one of the nearby modern restaurants. Laurie also indulged in a gelato. We are glad Portugal is a different place now, and we think so do the Portuguese.
Our day was coming to an end, and my only regret is that we didn’t go just a bit further downstream to see the Belem Tower. We’d seen it from the train and seen the long line waiting to get in. It dates from the early 1500’s and was the starting point for many of Portugal’s voyages of discovery. I don’t think there’s much to be seen inside it, but it is a true piece of history and I’m sorry we didn’t take a few more steps to see it up close.
As a postscript, other than the Jeronimos Monastery and the Archaeology Museum, we didn’t visit any Lisbon museums and honestly weren’t compelled to. Most of the lists of top museums in the area focus on art and design, which is fine, but I’d really like to get a better grasp of Portuguese history, particularly as it relates to its golden age of discovery. It turns out such a museum is a current topic of debate in Portugal. The current mayor of Lisbon ran on a pledge of starting a “Museum of the Discoveries” but others are resistant for fear it might gloss over the “crimes committed in the service of Portugal’s colonial project,” particularly slavery. There’s a related (if not the same) debate over a proposed monument reflecting the slave trade. I’d also like to get a better sense of Portugal’s 20th century history, especially the regime of Salazar (Estado Novo), relations (and contrasts) with Spain and Franco, Portugal’s role in WW II (here’s a book to check out), NATO and the EU, Colonial War and the Carnation Revolution. The past 100 years seem to be swept under the rug, to some extent, in current Lisbon with Salazar scrubbed from most public places. We had similar questions in Porto with regard to economic development in the 20th century, not to mention the city’s (and Portugal’s — the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance is the world’s longest) deep associations with England. Portugal, it seems, has a long and complicated history that it is still coming to grips with.
We take a short stroll back to the Belem train station and wait there a while, along with the world’s most kissingest couple (almost nonstop for 15 minutes, in a world of their own). I catch a glimpse from the train of a big orange ball of a sun setting over the bay of Cascais but it’s gone before I get a chance to take a photo…will have to remain a memory (but maybe I can steal someone else’s memory…this is close).
In Cascais we set out for Somos um Regalo, a restaurant reputed to offer the best chicken in the world. After a little wayward ramble we find it several blocks away from the city center. It’s a small, neighborhood place with a big screen TV tuned to football (Ronaldo in one of his first games at Juventus). We end up going with the waiter’s recommendation of two plates of chicken, one spicy, one not, and a tomato salad. It seems he’s done this before. Each plate is advertised as ½ chicken but when it comes out it turns out to be very small birds chopped into about six small pieces. It actually makes it easy to eat, and there’s not a problem for us to finish both plates. Also very good french fries, tasty salad and two small carafes of decent green wine. A fine meal, but the chicken is not the world’s best — not even as good as what we had at our first lunch in town — and the spicy chicken was hardly different than the non-spicy one. Still, the price was right with the whole meal coming to about Eu25, a price we’ve often paid for a single dish at other places.
Laurie wants to explore more of the backstreets of Cascais and suggests we walk up the hill to the apartment. We brave it and the stroll is not too bad. But it’s the only time we do the uphill walk. We get back to the apartment in time for me to see some US Open tennis. A Portuguese player, Joao Sousa, wins a third round match over Pouille of France in an upset. The feed is from Eurosports TV and has a voiceover announcer in Portuguese. I thought he might get excited a Portuguese player was doing well, but hardly seemed so. An interesting dynamic. Still, Go Portugal!! Meanwhile, Laurie delved into the first episode of Hinterland, the detective show set in Wales, that I’d recommended. She liked some aspects of it enough to grant it a second viewing. We’ll see if she gets hooked.
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