Uncle Pat's Window Seat

We started in Madrid, flew to Lisbon, trained to and from Coimbra and Porto, flew from Lisbon to Paris, and trained to Limoges, and now we’re on the way back to Paris. We are retired and tired of the daily tensions at home, so we’re taking an extended break, exploring the possibilities of a small Fortress of Solitude in a more slowly-paced land.   Before we met, we had each been abroad for extended periods.  I spent two years ashore in Rota, Spain with the Navy, followed by two more in Naples, Italy.  Both those military installations have subsided into the local architecture and economy.  Kathryn spent a semester in Paris on a cello scholarship, a season in the Puerto Rico Symphony, and a chamber music tour to Orvieto, Italy.   Traveling after children and career is a completely different thing if you are rolling without the constraints of an organized tour.  It’s especially trying if you are casting about for a new place to “tie up your c...

On the train between Limoges-Benedictins and Gare du Austerlitz in Paris . . . I’m sitting here making this note, and experiencing serious paperback-novel-envy for the fellow two rows behind us. I know he’s there . . . our seats face backward! (Gotcha!) Anyway, I finished my last English-language paperback before we left Covilhã, and I have been going quietly insane, reading all the real estate brochures in the shop windows, reading menus in bars and restaurants (many a ti me the same thing), translating street signs and highway maps. Yes; I -know- I can download a bazillion novels to my electronic body-extensions, but it’s just not the same. The slick plastic or aluminum of the device doesn’t have the china-paper cover feel that my fingers itch for or the tooth of the pulp-paper pages. Nor is there the comforting tank of bleached wood pulp for my nose. Let’s not even talk about the abuse my eyeballs endure as they interface and cycle with the refreshment rate of the screens phosph...

Spent eight hours pretty much afoot in greater metropolitan Lisbon today. Learning, learning, learning. First thing we did was head back to a local bookstore we discovered yesterday to buy a couple of English-language titles . . . didn't find fiction, but did find interesting stuff about Lisbon. I finished my last English-language fiction yesterday, and I'm climbing the metaphoric walls for diversion. (Manda Scott's -The Crystal Skull- is a collar-grabbing page-turner that takes a corkscrew twist at the end. It also pinpointed a site I have been trying to locate in England. That contributes to it's being a good read.) We had an early lunch . . . like 11:30. I like the way the confeitera wrapped Kathryn's leftover spinach quiche. Because it was raining like the proverbial cow on the proverbial rock, we kept walking to a Metro stop we hadn't seen before, and I got some new subway art. And in Praça do Carlos IV I snagged some more urban art. This town is so a...

Some of the architecture in Lisbon . . . 190419  photos to follow

Sculpture in the Metro station . . .  The art never stops. And "Campo Pequeno" in Portuguese does not have a tilde over the "n." 190419 video to follow  190424

Yesterday Kathryn and I followed a lady around Lisbon for a tour of all the "historic shops" and other truly fine and unique places mostly in the old part of town. The "historic shops" are like the "Century Farms" in Missouri that have been around a quite a while. Anyway, we stopped in a boutique tea and candy shop, and there I espied this really fine carousel horse . . . and the years fell away like a sycamore's leaves in October. I could hear the Pacific Ocean shushing the days on the sandy beach of Alameda, California, in the summer of my twenty-third year. There was a carousel on the town side of the road along the beach in those days. There were probably some more carnival attractions, but I don't remember those. The carousel was a permanent installation, though, and it stirred my soul. I fell in heart-lust with a yellow galloper that had a red harness and saddle like the one in the photo below. I must have driven my baby-blue Triumph...

My grandmother used to put all her Saturday Evening Posts in the cedar chest she kept in their bedroom in Canadian, up in the Texas Panhandle. When my brother and I would get shipped up there for part of the summer (the best part, actually), I would empty that cedar chest and stack those Posts up by month and week order all over that red-and-cream braided rag rug on the wood floor under the old swamp cooler in the window. That cooler was older than I was then. It's probably  gone by now; everything else I remember from then is. Anyway, once those magazines were aligned by the nine or ten months they'd been collecting, I'd thumb through them one at a time. First I'd read every single cartoon in an issue; when that task was accomplished, I'd read the first couple of paragraphs of each serial story that was started in a month. If it grabbed me by the eyeballs and yanked me in between the covers, I'd follow through to make sure I had all the story parts in a l...

Tell me why I -shouldn't- offer a Carnegie-credit summer course in Lisbon on applied arts based on paving patterns wall tile patterns wall-tile graphics architecture from Gothic to Bauhaus metal, ceramic, stone sculpture street performance urban architecture studies photographic composition pencil - ink drawing and sketching based on just walking the streets and riding the Metro. Employ local artists/artisans to host hands-on workshops in each of these artistic disciplines. Evaluation via portfolio. Tell me why I -shouldn't-.  If you can't, I'm gonna. If you can, I think I'm gonna anyway.

Here is a 3,200-euro rented car road trip. Yes; there a a bazillion places we "should see." These are the ones of particular interest this trip. 190424  Google maps link to follow

Walked down to the Avis rental office to check the price of just renting a car and driving to Calais on the English Channel. We've been doing pretty well using the train and public transportation. But with a car, we can swing by Covilã (the Portuguese end of the "Wool Route," through Roncesvalles (where Roland and Charlemagne's 10,000-man rear guard were destroyed), then visiting Kathryn's contacts with an earthship in Biras (in the Dordogne of Crichton's "Timeline," stopping  at Lascaux to view the cave drawings, then to Guédelon for the castle-in-construction site, Paris for the Van Gogh interactive exhibit and Notre Dame and Eiffel's Tower, Le Bec-Hellouin to visit a high-yield organic hand-worked farm, Azincourt (Henry V's "Agincourt") and Calais where Hitler was able to see the White Cliffs he was unable to breach.  But the cost to drive from Lisbon and leave the vehicle at Orly was 3,200 euros. I picked up a brochure i...

Stopped at a confeitaria near the Rossio train station in downtown Lisbon for lunch . . . actually bought a hamburger with homemade potato chips. It was rare ground meat with melted cheese and a tomato . . . and it tasted wonderfully different. Don't know why. Anyhow, they had American big band music vocals on the radio, and it was the kind of day where you just join in the singing because it's solid old gold, so I started singing along. The girl behind the counter gave m e a huge smile when she took my order, and I just kept singing. I sat at the bench, got out my book, and sat down to read. The walls were simply mirrored - easy to clean, I guess. Anyway I looked up and caught the eye of a maybe-twelve-year-old sweetie looking into the other wall's mirror. I gave her a big ole slow granddaddy wink with a smile. She matched that smile back to me, then looked down, still grinning. So'd I. Life sure is good.

Back walking the streets again . . . in Lisbon. Waiting for Wednesday for a private tour Kathryn has arranged. And I found all this wonderful art and community enrichment . . .  Life is good in Lisbon, y'all.

Surprised . . .  In Madrid, Kathryn and I stayed in a hotel set up in a multi-use building. It was on the third floor; it had no elevator. There was a bar on the ground floor and a restaurant on the first floor. There were literally half a dozen more bars, restaurants, and confeiteras on the street, on the corner, and around the block around the corner. The bus stop was in front of our door, and the metro stop was two corners over. In Lisbon, the first place we stayed was an apartment that had been converted from three bedrooms to one and turned into 21st Century elegant. It was extremely comfortable, and it had an elevator. It also had a modern kitchen and washing machine. There were places to eat seventy-five feet from the door either direction. There were shops and people in motion everywhere. Our second hotel in Lisbon was in the old commercial district. Like the Madrid hotel, it was the third floor of a multi-use building . . . shops on the first floor, private apartmen...

You need to be aware of how rich the Unites States is. I'm getting schooled here every day. This is one block over from one of the major routes in the city. We've looked online at house prices in urban Portugal, and they start off high, pretty much, and go higher. To get "reasonable" prices you need to go out away from the "big" cities. I haven't yet called on this house, but I've seen places not as bad as this for 110,000 euros. What you're buying here, really is the lot  with the foundations and, probably, outer walls. The thing about this place, though, the Traverso is a dead-end street . . . physically. Then, once you're in it mentally, I'm not sure how you'd ever get out. video (190414) will follow . . . 

Well, since FB is taking for-ever to load a video I shot earlier today, I've opened a second window to load stills . . .  Ceramic wall tiles are gloriously wonderful, the repetitive, and the individual installations. These four are from a building across from a yarn shop we found a couple of days ago. Blue is a traditional color for these tiles. They're even called "azulejos." Slur the "j" like a "zh." I don't think I'm even going to comment on any of these individually. I -am- going to say that the artist had to have laid out the entire set of tiles before painting. I think they're wonderful. They're on a not-very-inspiring street, not particularly called out in the tourist literature. And they're typical Portuguese exuberance. I love them. 190424  photos to follow

Every body has a favorite artist . . . one graphic street artist whose work is well rendered and instantly recognizable is in Porto. Samples of his work are below. These are the ones scattered around our neighborhood. 190424  photos to follow

I can't get FB to load my photos right now, so I'll share an experience I had without photos. Kathryn and I sallied forth on a three pronged mission this morning: find a laundry and wash clothes, eat breakfast, return the laundry to the hotel, and go locate a yarn store we found online. We accomplished two parts of the plan. Except the yarn store wasn't a storefront, it was a yarn broker's office-at-home address. Didn't work for us. Having returned to our new hotel . . . we had moved down the street, literally 178 meters, to an incredibly better-feeling hotel (15 rooms; in the family thirty-five years) . . . I went up the street and around the corner to reclaim our clothes. We had them washed and dried (not folded) for the same amount it would have cost to have done it ourselves at the self-serve laundry a block farther down across that street. I picked up our clothes and handed the man a twenty-euro note; his wife had to run to the shop next door to get ...

This video wouldn't load in the first try. So this is the second effort. 190424  video posting soon

Porto. Kathryn's in the hotel room sewing and writing, and I am unsupervised. "The possibilities are endless." It's not raining in Porto. It's still chilly, and it's windy, and I'm rolling down Rua de Antero de Quental with the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreaming" between my ears. Stopped at a fruit stand to buy a couple of pears for breakfast, and the lady shorted me fifteen centimes (dumb foreigner I guess), and I don't even care. It's a lovely day. I walked all the way past the train station to the first visitors' center we stopped at when we arrived, and I bought a ticket for a Duoro River tour of the six bridges that cross right here. In this immediate area, just up the river is the only place Port wine can be produced. It's like labeling champagne . . . it's a UNESCO world heritage designation. And the really cool thing is the neat little boats on the river is the way the barrels of wine got from the viney...

I saw this table in a wine-sampling store in Lisbon a couple of weeks ago. I'm finally getting around to posting the photos I love the muscularity of the two-inch thick plank with the structural steel uprights. 190424   photos to follow

One of my favorite snacks is grapes, red grapes or green. We found these grapes on todays three-plus mile quilt-fabric recon. They are the size of small plums. Crushing a whole grapes between your molars is like having a complete Concord grape jelly sandwich in there. You don't even miss the butter at all.  And then there is Cereal World. You can't make up stuff like this, y'all. This guy has a shop with a half dozen tables and cereals imported from the US and other European countries. It says on his two-sided menu that cow's milk is free and the default medium. You can also get soy milk, vanilla milk, etc. He kind of lost me after a while. He also has cereal on ice cream, in milkshakes . . . You can pile up as many as five different cereals in your bowl; the price does increase, but it's arithmetic, not geometric. We checked it out. Gave it a bye. Found this ceramic-tile-clad Evangelical Methodist Church (founded in 1877) on a quiet little park on the way to...

Porto, in the north of Portugal can be wet and cold and rainy and absolutely delightful at the same time. Kathryn and I are walking our literal buns off. Today we did five kilometers on a mission to reset the SIM card in my cellphone, and revisit a sweet little American-style quilt shop we found Saturday. That shop was closed today ... we walked right past it because the persianas (steel rolling shutters) were closed. We did, however, find a wholesale fabric shop where we  convinced the gentleman who spoke English to sell us a meter of blue-inked fabric patterned with sights of Porto. It wasn't the one Kathryn was looking for, but I bought it anyway because of the subject matter.  About all the walking; I'm fitting easier in my jeans, and, as Forrest said, "That's all I have to say about that." The first half of today's mission was to reset the SIM card in my cellphone (I NEED the wi-fi for navigation!), which the Vodaphone people graciously, promptly, f...

When you want to get fresh pork, check the window of the place you choose to eat. This was the window display yesterday in "our" little place across the street. 190424  photos to follow

Conímbriga. A Roman city sited atop an Iron Age settlement, predating Coímbra. I took the bus out and back, two and a half euros each way. It is absolutely the last stop on the line, and the buses at the end are an hour apart.  It goes through almost a dozen minuscule and not-so-small towns to get there. In one there is an ice cream stand that is built out into the roadway . . . traffic cones and everything, including chairs . . . the bus has to navigate around. Coming back downhill there was one of those "Your Speed Is" signs with the flashing lights. The posted limit was 30kph. Uh, we were doing an unapologetic 50kph. Just sayin'.  Twelve sheep in a field. Town name on an arrow sign pointing uphill at a road a single lane wide. Old man and young girl in a field - him cutting cane ten to twelve feet long; her holding a batch of a dozen or so as he works. Kids getting on and off with schoolbooks. Little girl carrying a cell in a brown plastic zipper case. Ads for t...

I haven't figured out how to make albums yet. So I'm just posting paving stone pattern in batches. By city. This batch is a partial from Lisbon. Another batch of paving stone patterns in Lisbon sidewalks. Lisbon is a large city, y'all. They've been laying down these paving stones for a long time. I don't really know (yet), but I wonder if the architects draw these in the site plans when they design the buildings. There are two photos in the middle of this run that show the typical size of these paving stones. These are typical; many times they're smaller; sometimes they're larger. This is the what? fourth? final batch from Lisbon. I walked part of that town, from the waterfront to the top of the saddle of the hills to the Aqueduct on the other side. Everywhere art and beauty is an integral part of the very visible and skin of the city. What I didn't capture was the raw elation I felt, standing on my balcony different times and watc...

Yesterday was such a fun day for Little-People Watching. The day started with my conversation with a daddy at the next table who was ringing a bite-on-a-fork against the youngest child's glass, commanding, "eat." I observed we had three girls and four boys, and we'd been through one like that, and that his children were beautiful. If my offspring read this, I know they are wondering which one of them was "like that." He introduced them as Matílde, six, María, nine, and Miguél, twelve. Miguél was burying his face in dad's shoulder, María was on her cellphone ignoring everyone, and Matílde was flashing her eyes and giving Maria fits. We all went back to our breakfasts. As they were leaving, Matílde scampered back to our table to say good-bye. Such sweetness blooms in open delight. Mid-afternoon Kathryn and I stepped out of a fabric store and an old soul in a young body being hand-towed down the sidewalk fixed me with a gimlet stare as she passed....

This week's room dimensions are in a parallelogram. The beds are against the 112-inch wall. The opposite wall is 133 inches. The street-side wall, with the window and it's opposite are 113 inches long. The bathroom is 90 inches long and 38 inches wide. One person can sit on the throne while the other showers. The person in the shower cannot get out till the reigning monarch abdicates. There is a delightful place across the street from our front door, literally. And breakfast - ham & cheese sandwich, two pastries, coffee/milk and hot water for Kathryn's tea cost three and a half euros. . . . AND we discovered pāo de ló (translates as "loaf of bread), which is angel food cake baked in a terra cotta form with another terra cotta bowl atop it. Uh, it sells by the kilogram. We bought a quarter-cake, and it cost us two-eighty-four. It's wonderful. With every cup of tea or coffee, you get a couple of sugar packets. These have historically-inspired imaged o...

Kathryn and I are traveling for the next several months to see what the rest of the world is about.  It's different, and it's the same. People texting and taking selfies are everywhere. At the museum at the Roman ruins site a young woman was making goo-goo eyes and Blue Steel duck faces at her camera. When I'd finished my meia de leite (half-milk coffee) and croissant with chocolate filling, she was still workin' it. Another young woman, behind her boyfriend on his scooter in downtown Coimbra traffic was texting as they went by. I just watch. I married the woman I run around with so I can have intelligent conversation ('cause she's smarter than I am). Don't tell her I said that. There is a 12% tax on prepared food in the coffee shops and restaurants. In a conversation with the owner of one such coffee shop, he observed, "yeah, but when I go to the hospital, it's twenty euros."  Television sports . . . two days ago, munching our sandwic...