The Fingerpost at Bowness

03/21/19 Lisbon

21 March in Lisbon . . . 

Life is good.

Walked from apartment 1 to apartment 2 this morning. When I checked my photos I realized I had forgotten to capture the gargoyle at the parapet of the government building across the street. Well, damn. This town is absolutely awash in historic architectural detail. 

So was Madrid, but we've left Madrid; we'll be back in September. 

There is so much art expressed everywhere in this city. One store window even has on its window "Beauty without expression is boring." Think about that for a bit. It gets convoluted if you let it.

Again I was made aware of the mosaic patterns in the sidewalks and took more photographs. With our afternoon walk to Kathryn's Portuguese Language School and back, I recognized one of the patterns I'd seen yesterday. Coupling that with the fact that you can stand on the esplanade and look into town, and vice-versa, I'm wondering if the intent might be to mark the walks so merchant mariners bringing their wares ashore could readily find (after paying duties to the king) their brokers' warehouses. I'm going to have to read up on this. Or maybe it's just whimsy.

Breakfast this morning was a matched pair of shrimp/cream pastries with cafe con leche. I have to learn the Portuguese for that. 

Then we found our new hotel. It is spang in the middle of the commercial tourist/shopping district. Literally, we were on that street yesterday tracking down Kathryn's fabric shops. 

As to the apartment. It's about half the size of the last one, and about forty years behind stylistically. The kitchen and dining room are down the hall and around the corner. There -is- a bathroom in the suite; it's about the size of the shower in the last place. It functions. We don't live in the room or the bathroom; we go out from there.

The suite includes a plastic-grass-surfaced balcony with a small table and chairs on it. It's less than two of my sneaker-shod feet wide. Again, it functions. Oh, and there are clotheslines on a steel angle-iron rigged over the side a bit below head height. There are even clothes pins there. The washing machine is in the kitchen.

I'm telling you, this is actually fun. 

Across the street (maybe fifteen feet wide) from where we had breakfast, construction crews are renovating an old hospital into something else. Probably upper-end shops at street level with higher-upper-end apartments above those. I snapped the ornamental floral stonework atop the pilasters, but the incised graphics didn't show. I need to get a better camera. Through the open ground floor door I could see a couple of marble columns topped with steel I-beams. I'd love to see what comes next.

After checking into the hotel I could only laugh at the societal differences between USA and Portugal. (I like it here better; the scale is human, not industrial.) Five floors to walk up . . . no elevator even considered. The hotel is on the fourth (remember the ground floor over here is level zero), so you have to walk up a level and a half of granite steps, two levels of worn-through linoleum, and another level and a half of pine to get to the door of the actual hotel. Once inside the receptionist takes your passports and logs you in with a pen on paper and hands you a set of keys ... one is a transponder that triggers the lock at street level, a double-bladed one which combines with the transponder to open the hotel door after hours, and an old-fashioned one for the (twenty-five-inch-wide) (really; I taped it) door to your room. Then she takes you on a tour of the public areas . . . the public bathrooms, the kitchen (microwave, oven, wash basin, pots, pans, plates, glasses, cups, common-area coffee and tea, and the sitting area which includes the wifi server, television, and a multi-language bookshelf.

I traded in Laurie R. King's 'The Beekeeper's Apprentice' for Paul Scott's 'The Alien Sky." I'd finished King's book, and Scott's is smaller and lighter. I've already read Larry McMurtry's 'Texasville,' so I left that one there, along with volumes in Cyrillic, German, French, and Portuguese. And the different travel guides from 2000 and 2003.

There's a balcony table and chairs off the dining room also.

I couldn't resist the unrivaled bargains from the one-euro vending machines of a travel toothbrush and a 100-gram tin of chili peanuts.

On our afternoon walk after an early dinner we walked on the esplanade that formed immediately beside the beach and saw the Lisbon waterfront from the bay of the Tagus as it debouches into the Atlantic. Sailboats. Catamaran ferries. Single-hulled tourist boats. Bulk freighter (grain?/oil?) in ballast. And a very large apartment building that turned out to be the cruise ship "Ventura." That thing was a monster. Especially to an old Destroyer Sailor.

Quick stop at a super mercado for pasta and other supplies for tomorrow's at-home meal, then home for an early evening.

Walking these streets without the bags is ever so much easier and more enjoyable.

Life is so very good, y'all.
And thank you for your comments; I love hearing from you.

04/24/19  photos to follow