1/7/09 11:53PM
in the last 2 days i've been offered pot and hashish on a total of 14 occasions. i've been offered cocaine on 4. most of the time it's regular looking guys, although twice it was middle-aged gents in a suit or a tweed jacket and cap. that was a little... odd. it's a little disconcerting when a guy walks up to you with a stick of what's unlikely to actually be hash or probably isn't marijuana in his hand. fortunately for everyone involved in the complete lack of a transaction they were happy to take a polite no thanks with a good grace and moved on. thanks, but i like to have my lungs and my nasal cavity on the inside, not the outside, and i have no interest in spending tonight in a Portugese jail... or worse: hospital.
Lisbon's pretty. actually, it reminded me a lot of parts of Croatia - old-school limestone buildings with terracotta roofs, smallish alleys emptying out onto wide streets. the majority of the Old Town is flanked by a pair of hills, forming a shallow valley leading down to the harbor on the Tagus River. on the eastern side, overlooking the city, is an old castle. on the west, a really very pleasant restaurant and night district. i'd heard that Lisbon wasn't really worth seeing, but now i really wish i had the chance to get down to Lagos which i've heard is nicer, but i have places to be and only so much time in any one country.
i rolled into town yesterday with about 3 hours of sleep under my belt. i got an hour and a half at Heathrow, then about the same again on the plane. i rememeber it taking off, then someone giving me food, then coming in for the descent. one might consider crashing out at the airport to be a bit ill-considered, but it served its purpose and i knew for sure that i wasn't going to be late for my flight. i wish i'd had more time to prepare... but then, you always do. i'd printed out a map to my hostel, then promptly forgotten to pick it up off the fucking printer. it's typical - as my grandfather used to say: "Less rush, more hurry." either way, i managed to make do with that i found at the airport, although i'd i'd been paying better attention i could have gotten off the airport shuttle right outside my hostel, and not half an hour's hike uphill. by the time i finally got here i was dripping with sweat and must have smelled a treat... and i know it's only going to get worse as the weeks go by. the Hostel Without A Name was fine as far as things go, although its claim to be in Central Lisbon was a little creative. oh well. shit happens. i dumped my bag, changed my shirt for a singlet and headed off into the sunshine. 6 hours later i collapsed into my bunk having hit the castle, the foreshore, the Baixa (the dip in the valley) and a few of the rambling, medieval areas either side. my feet had barely left the ground when Pietre, my Italian dorm-mate asked me what i was up to, and whether i wanted to come out for a beer and while my brain was formulating the phrase i'm tired and i didn't get much sleep last night so i'm going to have a quiet one in my mouth jumped in with why the fuck not? and it was another 5 hours of wandering around the town before i was finally in bed again. damn beer-hungry mouth...
by the end of all that i more or less felt like i'd done Lisbon which is a little sad all told, so i checked out the Lonely Planet guide to Western Europe i'd borrowed from Moonbug and decided to hop the train and head for Sintra - around 40 minutes on the Lisbon commuter rail. Sintra was the holiday-home for the Portugese royalty, back in the day when they had any and is basically a pretty little forested area with a Moorish castle on at the top of the mountain which dates back to the 9th century. i got in with a basic plan revolving around "show up, see what there is to see", so i wandered into the town looking for lunch to find that everything was touristy and expensive so i kept heading up, up, up the mountain. another picturesque location, another fucking mountain. as i walked i realised i was surrounded by a band of OAP's cluttering up the footpath from somewhere in South America, probably Brazil from what little i know of Portugese. not a problem... except that they were slower than an inbred retard. fine - i can get past them... and then they decided that the best way to tackle a slow walk was to sing. i had enough of singing Latin American motherfuckers ruining my peace and quiet in Egypt, so i legged it faster to get away from them and found a nice little spot to have a light lunch... only to find that they'd followed me into the cafe and hadn't given up on the singing bullshit. no lunch for me then. thanks a fucking lot you noisy slow-walking throwing-off-my-chi sons of bitches.
so i decided that eating was just not going to happen and headed on up the mountain, to get away from the Brazilians if nothing else.
so it was that i got to the bottom of the castle section of the climb and was sitting down for a bit of a break that i met Mieke and Wiebe and somehow fell in with them for the rest of the day. Wiebe (think Wilbur) lives in Lisbon doing more or less the sort of work that i do and his mum Mieke (think Mika) had come to visit him for a bit. by the time we'd climbed to the top, tried sneaking into the castle without paying (and failed), taken a stack of photos and headed down again we were getting along roaringly. beers at the bottom, you say? how could i say no? we even wound up on the same train back to Lisbon together, and i couldn't have been happier with that arrangement. Wiebe and i seemed to share the same twisted sense of humour - there were a couple of times when he had me in stitches, rolling around my seat on the train. he's even started reading my blog, which has me worried. maybe i should say something nice about him?
it's these little things that really put a smile on your face when you're traveling - the 24 hour friends who add colour to the place. if i'd been only my own i think i'd have been pretty bored, but i was stoked beyond words to have interesting people to hang with, and to this day i'm glad to say i've never met a Dutch person who wasn't pleasant company.
tonight is quiet time. i'm checking out tomorrow and on a flight to Madrid to kick off what will hopefully be an entertaining interlude in Spain. flight? well, it was acutually cheaper to fly than to take a train, not to mention much, MUCH quicker. i really want to be avoiding air travel as much as possible. this is a train/bus trip for me, but when needs must to the airport i will go, and probably give EasyJet even more of my cash. otherwise, it's been a good start to the trip... 2 days down... and... what is it? 70 something more to go?
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1 comment:
Hahahahaa! Damned right you had better say something nice about me!
Great writing dude, I hope you are having a great time.
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