Up and down hills and stairs, through sidestreets that barely, but convincingly, straddle cars, past garbage piled on corners, over the endless piles of shit filling in the cracks in the cobblestones, the cracks in the soles of our shoes. We walked ceaselessly across Lisbon. There was always more to see, but over the course of several days staying there I don’t know that we ever came close to making sense of any of it.
Situated at the mouth of the Tagus River and the Atlantic, Lisbon remains a city of eclectic intersections: old world and progressive europe, aristocratic avenues and drunkards’ piss alleys, a young artist’s haven and an old fisherman’s lonely nostalgia.
Even with its surface similarities to San Francisco – the ersatz Golden Gate bridge span, the cable car-like trams that wend their way through the streets – it proved a hard nut to crack. Parks were fairly empty, buildings sat broken and haunted, but at night the bars, restaurants and cafes swelled with people.
In the end, we learned to take pleasure in the simplest things: a bag of stellar cookies rich with egg yolks at Quinoa Bakery, a half-decent lunch from a seasonal menu at Kaffeehaus, and finally, after weeks, an honest to god plate of some fucking salad greens. It’s true, there is a little bit of San Francisco to this place after all.
