Last stop: Lisbon, and scurvy!

This is it. Literally the end of the road. The bus I hopped late in the afternoon in Seville took me a sleepy six hours along the coast, over the border, via Faro, and north to Lisbon. A bridge over a roaring river tells you that you are entering Portugal. Our stopover in Faro was brief. Long enough though to sample my first bit of Portuguese language and for me to say, “Obrigado” after buying a can of coke from a news stand on the street near the bus station. Soon I was going to be let off in the last city that I intended to visit on this trip. Lisbon is the capital city of Portugal and its largest city. It is one of those up and coming cities in Europe that attracts young tourists looking for good weather and hip nightlife. It is located on the coast, on the Atlantic Ocean, and is similar enough in latitude that if you look straight west out to sea and somehow are tall enough to negate the curvature of the earth, you’d see Boston, the shining beacon of a city looking straight back at you. But because of trade winds and sea currents and its location in relation to the continent it belongs to, its climate is nothing alike to that of Boston’s. Lisbon is warm, mild year round, and perpetually sunny. It is a city in the south. And it was my last stop on this long, long journey.

We pulled into the bus station right at dusk, as the sun was receding further and further below the horizon, I hopped off in search of the metro. Lisbon is not really a large city, buttressed by the a large river that quickly meets the sea, so orienting myself was pretty simple. And the hostel I had reserved was located right in the heart of that hip district that is drawing all the Euro youngsters to the city. The hostel was a three minute walk from the metro stop, located on the top floor of a beautiful, old building by a small square. When I walked out of the metro and out into the square, people were clustered in groups, sitting on steps, on railings, standing in crowds in the middle of the square, talking, smoking, and drinking. I could hear the music from bars and clubs in the distance. I found the hostel easily, took the elevator to the fifth and top floor, and checked in with the super friendly girl at reception who went really out of her way to help me, recommend places to me around Lisbon, and talked to me more as if I was a friend and not a customer, even inviting me out for a drink with her when she got off at midnight with another person she had met at the hostel. She recommended to me a place to eat, it was 10:30 and I was starving, a place called Casa do India, a very local, down to earth place, and she recommended a Portuguese dish, all for a very reasonable price. I was very happy for the recommendation and walked the five minutes across the street and down to the corner where the little restaurant was located. But it seemed that the quality of food here was no secret, the place was packed to the brim with people, and, being a more local place, lacking English and tourists, I decided not to try and squeeze myself into a seat somewhere and instead wandered around the nightlife district in search of some food. But I remembered the place and the dish and promised myself that I would return before I left the city. I finally found a place that served some cheap, late night sandwiches in the bar district, and realizing it was well past midnight, decided to return to the hostel and go to sleep.

Lisbon is set on the edge of some very steep hills that slope in and down to the water. It reminds me a little of parts of San Francisco because the very steep hills are sometimes a little too difficult to walk or to drive and so they have cable car trolleys that you can hop to make the trip up and down these narrow corridors. There is also a massive bridge, much resembling the Golden Gate Bridge, that connects Lisbon to a neighboring satellite city across the huge rive that dumps into the sea nearby. The nightlife district that I had been wandering around the night before is built deep in the heart of the city, in dense alleyways that criss cross steeply up the side of one of these hills. It makes for a pretty cool scene. I got up the next morning after sleeping in a little and decided to wander around the city a bit, casually, no strenuous agenda of sightseeing or anything like that. I walked out of the little square that housed my hostel and turned up the hill along the edge of the nightlife district, and near the top into a residential area with a park on one side that had views of the rest of the city that slope down another side of a hill toward the east. In this direction, Lisbon moulds itself down into a deep valley, buildings interspersed amongst huge leafy trees, and then eventually rises up in the distance to another huge hill, atop which lies an old castle. So I sat on a bench in this park for awhile beneath some trees, soaking in the warm air and the sweeping views over Lisbon. I could smell flowers from a garden nearby, and I read a few chapters of “The Shadow of the Wind” which I had nearly finished.

A view out over the valley of Lisbon and the opposite hill with the castle

Eventually I continued back up the hill and into the neighborhood a bit further. The road I followed started to bend along the top of the hill to the left, away from the valley that opened up to Lisbon, but directly above the nightlife district. I decided to trickle my way down through the alleys that lead through this area and down back towards my hostel to see what the neighborhood looks like during the daytime. Last night was a Saturday night so the place was jammed full of people. This morning, city workers were power washing the cobbled streets with water from a truck, blowing the rubbish and beer bottles that had accrued over night, and old men with pipes were walking small dogs and talking to each other in the streets. It turned out that this neighborhood that had become so hip recently, was one of the city’s oldest original residential neighborhoods and although the first floor of all these buildings are now full of bars and restaurants, the upper floors are still full of residents. It was nice to walk around these streets late on a Sunday morning and see the residents slowly waking up and buzzing around in the daylight hours. The streets in this area are so weird because of their orientation in relation to the steep hills, but they are beautiful in their own way, odd walkways and steps duck in and out of old buildings and cross trolley tracks. Flowers burst from every window sill and doorway and even the residents have seemed to embrace the graffiti that is found on every wall. It gives the pretty neighborhood a bit of an edge.

The nightlife district in the daytime

Flags of Portugal waving in high terraces above the old neighborhood

The tram that ferries people up and down the steep alleyways

I walked back towards the plaza where my hostel is located and then down the hill towards where the main part of the city is. I was going to stop in on the Casa do India for lunch but they were closed on Sundays, it would have to wait for tomorrow. But I was getting hungry. When I was in China, or more recently, when I was living in Chengdu, my body had to adjust to the drastic dietary differences between my normal Western diet and that of the spicy foods of Sichuan province. At first I had a hard time of it but my body eventually adjusted to the intense spices found in everything. But there’s more to it than the spices. Your body, growing up on certain foods with certain levels of vitamins and minerals, gets used to these types of food that you eat every day and when you plant yourself for a long period of time in a place where the food is completely different and contains drastically different levels of different vitamins and minerals, your body needs to learn to readjust or else there are certain health repercussions that follow. My stomach eventually got used to the food but my body eventually couldn’t keep up with the chemical imbalance as a result of the different vitamins I was exposing myself to. My immune system weakened and I started getting sick more often, being more vulnerable to colds and viruses. But the worst thing that happened was that after awhile, I had started to develop early signs of what I, in my non-medically trained way, can only describe as scurvy, a resulting disease from a lack of vitamins that come from fresh fruit and vegetables, most traditionally a disease that plagued sailors as they went months at sea without fresh food (in the old days). Scurvy, early on anyway, makes your gums very sore and makes it nearly impossible to eat anything. I had to supplement my new diet with a heavy dose of vitamin pills to regain that balance. I got over it eventually but the reason I’m telling you this story is because it finally came back to me, as I feared it would, here at the end of my trip in Lisbon. Perhaps my body was trying to readjust to a normal western diet but I think, due to my traveling and cheap eating, I just wasn’t getting enough healthy meals. Luckily I had brought some antibiotics for this purpose and with another round of supplemental vitamins, I was quickly back in the game, but I’ve come to appreciate the importance of a healthy diet. Anyway, long story short, I went to go find somewhere healthy to eat for lunch. I found a little veggie cafe and ordered a big pasta salad with every vegetable I could find. It tasted good and I could feel my body processing the vitamins from the vegetables through my body. It was nice. But word to the wise, for travelers who intend to do serious traveling for a long period of time, making time to cook and eating healthy, especially for those on a budget, is a must. Hostels are always equipped with kitchens and finding food to cook with is easy, anywhere. It is just a matter of devoting the time to do it. I’m a super lazy traveler, and I suffered for it.

But like I said, I was back in the game, I wandered down into the valley. My goal was to wind through the central streets of Lisbon down in the valley, up to the other big hill, to the castle above. I eventually found it. The entrance fee was pretty pricy and I wasn’t too interested in wandering around the old fort, the neighborhood around the castle held my interest enough on its own. I got really excellent views of the bay below and the city sprawling towards the west, and the other hill opposite, where my hostel is. I made my way through some side streets, allowing myself to get lost in the quiet alleys of some local residential areas, and came across another, virtually silent square, hidden in between buildings. I took a bench and began to read some more. I stayed here for at least two hours it was so pleasant. Eventually a local family came walking though and took up residence in the square with some extended family members or neighbors perhaps. The kids played in the nearby fountain while the adults talked around another bench. They eventually got up to slowly leave, an old man in the group tried to make an animate point about something to another family member but he had a pipe in his mouth that he refused to remove so the point he was trying to make seemed lost on the family member as all that was coming out of his mouth was a strong, “Shushushush” sound. He had beady glasses and a casual emerald green, corduroy jacket on, and he waved his arms around as if that would help his family members to understand. An old woman, presumably his wife, giggled at the whole ordeal. Eventually they left around a corner of the square and I did too, back into the valley.

A view out into the bay, the "Golden Gate Bridge" in the background

One of the entrances into the castle neighborhood

Fancy tapestries hanging above the entrance way of a government building

I walked around the city’s main square a little, packed with tourists. I was offered hash on eight separate occasions in this area. It was odd how blatant their attempts were. Especially considering the heavy police presence that for some reason hovered around every corner of this city, possibly in an attempt to curb the illegal hash trade, I don’t know. But it was getting late and I was getting tired so I made my way back to the hostel. I had one more day in this city and on this trip. Tomorrow I planned to do much of the same thing. I planned to eat at the Casa do India, and then take a tram a little bit west, along the coast, to discover a new neighborhood recommended to me at reception.

One more day.