As you might have already guessed by looking at the Picasa gallery, I got to spend some time in Lisbon at the end of August. Our Lisbon offices does a lot of work for our Swedish clients, basically all the routine and boring stuff, freeing up our time to work on the non-routine projects and to focus more on consulting. It was decided that we would be able to work more effectively with Lisbon if we got to meet our colleagues face-to-face, and spent some time with them to better understand what they do down there. We had a few hours of meetings every day. We tried to explain what we expected of them. They tried to explain why certain processes took longer than we thought they should take. We tried to find typical Portuguese restaurants for lunch, and we were left alone to explore the city at night.
I'm sorry to say that I can't really write the best review, as I intentionally avoided most of the touristy stuff. It may not look that way from my photos, but my goal was to see everything at a distance, that way everything will still be exciting and new when I can return with my partner in crime to do some real sight-seeing.
My first impressions were that the city was old, run down and dirty. Lisbon is a port city, sitting on the estuary (a good word to test on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?) of the river Tagus. The harbour offers some amazing views, but shipping takes precedence over leisure. Near the touristy areas of town, where a good city planner should want to build miles of interrupted parks and walkways, you will instead find miles of industrial buildings that block your view of the water. The parks and walkways do exists, but you have to walk along a busy road for a few miles just to get to them.
Everything was crumbling. Every other block seemed to have a building that was in ruins, bricked up, or in some other form of total abandonment. It was obvious that everything was old and that the money wasn't there for annual repairs.
My views weren't helped by my runs through town. It was the worst running city I've ever been in. The sidewalks were all paved in two inch by two inch square stones. Beautiful, but rough on the legs. They were fairly level in the touristy areas, but once I got past that part of town, the stones were too wavy for me to handle. The sidewalks were also quite narrow in many places, some areas no wider than two feet wide, with cars zipping by just inches away. By the end of the week I found a route that I was somewhat happy with, but for anybody that is in the height of their marathon training, I highly recommend waiting to visit Lisbon until after the race.
The longer I stayed in town, the more I started to like it. The town became more and more charming with each passing day. Even the most run-down buildings seemed to have a story. You could see how rich and pretty the city must have been at one time. Miranda said my photos make the city look very Spanish, but with a bit more of a Moorish influence than the parts of Spain she had visited. If that's the case, I want to go to Spain. Based on my more-limited travels, I'd have to say that the city was like a cross between San Diego and San Francisco. You take the hills and the tight-quarters of San Francisco. Drop a bit of the San Diego weather and design onto the setting, age the city a couple hundred years, then add palaces and monuments that will never be built in America, and voila! You have a new copy of Lisbon.
My one regret is that I care too much about each individual run to ever run with a camera. That may be my lifetime regret. The most amazing photos of Lisbon are all framed in my head, but unfortunately weren't ever shot. The top tourist sites were all along the river, too far from the center to reach on a walk through town. Taxis were cheap, but I didn't want to pay for a taxi to drive me around just so I could snap a few photos.
My last comment is that the food was just awesome...and so was the wine. I love the Swedish food, all forms of well cooked meat and potatoes, but if I had eaten Portuguese food first, I may never have made it this far north. Most of the food I found in Lisbon had a heavy Brazilian influence, meaning grilled meats and not potatoes, but french fries. There were a lot of fish options too, but I'm not a seafood lover, so I stuck to my steak and fries, and loved every minute of it. And it was cheap too! Maybe it wouldn't be so cheap if my salary were adjusted for the cost of living, but dinner and nice lunches were less than half the price of what I would have to pay in Sweden.
On the other hand, I went to buy a suit in Sweden. Tried one on, it was a bit baggy but no different than my American suits. Tried on the same size in a slim fit and it fit me perfectly, long arms and all. Tried on a few suit coats in Portugal, the shoulders fit, the sleeves were four inches too short and the body was wide enough to fit three, maybe four of me inside. They didn't even have a slim fit option. Point is, maybe the Portuguese diet should be enjoyed in small quantities.
We'll head back to Portugal. I really want to explore the city and learn more about it. I also want to visit their wine country and their beaches, both of which are an easy drive from Lisbon. We still have a lot of cities that we hope to see in the next year and a half, so we might not make it back there any time soon, but returning is high on my list of priorities.
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