Day 44: Still Lisboa

Cloudy 22°

Festival!!

We walked out to look for a drink and dinner last evening and found a huge party well underway! I will admit to being a bit overwhelmed after 6 very quiet, often reflective weeks. The culture shock was complete, at least initially. We’ve travelled and walked Portugal fairly extensively so we have a nice feel for its vibe. Last evening was on a different level. Turns out the Festival of the Saints is on the entire time we are here! However, we didn’t know this until the young women at reception told us when we returned to our hotel.

We are staying in the Alfama district of the city. We’ve walked through here during past visits and were delighted to this time find a place to stay in the district itself. It’s full of steep narrow, even abrupt Portuguese styled cobbled roads often with tram tracks set amongst the cobbles. Beautiful to look at, often difficult to walk.

It’s also a very colourful district with tiled buildings, vibrant colours and interesting wall murals, some of them quite large.

We had intended to find a good restaurant where we could find salted cod, but the smells from the outdoor braziers proved just too attractive to pass up!

We’ve often enjoyed them in Porto and we thought this was just business as usual, not yet understanding that a festival was ramping up.

We found a fun looking outdoor place and in very short order we were just part of the crowd seated at rough tables and benches sorting through the menu with a very full beverage to enjoy!

We ordered what seemed like a massive amount of food and then got down to business. I had a plate of sardines and AM had the chicken. It was all pretty good!

Half the fun was watching all the activity around the brazers.

We sat beside two youngish men (mid 30’s) who were speaking what sounded like an eastern European language. I asked them what language it was and they told us Russian, but that they were from Ukraine. We got into a rather interesting conversation about what they were up to in western Europe. If we understood them correctly, they had been here for about 14 months and were trying to make a life for themselves, one in Barcelona and the other in Andorra in the Pyrenees. As it turns out, the fellow from Barcelona plans to walk the Camino this coming August, which of course led to a quite interesting dialogue. They seemed rather surprised that we had just come from a long walk in France, and when I told them how old I was they were quite shocked. I have to say a little impressed as well.😊

Walking, But Not Really Walking. Drifting?

Well, the party went on into the wee hours and that equated to the amount of sleep I had last night. Haha! Not put off we were up fairly early and off to the nearby Copenhagen Coffee Lab & Bakery for a nice starting breakfast with some badly needed hot drinks!

We decided over breakfast to simply walk wherever our feet took us, just as long as they eventually took us to our favourite pastry shop! We’ve previously walked much of the city centre and we’ve also spent hours walking out the Tagas River far to the west, so a simpler wander was in order.

As we walked down through Alfama towards the river it became clear that my ears had not deceived me last night. A huge street party had raged through much of the night. Many heavy heads today!😵‍💫

Things were getting cleaned up, but today being a national holiday we can be sure of a repeat tonight.

There were literally thousands of people on the streets celebrating last night. Most of the festivities were centred in Alfama.

We continued our walk into the town centre.

I knew roughly where the pastry shop was, but I needed to orient myself first.

We found a familiar way point to start from! 😉 It could take a lifetime to barely sample everything in this shop.

A bit of brain scratching and then there it was. Heaven!

Afterwards we wandered down to the waterfront, no agenda. We seldom have one these days when travelling in the EU because we don’t feel a need to see everything. We have been privileged to return here many times and just kind of take the days as they present. A real shift from our earlier travelling years. We trust that if things go well there is a good chance that we will return. It’s a nice approach.

I the good old days when I was young and travelling this would have been a great area to hang out in for a while on a long travel. However, I suspect that today accommodation costs from the presence of many more affluent tourists would make this a difficult proposition.

The face of this city has changed a little in the last 6 years with seemingly hundreds of tuk tuks now on the roads hustling tourists around. There were very few here in 2018 when we stopped in after walking the Camino Norte.

There was also a 4,000 person cruise ship in port today for just 8 daylight hours. What that does to a city’s core for those hours is something to watch. We took a break when it became too busy, but the ship is gone now so we will venture out again. This remains a great city to visit and I hear there is a street party tonight!!🍺🍺

Geoff🍻