It's a city in which you can find eight restaurants lined up facing a red suspension bridge with two towers, each restaurant offering the same menu. Now, this would never happen on our home turf in San Francisco, where restaurants facing a completely different looking bridge offer chowder both in a bowl or a bread bowl. Now, that's variety!
The food in Lisbon is simple in a good way. It's a variety of grilled fish, so fresh that restaurants proudly display their fish in stacks as you walk in, usually on ice, but sometimes not so much. I tried the local favorite, grilled sardines, and found them to be salty and good. But, if you try them, be prepared to tasted sardine for a long long time.
While I appreciate the food here, I have to confess that if we stayed in Lisbon any longer that I would be that American creeping down the dark alley at nighttime. When approached by someone offering Portuguese whacky weed for sale, I would whip out my money roll and say, "No thanks, but I'll give you 20 Euro for a bottle of Siracha or Chulula." Clean, fresh and simple is great, but I also like to find a little complicated food from time to time.
My nearly sixteen year-old-daughter was lucky enough to find six members of the Portuguese Navy on the street for an impromptu photo session and they all looked pretty pleased to be part of it. I could tell when we walked by a construction site earlier in the day to hear enthusiastic whistles directed at my daughter that being a father of a teenager is going to be different in Europe than it is in the U.S. God help me when we get to Spain and Italy.
It's funny comparing the tourist trade in Lisbon to San Francisco and seeing the similarities. One of the things to do in Lisbon is to take a Funicular up a "winding steep grade." In the travel shows, it looks like quite the wild ride. Well, we took it and it was sort of a ready, set...wait, we're done. That was it? It reminds me of all those tourists lined up to go down Lombard Street.
French Tourist #1 (Renee Dupont Castile LeVrai): "Zthat was it? It's one block long?"
French Tourist #2 (Pierre Bastille LeChien): "Merde!"
Well, our experience wasn't a "merde," be it wasn't exactly the Indiana Jones Ride at Disneyland either. Still, it did end us up at a park where we found a nice pitcher of sangria and a great view of the sites we had seen that day. We also saw a monastery with 25 confessionals lined up to handle the sailers of sailing galleons as they came and went. It was sort of like mass spiritual redemption, kind of like of The Pope and Henry Ford and gotten together to decide how to speed up the process a bit.
Today we our celebrating a big arrival. It came at 2 a.m. and, after five days on the road, we are the proud parents of our luggage, which finally caught up to us. I want to be discreet and not mention the name of the airlines that lost our luggage. Let's just call them "United Kingdom Airways" so no one is the wiser. Still, it is humbling as a traveler to come back after a night on the town and wash your underwear in the sink to get ready for the next day. Yes, "Glamour" is my middle name.
What's a walkabout?
Well, as you probably already know, it's an Australian thing where a young man goes on a walkabout to find himself. As a family of four with two teenagers, we are attempting to do that as a family, before high school sports and, all too quickly, college sends everyone on their separate ways. We are taking a month to meet ourselves...and make some new friends in the process. We can already tell this is a good thing. Not that we didn't talk before, but when you are exploring new places as a family, you tend to do a lot of "Hey, look at this!" to each other and then chat about what you've found.
No Crankiness Allowed
So far, we've found the people of Portugal to be warm and friendly and going way out of their way to try and understand our mispronounced attempts at "Thank you." ("Albondigas!!!") and my way too Mexican pronunciation of "por favor." I can see them mentally picturing me with a sombrero on my head at a Chevy's and they think to themselves, "Dude, this is not Cabo. We don't even speak Spanish here!"
We're on to our next stop, a village on the coast of Portugal. I now have my full wardrobe of "American Middle-Aged Dad Wear," so I can truly impress the locals.
Just visited Lisboa, Porto, and large parts of Galicia in April, and could not agree more. Spanish and Portuguese food is good, but why are they the only Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking nations afraid of spices? My daughter taught in Santiago for nine months and was lecturing Galicians about their fear of hot foods. Remember when Indians started migrating to England in large numbers and taught the Brits to love masala and naga peppers? Spain and Portugal need a concentrated marketing campaign by the nations of South and Central America to say, "Step up you wimps, it's time to lively up your taste buds."
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