When we’ve stayed in the central areas of the bigger cities, it’s been interesting in the morning to open the windows and listen to the sounds of the city and people and feel the day getting started. The most interesting sound though is the birds. In Jerez, Lisbon, Porto, and Madrid you hear a lot of squawking and chirping. Some of this comes from caged birds in windows but most is just regular birds. It’s surprising and not what we expected in the middle of downtown. It’s very pleasant. All I ever heard in Richmond was seagulls and crows. On our last day here, Sunday, just outside our window, we…
Madrid
This is a big place. We thought Lisbon was big, and it is, but Madrid, together with its outlying metropolitan areas has roughly 6.5 million people, making it the 3rd largest city in the EU behind London and Paris. It’s nice here though, hustle and bustle with great energy. We arrived here last week after a 5-hour train ride from Santiago (we had to get up at 4am) and walked straight into market day. Our airBNB is in the La Latina area, an older neighborhood with the usual narrow streets, antique stores, and bars, cafes, and tapas joints everywhere. It’s also in the middle of El Rastro. According to the…
Santiago de Compostela – The Way
Actually, it’s more like ‘The End’, at least for most pilgrims. A few of the diehards go on to Finisterre, ‘Earth’s End’, on the western coast, for another 80km hike. We had at one point considered doing the ‘walk’ and I have a good friend from school days who not only did it a couple of years ago but is doing it again as I write this, with his spouse. They are our age. The El Camino de Compostela is a centuries old pilgrimage from various places to Santiago where supposedly the martyr St. James is buried. There are many ways or Caminos to get there (the German…
Porto – The WORST Tour
So, we broke down and did the touristo thing. We took a walking tour of Porto on our last day. Just what we needed right? More walking? The WORST tour started at a park filled with homeless people and went downhill from there. OK, so now that we have your attention, it was, in all honesty, a GREAT walking tour! It’s just called Worst Tours. Weird name, so here’s the deal, verbatim from their brochure. Three architects facing sudden economic destruction refuse leaving town and imagine the least likely walking tours. Porto, the big picture, good and bad architecture, ‘Tascas’, politics, alleys, tiny associations, abandoned buildings, and great…
Porto – Port, Markets, Graveyards, and Moby Dick
As I mentioned, many tourists here, a lot more than we had expected. I seem to recall a few internet vacation sites recommending Porto as the number 1 destination place this year. I guess everyone took that to heart. It really is a great place to visit but we haven’t exactly done a whole lot here other than just poke around. There’s the usual things to see of course, fortifications, monasteries, and old churches but there’s also interesting geography and culture here. The city hills wind down to the river docks south and to the Ocean on the west. The old houses built on top of one another…
Porto
Porto is, how can I best say this, really, really nice. At least for us. It has a great feel, it’s not as big or hectic as Lisbon, and it’s very pretty. Being an old working-class port town, it has some rough areas, but it looks like for the past 5 or 6 years there has been a rebuild and an attempt at reinventing itself. It’s being gentrified as we say; many old places in various stages of renovation, lots of modern stores and malls next to derelict buildings, and hordes of tourists wandering around. There is a good energy feeling here. Porto is about 3 hours train ride north…
Lisboa – Dory, Found!
or One Million Reasons Why You Should Not Swim in the Ocean For our last day here in Lisbon we decided to…surprise…go for a walk. This time we went in the opposite direction from the Lisbon center and headed out for a 7 km walk to the old 1998 expo site and plaza of nations. After the 12 km walk earlier when we explored Belem, this was easy peasy and a nice stroll along the Tagus river the entire way. The destination? The Oceanário de Lisboa, once the largest, now 2nd largest indoor aquarium in Europe, behind the one in Valencia, Spain. Built for the 1998 World Exposition,…
Lisboa – Belem
Day 4 we decided to head out to Lisbon’s iconic landmark, the Torre de Belem. It’s probably the most touristo thing to see here, so why not. It was a bit of a hike to the appropriate train station to take you out to Belem, and then another hike from there to the Tower. On the way, we passed a festival of sorts at the Lisbon Welcome Center Plaza right on the waterfront. It’s called Eurovision, which is a yearly music event to find the best musical acts in Europe. Google tells me that it’s the longest-running annual international TV song competition, starting back in 1956, and the 1st time…
Lisboa – Market Day
Day 3 for us was market day. Specifically, the Feira da Ladra or colloquially known as the ‘Market of Thieving Women’. Yikes! Hold on to your shorts. It was an interesting stroll in the hot sun through one of the better-known markets in Lisbon, open every Saturday and Tuesday. Lots of tourists here as there are elsewhere in Lisbon. There are 5 large cruise ship berths along the Tagus river on the south end of the city. I’m not a flea market kind of guy but Teresa likes to poke around these places for ‘deals’. It was, as I said interesting, and it was large as street markets go, covering…
Lisboa
Lisbon is bustling and energetic. We like it, but it is a noisy place. Lisbon has a vibrant mix of cultures, African, Asian, South American, and points in between, derived from the vast empire Portugal established during the exploration age. And you can see it all, strolling through the neighborhoods, crossing the invisible boundaries that separates these cultures. Yet, they all blend together to make the city work. The arrival day was typical for us. After the bus and train ride and the usual walk from the station to wherever our next airBnB place is, we are tired. Our new host, Ana Carolina, provided bread, eggs,…