After a quarter century in the business, it’s wonderful to visit a country I’ve
never been to before. Somehow, Portugal had never made it onto my radar; so when the opportunity arose to visit the famous Oceanário in Lisbon — one of the world’s greatest aquaria — I jumped right in.
It’s a very 00’s thing, visiting a country specifically to see their aquarium. Let’s face it: as much as one might like fish, and I like them a lot, an afternoon is about as much finned fun as you can stand. True, it helps if there are penguins, and otters; but even their antics, which mainly involve posturing and kelp, add only an hour or so to the mix.
My point is, no one (unless they live next door, in Spain) travels to Lisbon for a single afternoon. And so, with boundless curiosity and a ridiculous amount of luggage, I arrived for a four-day visit, hoping to pack the equivalent of a Fulbright-length residence into one long, extended weekend.
And extended it was. I arrived, completely by accident, on the beginning of the Portugese equivalent of the Fourth of July holiday. The streets were all but empty, and most of the shops were closed. My disappointment was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that (1) there was no traffic, (2) the skies were smog-free, and (3) the world’s greatest pastry shop, Pastéis de Belém, never closes. Believe me when I tell you that all the stress of the Air Portugal red-eye to Lisbon, aboard a spit-and-cardboard Airbus, evaporated the instant I bit into one of those warm, custard-filled tarts, with the scent of cinnamon in my snout and a mud-thick espresso in my veins.
Four days is not enough, of course, to see a country, but it’s certainly enough to
see its aquaria (Christ, I hate that word. It’s so much less satisfying a plural than, say, octopi.) There were two, as it turned out, in Lisbon, built exactly 100 years apart: the spectacular Oceanário, with its five million liter tank full of sharks and rays; and the modest, mustard-yellow Aquario Vasco de Gama, with its Giant Pickled Squid. I’ll be writing more about these, and plenty; but if you do find yourself in Lisbon, try to visit both. You’ll easily find the Aquario; it’s about half a mile north of Pastéis de Belém.
The other unmissable sight in Lisbon — actually, about 20 miles outside of Lisbon — will be found a few hundred feet above a rather touristic town called Sintra. Avoid the cavernous, overcrowded Palácio Nacional, sidestep the taverns and tile sellers, and spend every possible minute at the glorious, faciful Palácio da Pena. This is where Gaudi meets Shrek: it’s the castle of your dreams, an oversized chess rook covered with wild sculptures and fake coral, battlements and arches, ballustrades and cornices and other architectural conceits of vague meaning. A few hours there and you’ll feel you’ve visited Someplace Else: the mythical destination that all travelers seek, and that seems more difficult to find each passing year.
That’s it for this blog… I’ve arrived back in Oakland just in time for the events attending the 60th birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s long-imprisoned democracy leader. The next few days will be politically charged, a 180-degree turn from my surreal assignment in Portugal.
Such an odd mix of vocations. Sometimes it seems I’ve spent my life trying to make a virtue out of ADD. Ah, well. As a kayaker friend once said of the river: "We take what we get, and make the best of it."