Plucky Survivors See Europe Day 56: Seville to Lisbon

Before I begin the recap of the day, I just want to mention the horrific terrorist attack on the gay pride festival in Berlin.  I had tried to fit that one into my Pride circuit but just couldn’t make it work.

At every one of the parades I’ve been to – Vienna, Rome, London, and Barcelona – I have thought about this very thing.  To be honest, I think about this kind of thing a lot.  Anyone who knows me well knows I can’t sit in a restaurant or bar with my back to the entrance.  Whenever I’m in a big crowd of people, I always make sure I know where the best routes to safety are should the need for one arise.  You’ll rarely find me standing out in the open at parades and festivals – I usually try to find a spot near something that I could hide behind if I needed to.  In Rome, for instance, I spent most of the time at the parade next to a large dump truck that would’ve worked well – and provided shade!

I hate that we live in a world where people need to think about stuff like that, but I love that we live in a world that still embraces the joy and spirit and love that Pride does.  And I’m even more glad that I’ve been to the Pride events in Europe that I have.  I’m looking forward to wrapping it up with World Pride in Amsterdam in a couple of weeks.  Maybe I’ll find a windmill to stand next to.

Anyway, on with the day…

I didn’t want to leave Seville and Seville didn’t want me to leave.  I got up to do laundry since there was a laundromat a few doors down.  I got there a few minutes before it was supposed to open… and then it didn’t.  And still didn’t.  And didn’t some more.  I think it was Seville saying, “No, if you do laundry you have to leave.  Just stay.  Come on.  You know you want to.”

And I did.  But I couldn’t.  Lisbon called.

It was a longish drive – more than four hours – but a pretty easy one with little traffic on the highways and next to no road construction, a welcome change.

When I got to Portugal, I think I was supposed to pull over and talk to the border control people, but all the signs were in Portuguese and Spanish and by the time I figured this out I was zooming past it with the cars with Portugal license plates.  I spent the next 10 or 20 miles waiting for a Portuguese SWAT team to run me off the road and throw me into a Turkish prison.  Why a Turkish prison?  Because that’s the kind of luck I have.

That didn’t happen and I sailed on into Lisbon via an insanely high bridge that makes the one in Savannah look like a Lego set. 

My hotel is on Avenue da Liberdade, a wide, tree-lined boulevard with high end stores and fancy restaurants.  The room wasn’t ready so I went up to the rooftop restaurant to soak in the view and have a bite to eat – their version of a club sandwich with ham, roast beef, two kinds of cheese, egg, lettuce, and tomato on a very soft focaccia bread.  It was surprisingly good for hotel rooftop restaurant food.

My room has a terrace, which makes me happy, although not much of a view.  I’ve been spoiled.

It was toasty, to say the least, so I decided to relax for a while until it cooled down, then went out to explore, have a drink or two, and get some dinner.

I wanted to start with the Bairro Alto, an area first created outside the city’s walls in the 1500s.

To get there, I quickly discovered that Lisbon is not f-ing around with its hills.  Google Maps directed me to walk up a very steep hill.  When I got to the top of that hill there was more hill.  Then I got to the top of that hill and there were stairs.  I made it to the top of the stairs and there was another hill and then more stairs.  According to my step counter app I climbed the equivalent of a 13-story building.

The only thing… and I do mean the ONLY thing… that made me feel a little better is knowing that if I had tried to do this at the beginning of this trip, I never would’ve made it.  I’m not saying I’m in good shape, but walking over 200 miles and climbing lots of hills and stairs in other cities has gotten me into better shape than I have been in a long time.  I can’t wait to get home and sit down on the couch and let it all go to hell.

The good news is that once I got to the actual top of the hill it was literally all downhill from there.

Bairro, or barrio in Spanish, has a negative connotation these days but it literally just means neighborhood.  Yes, it’s a little more working class than the shinier districts like Baixa Chiado – you won’t find an H&M store here – but it’s got a lot of character with narrow streets and little bars, shops, and cafes tucked into doorways and alleys.  I stopped at a couple of gay bars that had just opened – Friends and Maria Caxuxa, both small slips of places that get very busy late at night but were empty this early.

Lisbon is another one of those “late” towns.  I asked the bartender if there was anything fun to do on a Sunday night and he recommended a nightclub that… hold on… opens at midnight.  “They have a drag show at 3am,” he said as if that was the most normal thing in the world.

I continued down the hill and into the aforementioned Baixa Chiado area, a touristy district where you will find an H&M.

But this is also the area with the heaviest concentration of restaurants and I was hungry.  I chose one that I didn’t write down the name of, but it had a Portuguese menu and an Italian one.  I started with the garlic and mozzarella bread from the Italian side and then got the roasted Piri Piri chicken from the Portuguese side.  I am a fiend for a good roasted chicken and I haven’t had Piri Piri in ages so this was a delightful treat.  The chicken was tender and juicy, perfectly roasted in the sauce made from chilies and citrus – more tangy than spicy in this particular instance, which was fine with me because sometimes it can be Hot Ones hot.

The walk back to the hotel was uphill but a much gentler slope, one fortified by a stop at the Grand Café for a chocolate cake and a strawberry tart.  I’m going to keep getting this combination until I find the perfect one. This wasn’t it, but it was still very good.

Tomorrow, I get out and explore more of Lisbon all the while keeping an eye on what’s happening to the north and west of here.  The wildfires have exploded out of control with more than a quarter-million people evacuated.  One of the highways that I would be traveling from Porto to Bilbao is closed and another between Bilbao and Bordeaux is as well.  As the fire pushes toward Bordeaux, the council is developing a plan to evacuate the entire city – more than a million people.

It is likely that Bordeaux and possibly Bilbao will need to come off the itinerary.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do if that happens but I know it’ll involve a lot more driving than I had intended as I try to work my way around the worst of it.  Everyone start doing your rain dances.