It's been so sunny and beautiful that I have to keep reminding myself that it is November. Otherwise, I get carried away daydreaming; "If the weather stays this nice 'til Friday, we could go to the beach!" Alas, it's not that warm. The sky is a blinding shade of the most brilliant blue though. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday about what color the sky would be called if it were made into a Crayola crayon. But the color of the Lisbon sky can't be contained; I don't think any paint swatch could ever accurately capture the essence of this radiant blue. The relative lack of pollution in the city makes this sky the clearest I've ever seen. The sky, light and fresh air are mildly intoxicating. It's so hard to pull myself out of that reverie...
But I digress. The purpose of this post is to record, more for my memory than anything else, a few things I forgot to mention...
- In Evora, we visited the Bone Chapel, a rather large, crypt-like chapel inside a church covered from floor to ceiling in human bones and skulls taken from a local graveyard hundreds of years ago. Lovely.
- A few weeks ago there was a taxi pulled up to the curb waiting in a right-turn lane. The cab blocked most of the turn lane, which didn't require a light, and all the cars behind him were honking like crazy because they couldn't move. Luckily, people don't mind driving on the sidewalk here and they could inch around him over the curb. As each car slowly pulled around, the driver stopped, rolled down the window and yelled at the cab driver. Every single car that passed did this. As if the first time, second time...sixth time...wasn't enough to give the cab driver the idea. I laughed out loud. Honestly-they were all honking so they could move and instead of taking the alternate route (sidewalk) and just continuing, they further blocked traffic by stopping individually to yell at the guy. Ah, Portugal.
- Last night, Wednesday, my dorm threw a party. We have a student commission in charge of the social life at the dorm and they are the official body for complaints, requests, etc. Anything that is not a maintenance problem goes through the student commission. Last night they turned the rec room into a dance floor with strobe lights, disco balls, a full DJ setup and a bar with beer on tap. They also auctioned off freshmen to be "slaves" for the upperclassmen. Tell me: where in the US would you have a dorm throwing an official party, serving alcohol and having a DJ spinning until 5 in the morning on a Wednesday? Again, I must reiterate: when do people ever sleep in this city?
- I've mentioned plenty of times how time seems to work differently here, one of the many things contributing to the feeling that it's not always the 21st century here. Recently, I have fallen in love with a trend I've noticed pretty much everywhere I've been in the country. The old men here all wear these floppy hats called boinas. These men move slower than the normal slow pace of the lisboetas, which is already pretty slow. I often see them sitting on benches just existing, enjoying the world and the beautiful day. They sit contentedly with their hands crossed over their bellies, boinas flopping down across their face. It's a sight from another era, one in which people didn't leave the house without a hat and one without noise pollution, email, PDAs, demanding schedules...I envy these men more than anything else because of the sheer calmness they exude. Always so content. I would love to get myself a boina but I don't think I could ever pull it off. Plus, it would ruin the authenticity of the hat and what it represents. I wouldn't want to do anything to ruin the authenticity of Portugal, which is for the most part blessedly untouched by the tourism bug that tends to destroy the true feel of a place.
- Evora is a small, quiet place. We had a lot of time to kill when we arrived at the train station to catch our train back to Lisbon and there were no other trains scheduled for the evening so we goofed off on the tracks, testing our strength in pushing the engine (unsuccessful), testing the limit of how much we could climb on the outside of the train without getting yelled at (successful) and running across the tracks to play next to the abandoned train cars. The small water tower bearing the town's name was just a hop skip away so we hopped and skipped over the iron ladder to ascend the tower and look into the sun as it set over the countryside. This, too, reminded me of another era. Minus the digital camera, we could've been in the 1950s playing along train tracks like you see in the movies. Except that it was a hundred times more exhilarating than in the movies because I got to experience it for real.
- I went to Elephant Walk today for lunch and spoke Portuguese with Rodrigo for 20 minutes. (Rodrigo is our juice-and-tosta-maker extraordinaire) I might actually come home with a basic knowledge of the Portuguese language.
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