"The perfect trip is a circle - getting there and coming home"
On a cold and rainy morning, we took our leave of Lisbon and Portugal, eagerly anticipating the trip home. What were we looking forward to? Pancakes, bathrooms larger then a cupboard, air conditioning, and football just to name a few. Portugal was....amazing, challenging, gorgeous and so many more adjectives both positive and negative.
I think the best thing about coming home from a trip, any trip, is not just seeing familiar faces and places. I think when you return home is really when you can begin to see the changes in yourself. In walking through the smoothened corridors of normality, hints of the exotic and the awareness catch like rough edges. You look at a gallon of milk, but suddenly it's not just milk anymore, it's knowledge that not everyone in the world drinks pasteurized milk, thanks for the gigantic supermarket at which you bought that milk, and wonder at how so many people can enjoy such similar things the world over.
Home is like a mirror, reflecting the dimensions in which you have grown (or shrunk) and showing us how to assimilate new thoughts into old lives.
Ate logo means "until later" in Portuguese. We're sure that we'll be there again later in life, if for nothing more then to relive a time in which we were so young and happy.
Thanks everybody for taking the trip along with us. We'll return in a week with the new Bartnik adventures in Brazil.
2009-10-25
2009-10-14
The Algarve
This past weekend, we finally visited the Algarve, the southernmost state in Portugal, bordering the Atlantic Ocean. We had been anticipating this trip for over 2 months and thankfully, it exceeded all of our wildest expectation. The city that we visited was named Lagos, and it is characterized by these rugged, towering cliffs that overlook the sea. If that weren’t enough, hundreds of tiny beaches and hidden grottos dot the landscape, making it perfect for exploring.To be honest, most of the trails carved into the cliff are either for the very fit or the very stupid. Guess which category we fe
el into to? Still, I think you’ll agree the pictures were worth
it.We also ended up taking a boat tour of some of the grottos that are only accessible by water and they were breathtaking. The water, as you might be able to see, is perfectly clear and absolutely luminous. The rest of the time was spent sunning ourselves on a beach that was 220 steps down a sheer cliff. Click here to see the rest of our pics from this place.
Needless to say, Matt and I have fallen in love with the place, and are already trying to scheme our way back here in the future.
2009-10-01
Belem II
We visited Belem (yet again) this time to check out the Torre de Belem and the Maritime Museum. The tower was interesting, if one doesn’t mind traipsing up and down claustrophobic spiral staircases. What really caught our attention, though, were the actual barges of the Portuguese royal family that were housed in the maritime museum. Some of the boats here are from 1790, and carried all manner of princes and queens.
Too Present the Past
I have been considering the past a lot lately. It’s hard not to, when I traipse over roughened cobblestone streets in the morning that have existed, in some form or another, for approximately 300 years. It’s difficult to forget when I frequent a candle shop which has been in business at the same location for 220 years. And it doesn’t help when, every morning, my first view is a river that carried every major explorer for the past 500 years.
Much has been written about the “weight” or the “burden” of the past on its people. I sense no bowed shoulders or heavy thoughts here. What is fascinating, though, is the interaction that these people have with their own history. One of the first museums that we visited was the Museu Arquelogico do Carmo, a cathedral that remains open to the elements, yet is still filled with ruins and artifacts. Nothing is behind glass or temperature controlled. Nothing is “protected”. I ran my fingers of the roughened surface of a 350-year old tombstone, guiltily at first, and then more confident as I realized no one was going to arrest me. One picture remains indelibly burned in my mind: a child, no more than a toddler really, climbing inside an ancient Roman fountain in order to play. Part of me wanted to rush over there and yank the child out admonishing the whole way. The other part of me was charmed.
These images lay heavy on my mind, my own assumed “weight” of the past. Did the Portuguese have so little respect for the past? Was history too present for them to ever take it seriously? Or was I simply being neurotic in my foreignness?
Some days later, I visited the Parque das Nacoes of Lisbon, a futuristic water development north of the city center that was created in 1998. It boasts everything the modern human might want: a shopping mall, an aquarium, state-of-the-art hotels, and a cable car system from which to sigh over it. But as I stared at its tangled, gleaming twists of white and silver steel, it struck me that the overall impression was of a child grasping at ideas of modernity and the future without comprehending them. This place was trying too hard.
In the United States, it seems as if there are no barriers between us and the future. For the most part, we revel in technological change, welcoming and integrating with every step of the way. But this, in turn, creates a barrier between us and the past. We’re so careful of it, so proud of it, that we slap pieces of history under 5” glass and carefully regulated lighting, while never realizing the barrier we created in our protectiveness. In Portugal, it’s just the opposite. Their present and their past are inextricably linked, woven together so seamlessly that it’s hard to differentiate between the two. Their churches, their cobblestone streets, their bakeries, all a part of history and all utilized every day in the present. It is history without reverence, without precision, without detachment. But again, this creates a barrier between them and the future, to the point where they can envision it, but never integrate it.
Is one way better than the other? Who’s to say? Certainly not I. But as I was walking through the sleek modernity of Lisbon, awed with the aquarium built to float on the water, I tripped on something. I looked down. Cobblestones. Cobblestones amongst this expensive altar of modernity. I laughed all the way to the cable cars.
Much has been written about the “weight” or the “burden” of the past on its people. I sense no bowed shoulders or heavy thoughts here. What is fascinating, though, is the interaction that these people have with their own history. One of the first museums that we visited was the Museu Arquelogico do Carmo, a cathedral that remains open to the elements, yet is still filled with ruins and artifacts. Nothing is behind glass or temperature controlled. Nothing is “protected”. I ran my fingers of the roughened surface of a 350-year old tombstone, guiltily at first, and then more confident as I realized no one was going to arrest me. One picture remains indelibly burned in my mind: a child, no more than a toddler really, climbing inside an ancient Roman fountain in order to play. Part of me wanted to rush over there and yank the child out admonishing the whole way. The other part of me was charmed.
These images lay heavy on my mind, my own assumed “weight” of the past. Did the Portuguese have so little respect for the past? Was history too present for them to ever take it seriously? Or was I simply being neurotic in my foreignness?
Some days later, I visited the Parque das Nacoes of Lisbon, a futuristic water development north of the city center that was created in 1998. It boasts everything the modern human might want: a shopping mall, an aquarium, state-of-the-art hotels, and a cable car system from which to sigh over it. But as I stared at its tangled, gleaming twists of white and silver steel, it struck me that the overall impression was of a child grasping at ideas of modernity and the future without comprehending them. This place was trying too hard.
In the United States, it seems as if there are no barriers between us and the future. For the most part, we revel in technological change, welcoming and integrating with every step of the way. But this, in turn, creates a barrier between us and the past. We’re so careful of it, so proud of it, that we slap pieces of history under 5” glass and carefully regulated lighting, while never realizing the barrier we created in our protectiveness. In Portugal, it’s just the opposite. Their present and their past are inextricably linked, woven together so seamlessly that it’s hard to differentiate between the two. Their churches, their cobblestone streets, their bakeries, all a part of history and all utilized every day in the present. It is history without reverence, without precision, without detachment. But again, this creates a barrier between them and the future, to the point where they can envision it, but never integrate it.
Is one way better than the other? Who’s to say? Certainly not I. But as I was walking through the sleek modernity of Lisbon, awed with the aquarium built to float on the water, I tripped on something. I looked down. Cobblestones. Cobblestones amongst this expensive altar of modernity. I laughed all the way to the cable cars.
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