Tuesday, October 21, 1997

Lisboa Letters

Thursday night :
Lisbon is but a young image (i.e. not yet fully implanted on the mind) of ancient forts and buildings with its decaying splendour. Taking the coastal stroll is full of flavours of Los Angeles, Marseilles and Elba, its bizarre shrub vegetation planted to avoid sandstorms, pigeon-shit facaded decrepid old villas abandoned with a haunted air about them, a vast expanse of freezing ocean cracked with large cliffs and mossy plates of rock.
The Electric Museum, a vast bastion of glass and industrialization, British built with massive windows faces the ''Golden Gate'' bridge , unlit spanning the Rio Tejo now becoming a gentrified bar haven-strip with Expo 98 creeping up at the end.

Friday morning :
Staying in the Pensao Setubalanse in a small room with a very high ceiling and no view as the window is 12ft high. The President lives a stone's throw away and the street bears a great mothy feel to it. Opposite is the restauarant Chines Xi , with a large ceramic front and stereo-typical red interior. Breakfast in the Pasteis Belem, a fabulous old pastry shop with its deco shelves abundant with dusty bottles of Mateus and J&B whiskey. The language is so alien here with its metallic twang and despite certain similarities, one is forced to converse in English!
Cobbled streets creased with trams hissing along their tracks, like tubular modern, air-con serpents.... now in front of the Mosteiro Dos Jeronimos, a mighty Gothic chunk of carved stone with elephants in the Santissimo Sacramento depicting a symbol of their efforts in heaving volumes of stone during its construction. Sitting on a bench in front of it, watching a cluster of excited Japanese tourists all suited and sunglassed, with itchy camera trigger-fingers, board the little yellow tourist tram and slither away in the distance. It's fantastic to be envelopped in the harsh Gothic surround of the Mosteiro and yet be able to taste the milky green waters of the Atlantic within the same half-hour.
Culture by the ocean, the cobbled mosaic pavements , buildings lathered in mothy green slime in their slow decay, all the decrepidness, the decay, leads to this salty, seedy environs oozing a past decadence of this little sideburn of Europe ...... the sun beats 32°C in mid October !

Tuesday 6.20 a.m. : Aeroporto de Lisboa.
Liitle trams all cast in wood, rather forlorn in comparison to their larger German imported ones that hiss down the street like bulbous anacondas in their advertised skin. A certain sadness prevails in Lisboa, hard to put one's finger on, but perhaps summed up by the dramatic wails of the fado admist its mossy misery. All nighters make me itch as the coffee alarm kicks in and getting hypnotized by the sonorous drone of the lottery seller in the airport.

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