Belem is a few stops from me on the Lisboa-Cascais railway. At the mouth of the Tagus, it's traditionally the place from which the conquistadors and explorers were seen off, and, mostly, welcomed home to Portugal. It's littered with enormous phallic monuments to people like da Gama and Dias, heroes in their own nation, vandals and homicidal enslavers in other, more southern, nations. One man's meat...
There used to be a little hermitage here, where da Gama spent the night before sailing on his epic journey to India at the end of the 15th century. When he returned, flush with success, the king ordered a vast and impressive monastery to be built on the ruins of the hermitage - Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, arguably the vastest and most impressive monastery in Portugal.
Although the squandering of piles of money on a religious statement is not to my taste, the monastery is admittedly very pretty, and as a bonus, inside are buried, side by side, two of Portugal's notables. One is da Gama, who, as I've said, had a lasting effect on my own home region. The other, more culturally fascinating, is Luís da Camões, the 16th century author and poet, half-blind soldier, traveller, romantic. In a shipwreck off Cambodia, his Chinese lover was drowned, but he managed to swim to shore holding aloft his precious manuscript for one of Portugal's classics - the Lusiads. Scandals ensued after his love affairs with princesses and queens, and he was imprisoned several times for debt and fights. He dropped out of the University of Coimbra - hence the statue I had to pass every day while studying there. Fascinating guy...
Also in Belem, and along the sam colonial lines, is the Monument of Discovery, an enormous structure leaning out over the Tagus, Vasco da Gama leading the conquistadors into regions unknown, spreading Portugal's influence and briefly making it one of the wealthiest empires in the world.
All very impressive.
More interesting, perhaps, is the living, modern city of Lisbon. One of the must-do activities in Lisbon is a ride on the old trams, so Dad and I made our way to a small square where one of the trams begins its perilous ascent to the castle. There was a queue. A long queue. Apparently, everyone else reads Lonely Planet too. The last time I was in Lisbon, it was the depths of winter and the tourists had gone to warmer climes - my friends and I travelled all day on empty trams, chatting to the conductors and hanging off the back rails. One tram came and went, filled to the brim with camera-wielding behatted Europeans; the next came with a twin. Dad and I got on the first one, and managed to nab the last two seats by a window. Luckily for us, this driver decided he wasn't there to be nice, and closed the doors to the other 30 people in the queue; the tram behind us didn't take any passengers at all, but just drove by! Lucky us :)
The No 28 tram wends its way through narrow streets, past Graça and its little olive tree-lined squares, up to the summit where the castle sprawls, and then down again past the teeming alleys of Alfama.
The Castello de São Jorge is another Moorish bequest, as is Alfama, where tiny houses are filled by tight communities - and have been since the time of the Romans. During Moorish times, it constituted the entire city, and it's the only place in Lisbon to survive the great 1755 earthquake.
After a day's wandering, including an unplanned trip out to a mall on the edges of the city for a CD Dad wanted, we were exhausted, and headed back to Cascais for dinner and coffee. I took Dad to Flecha Azul, the friendly cafe next door to my school, where we sat outside enjoying the evening cool. A familiar, older man emerged from the cafe to smoke a cigarette (and by the way, I'm astounded by how well the Portuguese have taken to being told not to smoke indoors - the last time I was here, there were ashtrays outside shops in enclosed malls, and the Portuguese were making full use of them!) The man, who was familiar in the way that many faces are becoming familiar to me in little Cascais, started chatting to us and turned out to be an English retiree who's lived in Portugal for 10 years (although in time-honoured English tradition, he speaks almost no Portuguese!) He was a fascinating find: in Cascais, most retirees are conservative, upper-middle class bridge players, but he was working class and liberal. Finding out we were Zimbabwean, he self-deprecatingly said he knew nothing about it, but then turned out, as so often, to know quite a lot. He told us of a story that did the rounds in the 70s: apparently, when Joshua Nkomo went to England for the first time, it was traditional for the Queen to pick up visiting dignitaries from Victoria Station in her coach, it being just round the corner from the Palace. Feeling slightly awkward, the pair were sitting in the coach making stilted conversation, when one of the horses lifted its tail and noisily let out some air. At which the Queen murmured "Oh, do pardon me!"
"Oh, no problem, your majesty," says our forgiving Nkomo, "I thought it was the horse..."
Oh, British humour!
Although the squandering of piles of money on a religious statement is not to my taste, the monastery is admittedly very pretty, and as a bonus, inside are buried, side by side, two of Portugal's notables. One is da Gama, who, as I've said, had a lasting effect on my own home region. The other, more culturally fascinating, is Luís da Camões, the 16th century author and poet, half-blind soldier, traveller, romantic. In a shipwreck off Cambodia, his Chinese lover was drowned, but he managed to swim to shore holding aloft his precious manuscript for one of Portugal's classics - the Lusiads. Scandals ensued after his love affairs with princesses and queens, and he was imprisoned several times for debt and fights. He dropped out of the University of Coimbra - hence the statue I had to pass every day while studying there. Fascinating guy...
Also in Belem, and along the sam colonial lines, is the Monument of Discovery, an enormous structure leaning out over the Tagus, Vasco da Gama leading the conquistadors into regions unknown, spreading Portugal's influence and briefly making it one of the wealthiest empires in the world.
All very impressive.
More interesting, perhaps, is the living, modern city of Lisbon. One of the must-do activities in Lisbon is a ride on the old trams, so Dad and I made our way to a small square where one of the trams begins its perilous ascent to the castle. There was a queue. A long queue. Apparently, everyone else reads Lonely Planet too. The last time I was in Lisbon, it was the depths of winter and the tourists had gone to warmer climes - my friends and I travelled all day on empty trams, chatting to the conductors and hanging off the back rails. One tram came and went, filled to the brim with camera-wielding behatted Europeans; the next came with a twin. Dad and I got on the first one, and managed to nab the last two seats by a window. Luckily for us, this driver decided he wasn't there to be nice, and closed the doors to the other 30 people in the queue; the tram behind us didn't take any passengers at all, but just drove by! Lucky us :)
The No 28 tram wends its way through narrow streets, past Graça and its little olive tree-lined squares, up to the summit where the castle sprawls, and then down again past the teeming alleys of Alfama.
The Castello de São Jorge is another Moorish bequest, as is Alfama, where tiny houses are filled by tight communities - and have been since the time of the Romans. During Moorish times, it constituted the entire city, and it's the only place in Lisbon to survive the great 1755 earthquake.
After a day's wandering, including an unplanned trip out to a mall on the edges of the city for a CD Dad wanted, we were exhausted, and headed back to Cascais for dinner and coffee. I took Dad to Flecha Azul, the friendly cafe next door to my school, where we sat outside enjoying the evening cool. A familiar, older man emerged from the cafe to smoke a cigarette (and by the way, I'm astounded by how well the Portuguese have taken to being told not to smoke indoors - the last time I was here, there were ashtrays outside shops in enclosed malls, and the Portuguese were making full use of them!) The man, who was familiar in the way that many faces are becoming familiar to me in little Cascais, started chatting to us and turned out to be an English retiree who's lived in Portugal for 10 years (although in time-honoured English tradition, he speaks almost no Portuguese!) He was a fascinating find: in Cascais, most retirees are conservative, upper-middle class bridge players, but he was working class and liberal. Finding out we were Zimbabwean, he self-deprecatingly said he knew nothing about it, but then turned out, as so often, to know quite a lot. He told us of a story that did the rounds in the 70s: apparently, when Joshua Nkomo went to England for the first time, it was traditional for the Queen to pick up visiting dignitaries from Victoria Station in her coach, it being just round the corner from the Palace. Feeling slightly awkward, the pair were sitting in the coach making stilted conversation, when one of the horses lifted its tail and noisily let out some air. At which the Queen murmured "Oh, do pardon me!"
"Oh, no problem, your majesty," says our forgiving Nkomo, "I thought it was the horse..."
Oh, British humour!
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