Madrid Portugal Madrid

By normal standards, daily life hadn’t really become daily life when we bought our tickets to Lisbon, Portugal, for the weekend. Teaching 4 days a week for a week and a half still felt like another part of my seemingly rotating, evolving life characteristic of the last two months. Barely 10 nights in the same bed, but was already 10 times that of any other bed I’ve been in in the last 8 weeks. Language acquisition works in very discreet ways as suddenly my tongue no longer felt quite as sluggish, the streets a bit less foreign, and I no longer called our new home “the apartment” but instead the “piso.”

Madrileño friends, met at my epic first full evening in Madrid, brought us to some hidden holes-in-the-wall where the palpable vibe of Europe and, more specifically, Madrid lay waiting for a wannabe-European-but-Minnesotan to feast upon. Nondescript buildings, bolted shut during 99.9% of the normal hours that any American would expect, suddenly become breathing, vibrant hangs where you can barely remember where you are and, reciprocally, make you feel as though nobody could ever find you here as you sit amongst throngs of flying Spanish words and lit Marlboro cigarettes (this isn’t the only paradox here – take, for example, the mullets gone from white rural society to high style upper class status in every corner of Western Europe). A sense of transcendence makes me feel as though I were Ralph Waldo Emerson, stuck in the woods somewhere, and despite the glaring difference in surroundings, I must admit the effect is quite the same. Nobody knows me, nobody can find me, and self-sufficience and quiet, intense observation of my surroundings brings thoughts that normally would be lost to being too accustomed and too well-known for my own good.

Certainly I’m sure Ralph Waldo Emerson occasionally cut himself with his pocket knife, or tripped upon a sprawling tree root. A sudden resurgence of the empirical reality of everyday existence. Our proverbial rainstorm came in the form of our difficulty of finding where in God’s name we pick up our tickets for our overnight bus to Lisbon. To continue with the comparison to American transcendentalism, let me compare Spanish bureaucracy (the attempt to find bus schedules, prices, buy the ticket, pick up the ticket, find the bus, and get on the bus) to separating a grape vine from a maple tree. Even once our tickets were bought, names registered, bags packed, and we arrived at the station to pick up our tickets, we were forced to spend close to 20 rather stressful minutes trying to find out which of the 4 offices for ALSA bus company to pick up our tickets. As with any rainstorm, it passes, and after 8 or so hours of restless sleep on the bus, we were arriving in Lisbon immediately before sunrise.

Arriving with not the slightest clue about where to go, what to see, where things were, or where we’d find ourselves in 4 hours, we hopped on the Lisbon metro (which is like any metro in its inability to really reflect anything about the quality of the world above) and took the escalator up through yellow-lit tunnels to find ourselves finally looking out upon a quintessentially quaint, old, brick-laden and beautiful European avenue at daybreak, complete with symmetrically balconied-buildings flanking either side of our view as we looked out through the arched exit of the metro. Without a doubt one of the most beautiful exits of any metro I’ve ever seen , and also one of the most dramatic first-views of any city I’ve ever seen.

Lisbon proved pretty amazing. Though we had no idea where our hostel was when we left the metro, our hostel was a balconied-room four stories above one of the most central and beautiful streets in Lisbon, with nightly entertainment off our balcony of roaming musicians and Portuguese ensembles providing music for the restaurants below and, as a result, us above. Sunrise views out over historic Lisbon, soup for less than 2 euros, beautiful Sintra and is striking castles and palaces overlooking the Atlantic, the Torre of Belem – all proved amazingly beautiful and exciting, since we had no idea what to expect from Portugal.

Hostels can be great or bad, and ours was great also due to the three Italians we met who we ended up hanging out with. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long time as I did when they feigned interest in the inevitable flower and squeaky-toy roaming salesmen that somehow show up in every beautiful European city. To the salesmen’s chagrin, the Italians in fact did not really love the squeaking ducks, but instead used it as a way to get them to eventually leave us alone as they realized we really didn’t want the toys but instead wanted only the laughter that arose from pretending we were interested.

Saying good-bye to Lisbon was, as always, bittersweet as yet another city had turned from stranger to dear friend, but we had the satisfying feeling of anticipation of “home” as we headed back to Madrid.