Trip - Day 2 - Salema, Lagos, Lisbon

12/30/09
During the wee hours of the night/early morning, Becca woke up and said, “What?! What? Who is it? It could have been the Christmas men paying for sweets with Euros. You don’t get it. They could have been using pounds.” Then she went back to sleep.

Breakfast at our Villa in Salema was good and German – Museli and yogurt. Salami and cheese. Bread and jam. Nescafe.
Heiwi’s girlfriend drove us to the train station in Lagos. We bought our tickets to Lisbon. We had a couple hours to burn so we started to walk into the city centre to check out Lagos and it began to rain. I rebuked it and it was mildly better after that I think. We looked at a cathedrael and a blind lady begging in the doorway and a nativity scene and rain and a slave market and rain. I dragged Becca to a Lonely planet recommended restaurant, Casinsa do Petisco, and ordered the prato do dia and a coke. It ended up being squid stuffed with chorizo and more squid. It was tasty and I was full town USA (and Portugal) afterwards. We had to run to catch our train, but we did. There was an Indian boy in front of us wrapping his head in the window curtain and crying, “I can’t see!” He made friends with a boy with an eyepatch that was sitting next to him. Then, when the eyepatch boy got off the train, he cried “My friend!”
And my shuffle played Tom Waits, Getz/Gilberto, the Books, Fleetfoxes, Monk chants, Radiohead, Wilco, Sufjan, Buddy Guy, Richard Swift, the Beatles and Belle and Sebastian.

Trains are like moving bars with a 20 Euro cover charge.

We arrived in Lisbon and took the subway to Chiado and the Lisbon Poets Hostel. Nice set up. We wandered around Barrio Alto and stopped into the Solar something Port Institute. The port was the right price (just over a euro) but the service was not awesome. My hair grew a few inches in the time it took them to serve us. So I punched our waiter in the face and stole his wallet and insulted his mother in my mind. Then we wandered around some more and argued about where to eat and about what street we had already walked down. But we went to a place with checkered tablecloths and I ate rabbit (including testicles) and it was good. tasty wine.

We wandered around town some more. There were amazing Christmas lights, a different set on each street. There was a big arch in one of the main plazas in town and they had 30 foot tall Beatles. John, Paul, George and Ringo. We laughed at them. We walked by a cathedrael and a fado club. We are super walkers. We walked the fig newton out of that city. I had a drink at café do Brazilia then we went to bed. Or at least tried to.

Ah, hostels. We stayed in the Poets Hostel. It was nice, but sometimes people are funny.

“it’s 12:30AM and there’s a girl with the entire contents of her backback strewn on her bunk, with the light on…packing? Or just rusting the plastic” So I listened to Bon Iver, Dirty Projectors and the Beatles.

later

“First, I don’t get this girl packing at 1am. Really? Plastic? Plastic! Crinkle crinkle. What the world? Throw your schizle in your bag and be done with it. Is it really such an operation? Crinkle, crinkle, zip, crinkle. It’s like when someone unwraps one of those pinwheel peppermint candies at church, except if it were 5 foot in diameter."

Lisbon was:
Red liquid in little plastic cups. A native American (?) playing the flute in the headdress. Custard pastries, bica, caffine, Sagres, and Superbock, and port.
Winding streets, laundry and bedsheets hanging in the breeze.
Dodging rickety yellow trams.
Rain and sun.
Back alley bakeries supplying snacks at 3 AM.
Christmas lights, fireworks, streetlamps, white stone sidewalks.
Churches for quiet contemplation of the mystery of the Incarnation.
Nativity scenes that wordlessly spoke 100 languages.