Much to tell. Shelley
Boyes has been – and gone. It was a good weekend, with some very interesting
activities. But first, the Thursday –
not that there’s much to tell about it.
The day was forecast
to be beautiful: mostly sunny, high of 19°C. We had lunch at the apartment and
then walked up Avenida de Liberdade to Edward VII Park. We took our e-readers,
with the idea of sitting on a bench and whiling away some time, but also talked
of taking a look at the large greenhouses in the park.
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| Park benchin' it in Edward VII Park, Lisbon |
The walk was...hot.
We’d forgotten how much Liberdade goes uphill, even if relatively gently. It was hard work in
the sun, especially as I was over-dressed. When we got to the park, we found a bench in the
shade, and sat reading for awhile. It’s the nature of the climate here that, once you’re out of the direct sun, it gets cool pretty quickly. We soon
moved over to a bench in the sun. We spent almost an hour being lazy. I did get
up at one point to take some silly pictures of the pruned tops of trees lining
the walkway, while Karen read her book. (I actually quite like the pictures.)
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| Edward VII Park, Lisbon |
I had read that you could
walk along the top of the old aqueduct, built in the mid-18th century to bring
fresh water to the city from the mountains. Our book explained where to go. The
entrance is in an out-of-the-way park about a 20- or 25-minute walk from where
we were. It’s in a residential neighbourhood at the end of a tricky route, with
not very interesting streets along the way.
When we got there,
Karen noticed a sign pointing to a ticket booth. Surely they wouldn’t charge
admission to walk along an aqueduct. Would they? There was also mention of a
museum, so I thought, oh, the tickets are for the museum. We could see the
entrance to the walkway directly in front of us, and started towards it. Just
as we got there, a guy came running up and told us that, yes, we did need
tickets – 3€ each. Karen was tired and joint-weary anyway, and I was kind of
disgusted they would charge money for this, more in fact than we’d paid
for some really good museums. So we turned and left.
We walked back by a
different route that took us through more not-very-charming parts of Lisbon, at
one point by the big Amoreires shopping plaza, and eventually back to
Liberdade. By the time we got home, we were both done in. I can’t even remember
who cooked dinner.
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| Near Armoreiras shopping mall, Lisbon |
The next day, Friday,
we were mostly in idle mode, except for a big Pingo Doce shop in the early
afternoon, until Shelley arrived. She had flown in late the night before and stayed at a posh hotel on Avenida de Liberdade because she had a lunch meeting with her local law firm the next day. She cabbed over to our place in the afternoon about 3:30. After which the drinking
and hilarity began.
At one point, we took drinks in go cups and walked up to
the Miradouro de Senhora do Monte at the top of our street. It was chilly and
windy as usual, but the views compensated. A new wrinkle: there was a
little portable cafe there, in the back of a tuk-tuk (tiny taxi built on three-wheel motorbike chassis). Very cute.
The evening was
planned: we had a reservation for dinner at Cantinho Lusitano, a tiny
Portuguese bistro in Bairro Alto, run by a young couple – she the front of
house, he the chef. Shelley had discovered it during one of her earlier stays
in the city, when she lived in the neighbourhood. She’s been recommending it ever since. The later slightly revised plan was to head out early
and have a drink in another place she knew on Rua Dom Petro V near the Alcântara miradouro.
So a little after 6
p.m., we walked down to Placa de Martim Moniz and grabbed a cab at the Hotel
Mondiale. (You will note, gentle reader that, of a sudden, your correspondent, heretofore a model of frugality, has begun to take taxis. How
can this be? I’ll leave you to guess.) The cab dropped us near the Miradouro de
São Pedro de Alcântara, near a place called Lost In, another old haunt of Shelley’s.
It’s an attractive
place, down a rubbly-looking alleyway, so invisible from the street, aside from
a discrete sign.
It’s built on a hillside, with views out over the city. The decor is
predominantly East Indian, the menu eclectic. We tried sitting out on the
charming patio, but the views right now are marred by a construction site just
below – a new boutique hotel, apparently. Plus, the wind had come up and it was
getting chilly. We moved inside. Shelley insisted we try some appetizers: a
honey and goat cheese dish, and the “lollipop” chicken – tiny chicken bones
with little balls of meat on the end (from pygmy chickens, presumably). Both
good.
We walked from Lost
In to the dinner restaurant, about ten minutes away, down into a very middle-class residential district. The door was locked, with no
handle on the outside. You have to wait for the owner to come and let you in.
She made a great play of welcoming us, teasing that she was disappointed
because she thought it was Jerri Halliwell
of the Spice Girls coming for dinner. (I had booked by e-mail so she had my
full name.) We were seated at a tiny table near the kitchen, which might
normally put my back up a bit, but it seemed okay because the
young woman was so charming and funny about it. The restaurant has about six
tables – we counted a total of 19 seats.
They serve a Portuguese take on tapas – small dishes for sharing. We ordered six in all: pica pau, a beef dish in a piquant sauce, fava bean salad, mushrooms
stuffed with cheese and bacon, pork stew (made with pork cheeks, Shelley says,
although the menu no longer says so, perhaps for fear of turning off North
American customers), little potatoes roasted with rosemary, and garlic shrimp.
Everything was very good and obviously lovingly prepared. We ate it with a
bottle of crisp white Portuguese wine. Conversation flowed. The bill was not
outrageous. (Can’t remember what it was.) All in all, a fun evening.
We cabbed home and
sat nattering until I started to fall asleep in my seat, at which point I
trundled off to bed and left the ladies to their devices. Our noisy upstairs
neighbour – have I mentioned her? – was strangely silent. We assumed she must
be away.
The plan for Saturday
was a moving target. There had been talk of going out to Belem to the see the Berardo
modern art gallery. We thought that was Shelley’s wish, but she seemed lukewarm
on it now. We were easy. In the end, we headed into the centre on foot, with
the idea of walking to one or both of the Marionette Museum and/or the national
historical art gallery. We went via Largo do Graca, in search of a fado place we’d
heard about that sounded promising. We couldn’t find it. (Turns out it had
moved.) We stopped on the way down at the Miradouro da Graca and Our Lady of
Graca church to show Shelley.
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| Our Lady of Grace church |
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| Eschadino near Graca miradouro with view of our hill |
When we got down near
Rossio Square, Shelley, who as usual hadn’t eaten a proper breakfast, suggested
we go for roast chicken lunch at a place she knew nearby. We did, and it was
good, and inexpensive: half a roast chicken with fries for 6.95€. Attentive and
dignified middle-aged waiter.
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| Lunch near Rossio Square - I'm calling this one 'Skeptical' |
We walked a little
further than we bargained on to get to the Marionette Museum, which is past
Bica, half way out to Belem (or seemed it), through some interesting
neighbourhoods that were new to all of us. We tend to look at city
neighbourhoods with an appraising eye: could we live here (for a season or a
couple of months)? The answer in this case, was probably yes. Some nice
tile-fronted apartment blocks, quiet streets, not too many hills.
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| Marionette Museum: cloister of old convent: note partly restored fresco painting, and laundry - the mezzanine level is apartments |
The museum is
gorgeous, in an old convent that has been fairly recently refitted, at no
small expense, to accommodate the museum’s collection. The collection is
spectacular. It’s basically a survey of puppetry around the world, with examples
– many of them brilliant works of art – all beautifully exhibited. There are
puppets from several Asian countries, West Africa, Brazil, Europe (with
emphasis on Portugal, naturally). I particularly liked some of the modern
Portuguese marionettes. The interpretive information is very good, well translated.
The museum’s brochure, also in English, is comprehensive.
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| West African puppet mask |
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| Chinese stick puppet |
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| French Punch & Judy glove puppets |
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| Javanese (I think) stick puppets |
Towards the end of
the permanent exhibit, the displays start to shift to stop-motion film making,
which I suppose is a form of puppetry if you stretch the definition. The
special exhibit right now is a showing of sets and figures used in the making
of a Czech animated feature movie called Malé
z rybárny (Little from the Fish Shop), a retelling of the Hans Christian
Andersen Little Mermaid story. The world created for the film – apparently
based on a kind of 1930s version of Hamburg docklands – and the puppet
characters are brilliant. The movie came out last year, but is apparently not
available online yet – except from off-market and pirate video sites.
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| Modern Portuguese marionettes |
We took a cab home.
Our plan for the evening was to eat lightly at the apartment, then go out and
try and catch some fado. Fado is the melancholy folk music of Portugal. It's still
popular here. We spent a frustrating couple of hours researching
the best place to go – a further
couple of hours; I’ve been researching this for some time. It’s something I
really wanted to do. I’ve been listening to recordings at home and grown to like
the music a lot. But it seems most fado places in Lisbon now are tourist traps
where you have to buy an expensive meal of mediocre food, and sometimes pay an
exorbitant cover charge as well. I tried Googling “fado without dinner,” but didn’t
immediately come up with anything very helpful. (I wasn’t the first to ask for
the same information.)
I did finally stumble
on a good online article by travel book writer Rick Steeves, about
exploring fado clubs in the Alfama district. His recommendation was simple: go
late, walk around in the area just above the Fado Museum, where most of the
clubs are located, and look for a place that does fado vadio – informal, often amateur fado. You won’t get
professional sound systems or name acts, but you will get an authentic
experience. Neighbourhood amateurs often drop by to belt out a couple of tunes.
I had read about fado vadio and knew this was what we wanted.
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| "Moorish ruin" below street our apartment faces |
Late in the
afternoon, we took drinks out to the little patio below us on Damasceno de
Monteiro. Lots of tourists about. I was photographing up the street of the
poetesses mural and noticed that up on the rooftop of one of the houses, a
whole bunch of young people had come out and were sitting on the peak to watch
the late sun. I also managed to photograph the little garden below Damesceno de
Monteiro, which Shelley thought looked like a Moorish ruin. (I think it’s more
likely a folly – built to look like a
ruin.)
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| Beco at bottom of our hill with Poetesses mural - note folks sitting on roof peak, top left (click to see bigger version of pic) |
We set out for our
evening a little after 10 and walked down the hill from Graca into Alfama, past
a thumping young people’s nightclub on Rua da Voz do Operário. We moved pretty
quickly into quieter streets below São Vicente da Fora church, on the edge of
the area where the fado clubs cluster. The first likely-looking place – with
crowds milling outside, and signs in the windows seemingly advertising fado –
didn’t have live music. We walked on another 50 meters, and came to a little
place called Tasco For A de Moda. A middle-aged man and woman accosted us
outside – the owners? – and told us there was fado on right then, and there was
no cover. We said we just wanted drinks, and they said that was fine. So in we
went, a little suspicious still, but willing to take a chance.
It was a tiny place
with seating for maybe 35, rustic decor. The performers, two guitarists – one
on the distinctive Portuguese 12-string guitar – and a male singer were sitting
or standing among the tables in one corner on the lower level, down a few steps
from where we were seated near the door. The musicians were middle-aged,
dressed in street clothes. The singer, I’m guessing, was an amateur, although
he had a very good voice. He looked like he could be a plumber by day: big
square shaved head, broad shoulders, thick chest, a nice face. The guitarists
were probably professionals – they were excellent – although I would doubt they
could make a living if all they did was play in little clubs like this.
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| Tasco For A de Moda - note Portuguese 12-string guitar at left |
We ordered drinks. I asked
for a beer. Small, medium or “big,” the waiter wanted to know. I said big,
because usually here a “small” beer is not much more than half the size of a
regular bottle. When it came, it was a huge stein, probably 750 ml, at least
500. I was taken aback – as no doubt I was supposed to be – and showed it. Everybody laughed, the waiter grinned good-naturedly. I offered some of it to the young couple who had come in behind us
and were sitting at the next table. (They turned out to be a Swiss artist and
his Swedish girl friend, a singer/songwriter, who lived in Zurich.) A few
minutes later, the waiter brought me a shot glass with beer in it, plunked it
down and said, “Small beer!”
Everybody laughed some more.
I had noticed a woman
in her 40s, dressed in “traditional” clothes – full skirt, billowy blouse, buttoned vest, fringed shawl – sitting at the next table. I guessed she was
another of the performers, and sure enough, after the man had sung a couple of
numbers, she got up and took the floor. She was a much more engaging performer,
a real entertainer, with a good, though perhaps not quite professional-calibre,
voice. Her repertoire tended to the more upbeat, some of the numbers quite
bouncy and positively un-fado like. She sang three or four songs (click the play button below the picture to hear what she sounded like), and then the
musicians took a break.
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| Fado soul |
At some point during the break, a very drunk Dutch woman flopped herself in a seat at the table behind us, and said to no one in particular, in English, “I’m not happy!” Shelley, all solicitous asked, “Are you alright?” Turns out she was in high dudgeon because when her and her husbands’ bill came, there was a cover of 3€ each, despite the maitre d’ having told them, as she had us, that there was no extra charge for the music. The woman kept shouting, with embarrassed staff trying to calm her. We had seen them earlier with the woman. We assumed she was a friend of the establishment because at one point, one of them gave her a big hug. But they must have been trying to jolly her, and probably shush her so as not to disturb the performers. Her husband had disappeared outside, too embarrassed to deal with it.
The husband finally came
back in and paid the bill, over her loud protestations. He turned to her a
couple of times and said angrily, “Stop!” He’d had enough. After they left,
Shelley went out for a cigarette and got talking to the maitre d’ (and the Swiss/Swedish couple.) The Dutch woman, it
turns out, had drunk over two bottles of wine on her own – while her husband
had one beer! She misunderstood the cover charge, which was not for the music but for the bread and
cheese and appetizers that restaurants here often serve without you ordering
it. If you eat some, they charge you, but you can wave it away when they bring
it, or just leave it alone, and avoid the charges. We don’t like this practice,
but there had been no real trickery here, and 3€ didn’t sound unreasonable to
us anyway.
We listened to one
more set up top, with the same two singers, then moved down to the main floor,
which had largely emptied out. The last set started with some new singers, much
more obviously amateurs. Shelley at one point whispered to me, “It’s the fado
version of karyoke.” That was a bit harsh, perhaps. We heard two okay male
singers, obviously neighbourhood folks who had dropped in, very sincere. Then a
40-ish woman with a mane of frizzy hair got up. She could really belt it out, and
with great passion. After she’d sung a couple on her own, she coaxed the
moonlighting plumber up, and they sang a duet that was absolutely gorgeous. We
were gobsmacked. The original two singers took over after that.
When we finally left,
it was after one. We’d pretty much closed the place down. Shelley went off to
the loo and Karen went outside to get cool. I flagged the waiter to pay. He said,
“Six euros.” I thought he must be saying 60, and was a little aghast, but I
asked him to repeat it a couple of times. I finally handed him a 10€ note, and
he gave me change. I went outside and told Karen what a great deal we’d got. She
pointed out that her wine was listed on the menu at 4.50€, and there should
have been three glasses of wine on the bill, plus my huge beer. Obviously there
had been a mistake. So back in I went.
I looked at the waiter
questioningly as I came in, and it finally dawned on him. He’d apparently confused
me with another customer. Our bill was actually 20.50€ – still very reasonable. At this point, Shelley
came along, handed him a 50€ note, and said, “Take 20 out of that and buy the
performers a drink.”
We had talked about
cabbing home, but it really wasn’t very far. We were back at the apartment in
little more than 20 minutes. It was after two before Shelley and I packed it in.
Sunday was Shelley’s
last day in Lisbon, although her flight didn’t leave until after nine in the
evening. We got up very late, for us – even Karen slept until nearly ten, and
it was ten when I got up. Shelley
emerged shortly after.
After some
discussion, we decided to walk down through Alfama – basically where we were
the night before, but exploring a little more in daylight – and then along the
river into the centre. From there, we’d walk out past Cais do Sodre train
station into the Lapa district to the Museu
Nacional de Arte Antiga, the national museum of historical art. And then aim to
be back home by 5 for Karen to make a roast pork dinner before Shelley had to
get her cab to the airport. Whew!
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| Azulejo panel on wall of fado club (based on this famous painting) |
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| Square in Alfama |
We zig-zagged down
through Alfama, up and down tiny becos
and eschadinos (staircase streets).
We eventually stumbled on fado central in the streets and squares around the Igreja
de Santo Estêvão, the Church of St. Stephen. There were... many bars and restaurants advertising live fado. We spotted several
of the famous ones, as well as a couple we had considered as possibles for the
night before, including the one that used to be in Largo da Graca, the Tasco
de Jaime. We also saw one bar with a big chalk-board sign out front defiantly announcing,
‘We won’t play fado. We play jazz.’
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| Alfama street scenes |
We never did get down
to the river, until we got right into the centre. We stayed up in the little
streets below the cathedral and poked along until we suddenly found ourselves
practically at Commerce Square. I think Shelley would have liked to walk along
the river from the square towards Cais do Sodre, but we knew with the
construction there that it was difficult or impossible to get back up to the
street we needed to walk along to get to the museum, the Avenue of the 24th of
July. It goes out past Cais do Sodre station and the fabulous Energias de
Portugal building towards Belem.
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| Energias de Portugal (national energy company) building |
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| Building somewhere in Cais do Sodre district |
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| Nuno Gonçalves, The Saint Vincent Panels, one of several (1460) |
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| Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Descent from the cross, triptych (c1535) |
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| Albrecht Durer, St. Jeronimo |
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| Hieronymus Bosch, Temptations of St. Anthony, detail - note guy at right in what looks like a stove-pipe top hat, a style invented in the 19th century |
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| Hieronymus Bosch, Temptations of St. Anthony triptych (1506) |
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| 17th century Indo-Portuguese cabinet in teak, cherry and inlaid ivory |
‘Bye, Shelley! See you on
the other side of the pond.
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