4: Here Comes the Sun
23 Feb 2002
We’ve popped over to Portugal briefly, and finally it’s a lot warmer and sunnier. Yay!
We started off in a small mountain town called Evora, again with many cathedrals and old buildings to see. However, the big difference is that the Portuguese people are a lot friendlier.
After Spain, it’s such a shock to see cars stopping on the streets for pedestrians. As we stood at a small roundabout, trying to decide which street to take, we actually caused a brief traffic jam as all the cars around us stopped. Also, in the gray cobblestoned streets of Evora, instead of painting white lines on the road to delineate the curb, they use a pattern of white cobble stones instead, which makes for quite a beautiful town.
Our Bones Await Yours
In one of the churches in Evora, we found a room of bones, I guess some Catholic tradition of preserving relics. The chamber is rather large, and the walls are completely lined with human bones. The arches on the walls and ceilings are made up of skulls. The spaces between each of the arches are composed of cross-sectioned thigh bones. Decoratively interspersed are lower leg bones, placed lengthwise to form pretty patterns. The whole skeletons of a man and a child also hang from one of the walls. This whole room gave me the heeber-jeebers, although it was also gruesomely fascinating. The finishing touch was the inscription above the chamber, which roughly translates to “Our Bones Await Yours.”
Longing for San Francisco
We’re now in Lisbon, which makes me miss my San Francisco. The city is similarly surrounded by water, with gorgeous hanging bridges, one of which is painted Golden Gate-red and looks like the hanging span of the Bay Bridge. There are 7 hills surrounding the city, and you can ride the trams up and down the hills. These trams look exactly like cable cars, except the drivers are a lot more psycho and seem to take pleasure in jolting passengers about. Lisbon has even had its own great earthquake, of 1755. So basically… I like it here a lot.
One of the more intriguing sites in Lisbon has been some archeological Roman ruins. They are owned by the Banco Comercial Portugues, so you first have to enter a modern bank to start the tour. Travelling down through the bank’s foundations are vast tunnels of Roman ruins. For some reason, the walkways are about 4 feet tall, so we kept creeping and crouching along through them like the people in Being John Malkovitch. But it was all worth it. There were old Roman wells (again used by the firefighters during the earthquake), baths, bits of pottery and the embedded skeleton of an ancient man. The most amazing thing is that these ruins were only discovered in 1991, when the bank was starting to build their new downtown site.
I’m sure that endless descriptions of more castles and palaces and cathedrals will be quite boring, so I won’t go on. One last interesting factoid though…
- Number of times Josh has been offered hash in Morocco, Spain and Portugal: 47
- Number of times I’ve been offered hash: 0
