Habits, once made, aren’t easily broken. Thus it is, that after more than 20 years of waking up early enough to be in the office before 07:00 and another 10 since my retirement of living with a cat who considered 07:00 sleeping in, I woke early enough Friday morning to have a good long walk about Lisbon at an hour when the streets were still relatively quiet.
North on the Avenida
To this point, I’d walked along the southern section of the 1.1 kilometer Avenida da Liberdade several times but while my excursion to Amoreiras had taken me to the Praça Marquês de Pombal – the northern terminus of this elegant thoroughfare – I hadn’t actually walked the stretch from the hotel to that spot so that was the direction I started my morning walk. The street maintained its elegance but by the time I reached the Praça, I didn’t think I’d added much to my sense of Lisbon.
As I looked across to the opposite side of the circle I saw a park with a large monument at the top of a hill. (Seeing it up close, I recalled that I’d actually spotted this monument during my walk with Ana days earlier. I’d asked her about it but hadn’t really kept it at the forefront of places to visit while in Lisbon.)
The park was once called Parque da Liberdade (Freedom Park) but is now known as Parque Eduardo VII. The new name commemorates a 1903 visit from King Edward VII of England and it makes a certain sense given the centuries long political relationship between Portugal and England. The monument at the top is by the sculptor João Cutileiro (and I have to assume it was installed before his controversial installation at Lisbon’s Lago das Tágides among other controversial artwork of his) and is the monument to the 25th of April – the date of the Carnation Revolution.
One of the aspects I remarked on when people asked me my impression of Lisbon was that it was quite hilly. As I was preparing to write this post, I charted the walk from the hotel to the Jardim Amália Rodrigues, the singer you met in the post about Fado, and that marked the walk’s northern terminus. In 1.4 kilometers I climbed a not insignificant 72 meters. (This seems to be a typical range of elevation change ascending Lisbon’s seven [or eight] hills. My walk to Prazeres, for example, had a similar ascent. Glancing at a topographic map, the low-to high range seems to be from about 6 meters to 120 meters with an average peak around 100 meters. This is just slightly less than much of San Francisco where, for example a two km walk from Crissy Field to the top of Presidio Hill is a climb of about 111 meters.) But back to Amália Rodrigues. In her charming garden with all its open space,
I discovered that she also has a space named for her in in 19th Arrondissement Paris.
From there, I started on a route that would take me beyond the hotel and back into Baixa where I planned to get the standard tourist photo of the Elevador de Santa Justa from its base and from there back to the hotel to complete a walk of about five kilometers. This got me through about half the distance I normally walk every day. This was important to me because I knew I’d spend most of the rest of the day in transit to Vienna.
I still had time to freshen up a bit, have some breakfast, and a nice conversation with a new doorman, Seydou who was from the Côte d’Ivoire on the west coast of Africa. He had spent much of his career working as a bartender on cruise ships but after saving some money – because unlike his crewmates he rarely went into port and never gambled – he decided to settle for awhile in Lisbon so he could be with his now college aged daughter after having missed most of her formative years.
A mishap and…
I also spent some of my time talking with the gent at the front desk (whose name I have sadly forgotten) who’d been helpful directing me to the CTT office on my first day in Lisbon. We chatted about some of my experiences and impressions of Lisbon and my plans for Vienna. I took out my camera and showed him this picture
that I’d taken in the morning as I walked back to the hotel because it had, in a sense, brought my time in Lisbon full circle since he’d identified it as a landmark to help me find the CTT office.
Here are the rest of the photos from my last morning in Lisbon.
The driver arrived at 11:45 as scheduled to take me to the airport. I wasn’t certain why PT had arranged for my pick-up to be so early since my flight wasn’t scheduled to depart until 14:30 and the airport was only about a 25 minute ride. When I saw it was Martim, the same chap who’d picked me up Tuesday, it dawned on me that he might be meeting another arrival and this timing allowed them to consolidate trips.
Whatever the reason, it turned out to be a boon for me because about 10 minutes after we left the hotel my phone rang. I didn’t immediately identify the call as coming from the hotel but it was from Lisbon so I answered it. It was the hotel calling to tell me I’d left my camera at the front desk. Fortunately, at least from my point of view, we had ample time to turn around and return to pick it up. Even with the detour, I still arrived at the airport 15 minutes before the check-in counter for my flight opened and I passed through security more than two hours prior to my scheduled departure.
Again, since I’d booked a more expensive business class flight, I had access to the TAP lounge where I was able to indulge in a light lunch and pass the time comfortably. Interestingly although all of the staff was masked, few of the passengers were. I noted this because the masking rules in Portugal – that nearly everyone followed even without any apparent enforcement mechanism – required masks on all public transportation.
…a helpful flight connection
On the flight, I sat next to a fellow named Klaas who was a Finn living and working in Salzburg. We had an interesting conversation that included the swift and dramatic change in popular opinion in his home country about NATO membership. I told him I found it understandable that the Finns would be nervous given the current situation in Ukraine combined with Putin’s apparent world view and accompanying aspirations of restoring the Russian Empire, and the fact that Finland was a duchy of Russia until a bit over 100 years ago. Not to mention that the countries share a 1,300 kilometer border. He appreciated the breadth of my knowledge.
It was a direct flight from Lisbon to Vienna but Klaas turned out to be a helpful connection. He led me to a private company that transported me from the airport to my hotel in central Vienna for a flat 30 euro fee saving me between six and 10 euros from the fare in a metered cab.
Vienna is an hour ahead of Lisbon and the flight departed Lisbon about half an hour late so it was after 20:00 when I arrived at the hotel. I checked in, had a light meal, and, still without word from the vet, began mentally mapping my Saturday before I’d join the group from Earthbound Expeditions for the second half of my 2022 European adventure.
Before I get to that Saturday I’ve written the bonus post I promised that decodes the music references and that should be entertaining on one level and perhaps eyebrow rolling on another.