Do You Really Want to Hurt Us?
A frustrating journey through Portugal's
capital
8-15 December: A
Lisbon LamentationThis is my
original submission to
LGNY. The
article appeared in the Spring 2001 Travel
Issue.Do
You Really Want to Hurt
Us?A
frustrating journey through Portugal's
capitalThe long-term LGNY reader
knows, that I am an opinionated boy. Oh, hell, I am downright cranky, a
curmudgeon at best sometimes. But why? It's the by-product of cocksure optimism.
Believe it or not, I enter most books, films, and vacations of my own volition,
with a pure heart and a head full of optimism. Frustrating that optimism leads
to some very entertaining articles for you, the beloved, intrepid LGNY
reader.And so, my last big trip, to
Lisbon, started out as so many other vacations have started. I never embark
thinking, "Oh, I hope I like this." I reserve fears and doubts for my so-called
love life. I enter each vacation with a delightful mantra: "Despite the
vicissitudes of air travel and Amtrak, I am going to have a absolutely fabulous
time."Mind you, I am not a dolt. I do
expect things to go awry. Things happen. However, things happened to me in
Portugal that I did not expect from an up-and-coming member of the European
Union. I am ashamed to admit I turned into Judy Davis from **Where Angels Fear
to Tread**. I crowned myself queen and had a royal fit or
two.But everyone I know who ever went to
Lisbon adored it, and all the books extolled the virtues of Portuguese
hospitality. And for those first two days, Saturday and Sunday, I was ready to
retire in Portugal. People were friendly. The town was quaint, as if not much
had changed in 60 years. In fact, Lisbon is remarkable for not having changed
all that much since the 1930s. Narrow streets and red tile roofs everywhere.
It's a city of large hills, with cable-car funiculars circa 1885 that help you
on the steeper routes, and vistas unspoiled by garish office towers (although
there's tons of leftist graffiti). Cross Rome with San Francisco. And everything
seems inexpensive.Oh, and the men were
delicious as well, as proven by on-site, first-hand research at an actual
European sauna, where men were actually be nice to each other and naked at the
same time. What a refreshing change of pace. Why, I must have been the only
circumsized man in Lisbon, also based on my own first-hand
research.Then, Monday came. Monday
changed everything. On Monday, Lisbon transmogrified into New York. It started
with my second room change in two days at the gay hotel the Anjo Azul--the Blue
Angel. Add Marlene as your mascot, repaint, put up some male nudes, and by god,
you've got Portugal's first-ever gay hotel. The hotel manager--an unsmiling Mona
Lisa--was completely unconcerned with my having no hot water, and then wasting
an hour moving all my stuff twice in two days. The tsouris continued when a
trolley driver let me board and just as quickly pushed me off the moving trolley
for no apparent reason. And it continued, as I was met with sour faces from
various museum guards, frowning movie patrons, and ennui-inspired tourism board
staffers. My nitecap: a seemingly endless search for a place to eat dinner at an
early 8
pm.Halfway
There? Sort Of.The Economist's
recent special report on Portugal was headlined "Halfway There." The Portuguese
had their bloodless revolution in 1976, overturning the 65-year record-setting
dictatorship under Dr. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and his successors after
Salazar's stroke in 1966. Portugal, the second poorest nation in the European
Union, eagerly signed up in 1986 and has gotten tubs of money from the EU for
infrastructure. To prove their working on it, every third street I walked on was
being unearthed. Construction projects abound. Buckets of Euros alone do not a
good attitude make, though. Salazar discouraged travel, tourism, and education,
and perhaps the shabby, unsmiling, unsavvy manner in which I was treated by the
majority of service people is part of the legacy of the suspiciously single
dictator who looked fondly upon Hitler. Despite my diminished expectations, let
me add, that when people were friendly, they were the nicest people I'd ever
met. There just weren't nearly enough of them. The night clerk at the hotel
practically acted as a nurse and maid when I was violently ill the last night
there (TIP: Do NOT eat beef in Europe, ever. Mine was camouflaged in lasagna).
But for every one of him, there were three gift shop employees ready to arrest
me for buying postcards. I just want to order a Customer Service Class for the
entire nation. Even the men running the gay center were contrary, claiming they
were open the two times I went out of my way to visit during operating hours,
only to find the doors chained shut. I'm not exaggerating--real
chains!Portugal's capital mirrors the
progress the nation has made since joining the EU--it's truly halfway there.
All-new public phones... but only a quarter seemed to work. All the modern
conveniences, but small-town glowering and suspicion of
strangers.Good
DiscoveriesOkay, I've bitched,
but how bad can a vacation be when you take ten rolls of film? Lisbon sits at
the wide mouth of the Tejo (Tagus) River. Take a round-trip journey on a
Transtejo ferry, and see how Lisbon rises from the sea, a geologic version of
seeing the World Trade Center en route back from Staten Island. And the city
really has not changed an awful lot physically this century. Some streetscapes
haven't changed since Lisbon was rebuilt after the 1755
earthquake.Lisbon was the gateway to the
New World. There are a lot of reminders of Portugal's glorious past. All the
money features someone like Vasco de Gama or Henry the Navigator. The Portuguese
rounded Cape Verde, at one time the outer limit of the known world, and later,
the Horn or Africa, and eventually circumnavigated the world. But old pensioners
turned into beggars are a common sight in this former world power. So are
immigrants from the old colonies-Africans from Mozambique, Angola, and Cape
Verde, Goa in India, Macau in China, and of course Brazil. As Portuguese workers
wandered north, former colonials have filled that void, and brought their music
and cuisines with them. Amid the construction, graffiti, and multiculturalism,
Lisboeta dot-com wannabees buzzing around on cell
phones.While there is racism, and while
some Portuguese likes to think they were historically kinder to the people they
enslaved because they intermarried with them, the by-product now is a higher
level of natural integration. I saw more interracial friendships and easiness
than I ever witness in New York. That the Moors ruled Portugal for several
hundred years, up until the 13th Century, adds to historical mixture of
heterogeneity.A Lisbon Card allows for
unlimited museums and mass transit use. Another benefit of Lisbon's faded glory
is that history of wealth. Lisbon features a trove of museums, but also sports a
lot of incidental art. A particularly indigenous artwork is azulejos--painted
tile work. There's a museum devoted to it, but these trademark blue-and-white
tile panels adorn churches, palaces, restaurants, and alleys, inside and
out.Clang
Clang ClangTrolleys are still
very much in use in Lisbon. Old 1918 models still run along the streets and make
the billygoat climb up to Castelo São Jorge. A sleeker new model sails
along the waterfront to neighboring Belém, which features an ultramodern
Cultural Center, the Monastery of Jeronimos, and Monument to the Discoveries.
The latter is Salazar's project. Like his contemporaries (Hitler, Mussolini,
Franco), he buried real social ills under oversized statues and wide concrete
plazas.Further out, at Oriente, is the
World's Fair complex. Its oceanarium is one of the world's finest aquaria. The
Vasco de Gama Bridge, the Praça de Naçãoes, the Oriente train
station and subway line, were all built specifically to greet 10 million
visitors in 1998. New housing, a massive mall (named for Vasco also-"Discover
the Savings!"), and facilities are being built to make a neighborhood out of
this former industrial area (thus preventing ruins, like ours in Flushing
Meadows in
Queens).A Day
in SintraA quick train ride away
is Sintra, and for a small fare, an all-day bus service will take you up the
giant hill, where the Pena Palace and the Castelo Mouro overlook this small,
toursity town. Pena was built by King Ferdinand (Prince Albert's brother), and
features rooms as they were in the royal days (the last king fled by ferry in
1912), a wild homage to every style of Portuguese architecture since the time of
the Moors. The Moors' castle (Castelo Mouro), below Pena, is just the remaining
walls and watchtowers, standing there for 1200 years in a misty enchanted
forest. Stray cats guard the entrance to this part of the pinnacle. En route
back down, a must-see is the Palacio Nacional. Its outward intrigue is its pair
of conical chimneys, which look like two champagne bottles attached to a
nondescript building. But go inside for some of the most ornately decorated
interiors in
Portugal.Finding
Gay LifeThis corner of Iberia is
making up for lost time, and while the gay and lesbian community is not quite as
out loud and proud as we might be used to, its definitely there. Unlike our gay
ghetto turned strip malls, gay venues are not quite as obvious. Even the highest
concentration of gay life, in the narrow streets of the Bairra Alta, is not
easily spotted. I practically tripped over the subdued but chic gay bookstore.
My third (and successful) journey to the gay center unearthed a wealth of gay
groups, as highly specialized as anything we have here. They might not be as
eager to meet foreign gay visitors as their Spanish counterparts, but the sheer
number of organizations is very
encouraging.Homosexuality is perfectly
legal, and official literature encourages reporting homophobic incidents to the
authorities. This follows suit with a rather public anti-racism human rights
campaign. It's not Amsterdam, but for a Southern European country, and one of
the poorest, it's good to see a positive official line being
offered.The
VerdictWell, while I let my
frustrations overwhelm me a bit, I wouldn't tell you to avoid Portugal. I would
recommend not spending seven whole days in Lisbon, though. Perhaps make a longer
trip that includes other parts of the country, or continue on to Spain. Maybe
people are nicer in the countryside. Perhaps its the years of isolation, or
perhaps its the poverty, or perhaps its both but the Portuguese, even after a
week, remained an unhappy enigma to me (only two people appreciated my attempts
to speak in nearly opaque Portuguese language without assuming everyone knows
Spanish). So, go to Lisbon, but leave behind any expectation of standard
European conduct. With its claustrophobic recent history, poverty, and its
wonderful heterogenous mix of born Portuguese citizens and many ethnic arrivals,
there's nothing standard about Portugal or its capital.
Posted: Sun - December
10, 2000 at 12:56 AM
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Published On: Jun 20, 2009 07:04 PM
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