Lisboa Part 3

I had to get all my stuff out of my room by 11 AM the next morning. I slept for four hours. The Traveller’s House staff were kind enough to let me nap it up in the TV room for as long as my heart desired. I slept heavily. I woke up surrounded by an adorable French family watching some old-school Jackass. I spent the day drowsily wandering around the Alfama district, stopping for a glass of wine every so often. Portuguese wine is cheap as fuck and delicious. I dropped by the Traveller’s House for one final farewell and to pick up my junk. I homie’d it up with all the staff there and was awfully sad to bid them all adieu. I took the metro to Joao’s house where I was scheduled to surf his couch. He lives in a very cozy apartment on the outskirts of Lisbon. We talked about Charlie Hayden, my family and Couchsurfing. I could sleep in his son’s bedroom while he was gone for the week. I was stooooooked. I also discovered via the interwebs that Tressa is studying in Granada, Spain, my next location. She offered to put me up for the nights I’d be in town so I was double stoked to not pay for a hostel and to see a familiar face. Life is totally convenient like that, it’s kind of unfair.

The next morning I rubbed copious amounts of sleep out of my eyes and ate some breakfast with Joao before he left to teach highschoolers some bomb math. I headed for Belem, an old district down the river from downtown. I wandered into the Centre Culturale de Belem, an epic museum. They had several free exhibitions. I listened to Aphex Twin and stumbled through the modern art section – classic. They also had a World War II propaganda section that put me in a reeeeaally weird mood. I decided it was time for some cuisine. I snagged a kebab, Europe’s burrito. My Portuguese was getting a little better and I was able to order without feeling like a silly whitey. I also picked up a couple world famous Pastel de Belem’s which are these little crème brule-esque tarts. I doused them with cinnamon and watched some religious group play some national songs Fado-style in a park (Fado is epically silly acoustic melancholy folk music from Portugal). I charged back to Joao’s and we prepared some Portuguese style hamburgers. We drank copious amounts of wine and talked about politics, music composition and traveling.

I decided to sleep in. My brain was fucked from 5 hours of sleep and 2 hour naps every day. Joao took me to a place outside of Lisbon called the Expo. It is a huge development put together for some European expo a number of years ago. We walked around at a Portuguese pace and did some quality people watching. We wandered into a mall that is designed to look like a cruiseliner. We got distracted and Joao ended up being 30 minutes late to a parent-teacher conference. It’s cool though, the Portuguese don’t give a fuck. In the evening he drove me to the bus station and figured out which bus was mine with his pro ass skills. I bid him a farewell through the window as the bus dashed out of Portugal and off to Granada, Spain. Joao is an excellent human being – an ageless dude and a true hippie. I promised to someday show him around the redwood forests of Northern California.