Beef Kung Pão

So. It's my first night in Lisbon and I'm having Chinese food for dinner. I can explain. Kind of. I walked all day and I'm really tired and don't have it in me to look hard for a restaurant or walk very far. But everything around my hotel has menus in about ten different languages and really annoying waiters outisde trying to draw you in. Except this one mostly empty Chinese place. So here I am. The beef is fair, the rice is awful, and the wine that I somehow accidentally ordered myself a whole bottle of is good. Could be worse, and at least I'm not getting a bad impression of Portuguese food from some tourist hell restaurant.

Anyway. I was ready to leave Faro this morning. How I managed to make an anti-semitic* virgin-seeking Muslim fall for an infidel like myself is beyond me, but Mahmet was getting to be a little much. Time to move on. Even in the capital, Portugal feels almost entirely calm and quiet compared to Spain. And so far, Lisbon has been completely manageable: I showed up in town without a place to stay but found a room pretty quickly. The bus station is far from the center but the metro is easy. I haven't gotten even slightly lost yet. And most people speak English; in fact, I think I'm annoying people by trying to communicate in the Russian-accented bad Spanish that I try to pass off as Portuguese. (Written Portuguese looks like Spanish; spoken Portuguese sounds like Russian. Weird. Several times I've almost answered questions with da instead of sim for yes.) In Spain people mostly appreciate the "English-as-a-last resort" attitude; here, not so much.

But I digress. Lisbon is sort of a filled-in U shape surrounded by the Rio Tejo. Six km west of the center is an area called Belém. (For having a fairly smallpopulation, Lisbon feels spread out.) I arrived in Belém really tired and all sweaty because I thought it would be a good idea to walk there. 6K is a pretty long walk when it's hot and there's no shade. Anyway, I mostly went to Belém to go to this design museum that's there. The museum is in this large complex that reminds me a lot of the Contemporary Culture Center in Barcelona: very modern and open and airy and confusing as hell. Once I finally found it, I liked the museum: kinda art but kinda different. It had a lot of furniture, and it was pretty funny to see what was on the cutting edge of design fifty years ago: A lot of it looked like it could be from Ikea today. They also had some nice glass art, wich is one of my new favorite things.

After the museum I paid 1.50€ to go to the top of a tallish building. Deep thought: Lisbon is really nice. It has nice architecture (lots of the buildings have these cool tiles all over the outside) and lots of green space. Plus, everything looks beter when it's really bright and sunny. It's really windy here, but the wind is somehow doing good things for my hair; that's never happened before. After the view I sat by the river (it is so calm here) and basked in the fact that I'm in Portugal. I took a bunch of pictures of the setting sun shining on this suspension bridge. Bridges are cool anyway, and this one is especially nice because it's a nice shade of red.

So, Lisbon. I like it. Bad Chinese food and all.

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*I'm not stereiotyping. I asked him what he thought about Israel, and he asked me if I'd been to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. I have. He started talking about how big the house was, and how wealthy the Franks were, and how the Jews had too much money and the German government had to do something, and that he wrote as much in the Anne Frank House guestbook.... And here I felt guilty about getting stoned after going to the Anne Frank house.