Christmas and New Year passed by, and in Lisbon things started getting back to the new normal in that town. The massive herd of tourists that had plagued every street and praça had finally thinned out. But tourism wasn’t dead. We were still there. This time I consider myself a tourist as well, not an Alfacinha, a lettuce-eater Lisbon native. I mean, I never really was a native, was I, even though I did feel at home there for almost 3 years.
On the day of transition from 2025 to 2026, I had a pretty good view of the fireworks. After a before-midnight Cafe Baileys cocktail made expertly by the barman in a Jazz bar, where he promised us for half-an-hour that the band would start playing in 5 minutes, Peter and I decided to explore the rest of the night separately.
I ended up being one of the thousand plus people at the Miradouro de S. Pedro de Alcântara, a two-tier praça that overlooks the city and has a wonderful view of the Castelo de São Jorge. Unfortunately, for many who couldn’t get the right place to stand, the fireworks didn’t come from the direction of the Castelo (East), they came from a completely different direction, from the Praça do Comércio (South). Because I had a good place near the fence that protects visitors from a nasty fall into a cobblestone street below, I was able to see the fireworks as they exploded high over a wall of buildings (a rather low wall). It was a 15-minute spectacle of exploding lights in the sky.
There are better places to view this spectacle from, obviously. But there was no way I was going to travel down to the Baixa or even to Praça do Comércio to watch among thousands and thousands of people. The nice thing about Lisbon is that the fireworks are put on by the city and there are hardly any fireworks in the streets. In Hamburg the fireworks go off everywhere, in every street, and careless people lose eyes and fingers on a regular basis. All attempts at banning personal fireworks in Germany have failed. Germans like their explosions!
I filmed the fireworks with my GoPro, felt satisfied, then strolled up the hill to the Jardim do Príncipe Real, which is near the apartment where we were staying. The bus and tram stop at Príncipe, so it is a very convenient place to live. My stepson and his girlfriend, who made the apartment available for us, went home to Germany for the holidays. After Christmas my stepson sent me a picture of them skiing in Austria!
Smart kids. The apartment is small, like I said, but what I didn’t tell you is that it is humid and cold. No heating! Seriously, no heating. During the day we kept one of the windows open a crack so that it would get fresh air. The weather was good, the temperature OK, around 14° C during the day, and the apartment dried out a bit. But the nights were cold, and of course I caught a cold.
We cooked most every evening, Peter’s fresh salmon steaks with various veggies, my spaghetti bolognese or millet with various veggies. Breakfast of course every morning, with espresso, jam, bread, presunto ibérico de bolota (thinly sliced ham), orange juice. A hearty breakfast to ready us for the walking of the day to come.
Walking up and down the myriad narrow streets is something your legs actually get used to after the first few days. Peter and I spent the first couple of days exploring together, then decided it would be more interesting and less stressful for us to explore individually. Spending uninterrupted time with another person, no matter how well you might know each other, can lead to friction. It did for us on a couple of occasions. The decision to explore separately made sense and kept the mood more or less level.
Slowly, I started to remember the city I knew back in the 1980s. The physical part had changed much. Lots of new buildings—many of them architecturally loud and showy—in the parts of town away from the tourist centers of Chiado and Baixa. I took a bus out to Odivelas, a very poor and rundown dormitorio suburb of Lisbon. Stayed in the bus all the way to the terminal. Got out, crossed the street and 5 minutes later took the same number bus back to the Rossio.
Nothing but highrise apartment buildings, 10 to 12 stories high and 50 or 60 apartments wide. I used to live in Carnaxide, also a dormitorio suburb. It was not too poor a neighborhood, close to the American School where my American female companion got a job teaching the kids of diplomats, military officers and wealthy Portuguese business people. I took lots of busses and sometimes drove our Toyota Celica (with California plates) to town.
Most of the time I preferred the long bus ride and then the train ride to Cascais where my millionaire benefactor would tell me what his dreams were for Saudi Arabia in the Year 2000. That was the book I wrote for him. It was OK. I made it sound as much like him as possible, with correct grammar and the thread of a story. At the same time, I wrote my own book, Shoot the Albatross, a compendium of stories that somehow, in fragment form, followed the life and mental process of Albatross, a shadowy figure who is never actually named and never really presented as a character.
Yes. I know. It was my creative baby slipping into the world after years of studying literature and writing songs. I enjoyed doing it and was getting paid—kind of—to do it. My female companion and I were earning enough to pay for the apartment, and through my musician contacts and from some of the kids at the American School I got enough grass to make writing even more of a pleasure.
Grass wasn’t legal at that time, but nobody fussed about it. The former colonies in Africa, Mozambique and Angola and Cape Verde were pipelines for the import of quality product. These days all drugs have been decriminalized. You, the normal citizen, can use anything you like, but big dealers and importers can get in trouble. Personally, I believe it should all be legalized and made available at what the British call the chemist shop and the Americans call the drugstore.
I’m writing this from Haro, the Rioja country capital of wine. It’s a darling little town that has a madhouse festival on June 29th each year when wine is splashed on everyone who is out in public. Today we went through some of the nearby countryside where the vineyards were covered in fresh snow. It’s cold, but shouldn’t snow tomorrow when we head out to slink through the Pyrenees into France and our next stop, Bidart, a coastal town in the traditional Basque province of Labourd.
Counting down now, like they do here for the wine festival. Until June 29th it’s 173 days, for us, if all goes well, it’s 5 more days, then we are home.
[Everything did not go well on Monday on our way to Ciudad Rodrigo. Peter’s car is a VW diesel and he accidentally filled the tank with gasoline. After 5k from the station and about 10k from Ciudad Rodrigo, the car stopped dead. We were stuck there for 2 hours until a tow truck took us to a mechanic’s shop in Ciudad Rodrigo. They had seen this many times before. No problem. They flushed the engine put in some diesel, and hey presto, by 7 pm we were in our hotel. Peter had a mini-breakdown in between, but he survived and was happy today that the drive was smooth. — Shit happens!]
