it looked better on paper than it was in practice, but yours truly will emerge more grateful than regretful for the 14 hour layover in lisboa. in the end, i would highly endorse a visit here and suggest that the centuries-old iberian capital is worth more than a half-day of your time. if, however, you are also forced onto the half-day plan, sleeping the night before would be highly recommended. so with my return to the aeroporto imminent, i thought it might be helpful to the loyal reader if i could share a little bit of what i learned. entaõ, some lessons and concluding thoughts:
i did absolutely no research into lisboa, not even a glimpse at wikipedia. the biggest con to this was that i had no idea what existed and where it would be found. the pros, however, are that i still managed to find enough to keep me occupied and that i not once stopped on a busy street corner to unfold a map or look at a guide book (are we listening, germans?).
galicia does not hold the monopoly on surly iberian waitstaff.
i definitely slept for a good 40 minutes in a green velvet chair on the second floor of a pretty hip cafe. this is either attributable to the pleasant ambience, or the fact that i haven't slept in two days. maybe both.
blanket generalization based on the limited areas i saw: lisboa is more a dense amalgamation of plazas and alleyways than a frenetic metropolis. the labyrinthine streets may be confusing, but this city does not strike me as intimidating in the least.
i do not look like i'm from lisboa.
if brasilian portuguese (as i wrote last year) sounds like russians speaking spanish, then the lisboan dialect sounds more like italians speaking russian, presumably because of greater contact with the french. even if that sentence doesn't make sense, it's still true.
i smell. badly. i have a caravel of empathy for the poor soul sitting next to me on tonight's flight.
favorite graffiti: nadie podem sonhar para ti
exactamente.
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