At Home, part 19

There was an acueducto vacation—one of those that bridged two holidays—early in March, and we decided to use it to drive southwest to Lisbon. “Watch out for the roads in Portugal,” Rich Irwin told us. “They’re not nearly as good as the Spanish ones. It’ll take you twice as long to drive 100 kilometers in Portugal as it does in Spain.”

That proved true. The big highways in Spain were multilane roads like interstate highways in the U.S., but the main highways in Portugal were still two-lane affairs. I had a lot of trouble on those roads, because I rarely felt secure enough to pass another car. I couldn’t tell how far away the oncoming traffic was, or how fast it was coming, so I would enlist Mike to judge the traffic for me. “Go! Go! You can pass now!” he would say. “Are you sure?” I’d quibble, missing my chance to go in the meantime. But I was usually the daytime driver, because I liked to drive. Also, Mike liked to read in the car, and I couldn’t read without getting carsick.

We used the drive down to Lisbon to make our return trip to Mérida, where we had missed seeing the Museo Nacional de Arte Romano (National Museum of Roman Art) on our trip to Extremadura in the fall. It was worth the detour. The building was new, made of brick, an excellent showcase for the pottery shards, glass vessels, statuary, coins, and other antiquities collected from archaeological sites in the area. By this time Julie had learned a bit about ancient Rome in her social studies class, so she was impressed by the collection. “This coin is over two thousand years old,” she informed us excitedly. “Can you believe that? They used this for money right here.” Mike and I smiled at each other, pleased that she had begun to tap into the richness of the history around us.

We drove on into Lisbon, where we found the Holiday Inn at which we’d be using our Bancotel coupons—$50 per room per night, an excellent deal. We found a restaurant in our guidebook that was supposed to have good roasted chicken, and we took a taxi to the plaza where it was located. There were shops still open in the dusk, which made for a nice walk before dinner, and the restaurant was just right for the kids—informal, friendly, with homey menu items that wouldn’t be served in a Spanish restaurant.

“Mom, they have those paté things like we had in Portugal before,” Lisa said. She liked opening the little tins and spreading paté on bread, whether it was pork liver or smoked sardines. And Mike and I liked the incredibly spicy pilpil sauce that was available on all the tables, for mixing with whatever dish you ordered.

The first two days in Lisbon were drizzly, so we decided to postpone the beach part of our itinerary and see the sights in the city. We used taxis to get around, visiting first a monastery in the Belem section of town. The girls had their usual fun by running up and down the open arcades surrounding a cloister in the monastery, and Mike and I noticed the differences between Portuguese architecture and Spanish building styles of the same period. “There’s so much more ornamentation here,” Mike said. The gray stone walls were dripping with carving and frills, looking much more Moorish than the austere Spanish church buildings of the 1500s.

We took a taxi to the Gulbenkian Museum, a beautiful modern building that showcased the huge collection of art and furnishings belonging to an Armenian oil magnate. I was impressed by his Asian pieces, which included fine Chinese porcelains and sumptuous Persian rugs. There were special shows of Lalique glass and Japanese prints taking place—the prints were a longtime favorite of Mike’s, so he was especially happy, and the girls loved the colorful, graceful crystal pieces.

We spent the next morning at St. George’s castle, right in the center of Lisbon. It provided the usual running and climbing opportunities for the kids, and its hilltop position set us up for a nice, easy walk through the Alfama district, which was the old fisherman’s part of town. The tiny streets were lined with modest shops and bars leading down to the waterfront.

Both afternoons we went to the movies. Portugal was a good place for that, as most English-language movies there were subtitled rather than dubbed into Portuguese. The kids were delighted to see The Mask and Only You, two films that would never be available in subtitled versions in Spain—only serious or “artsy” movies had a non-dubbed version there.