My time in Lisboa

I have left Lisbon. I am happy with how it went, couldn’t have picked a better city to start in coming from San Fran. Lisbon is remarkably similar. Its by the bay and ocean. It has rolling hills. Plenty of parks. Small townhouse style duplexs and apartment buildings( kinda like North beach in SF). It even has a big red bridge. This was really a beautiful city.
Impressively, my first day, even after the long overnight flight, I managed to scale Castello St. Jorge. The below video is from there, but I must warn you, I am quite incoherent in it and very tired. However I think it conveys my feelings at that point –desheveled.



The next day I got a late start and ended up breezing thru Belem, a cultural/historic area of Lisbon. That night I failed to find a bar I was told to go to.
The real treat of the trip was pretty simple: riding a bike around the waterfront area. The waterfront, as Im calling it had nice gardens, rolling greens, cafes, a little air lift thing, pretty much all you could want to find at a waterfront. It was right in front of the Vasco De Gama which had a lot of shops. Cruisin around on a beach cruiser with the great weather and sea breeze was perfect.
Some Brief Observations
- I fit in. There is a surprising amount of dark, mostly african, people here.
- Riding my bike by the beach, I saw a few dead portuguese Man-o-War jellyfish..They were pretty big.. At least 18inch diameter.
- There was cursing on the radio, in English. Listening to some Kanye and Jay-Z at a café, the songs were completely unedited. I guess they don’t need to bleep out curse words in other languages.
- Finally, I am shocked at the sheer amount of people that speak really good english. Its amazing, and really lucky for us native speakers, that English has really become the world’s second language. There were times that I would ask “Falla Portugese” to someone and they would say “Of course” as if its only natural to be fluent in two languages. Its amazing that so many people in Europe, so far, are basically bilingual. I guess it is a gift and curse that we do not need to focus on other languages in the US