After an entire day of airplanes, Newark, and knee pain from Newark airplanes, Fes and I finally made it to Lisbon, Portugal! We landed at the dark hour of 5:15am, which meant that we had a lot of time to kill before our (very helpful and charming) hotel would be able to check us in at 3pm. We’d been sleep deprived for the last two days, and it was our 17 year/10 year anniversary, so what should we do?
Eat a lot of bread, of course!
We found the Hygge Kaffe near our hotel, and quickly found that they had a breakfast platter for two. Perfect!
I shall note here that Fes and I are both prodigious eaters, owners of bottomless midwestern-American stomachs. But the platter defeated us. We were unable to even make an effort at the cinnamon rolls. The yogurt, fruit, granola, croissants, meats, cheeses, toast, salmon benedict, ham benedict, and orange-currant juice were more than enough to conquer our travel-addled stomachs. But it was delicious!
After that, we wandered around the neighborhood for about an hour, finding our way to at least three historic churches in as many blocks. We vowed to return when their doors were open for visitors.
Finally, it was 10am, so we still had some time to use before we could collapse into our hotel room. Why not hire a tuk tuk driver for a four-hour personal tour of the city?
Let me tell you about tuk tuks. I’ve long been familiar with the careening, three-wheeled doom-wagons as part of the necessary city culture of Asia. To ride a tuk tuk in Mumbai is to recognize your own mortality. Yet until now, I was unfamiliar with them as part of the European tourism ecosystem.
Enter Lisbon, where the tuk tuk population has exploded over the last ten years or so. And like cabbies, the tuk tuk tour drivers are a rare breed of people who have, as the London black cab drivers say, The Knowledge.
Our tuk tuk guide was a man named Nali, a native Lisboan with flawless English, who was loaded with answers for every question and a story for street corner. When I mentioned early on that we were interested in history and archaeology, he immediately veered into, “If you look into that building’s window, you can see the original Phoenician foundations of the city!” We had an action-packed four hours filled with monuments, cathedrals, street art, trendy Instagram spots, tremendous scenic overlooks, pastries, museums, hidden elevators, and pigeons. We didn’t go inside these things so much, as we have three more days to do deep exploring, but the tuk tuk tour was a perfect way to get our bearings in place with narrow, steep streets and thousands of years of history. We hired Nali through Eco Tuk Tours, and I highly recommend him and the company in general.
I’ll be covering some of the details of today’s adventures in later posts. But for now, we have finally gotten into our room and taken showers. It’s time to do the exact wrong thing for jet lag and collapse into an evening nap.
