View of River Tejo from our hotel window. click on image to expand A few things I have learned on this trip: 1. When looking for budget accommodations over “the holidays” in Europe one can’t always be too choosy. 2. One should always be somewhat choosy because 3. Counting the hours left to endure in […]
I promised you Fado (the melancholy musical genere named after Fate), and Fado you shall have, or at least the town that is famous for it: Lisbon. Lisbon is also a city famously destroyed in an earthquake (suspected Richter 9) followed by a tsunami and fires spread by toppled cathedral candles on November 1, 1755. […]
We began Christmas Eve day with breakfast at the Barton Fink Hotel (aka Grande Hotel de Paris), an incredible labyrinth ghostship with massive banister staircases, floor upon floor of guest rooms with libraries and sitting rooms decorated in a jumble of faintly dilapidated 1900s furniture. The view from our window showed abandoned buildings all around, […]
This pretty much sums it up. View from Dom Luís Bridge. Palacio da Bolsa (Stock Exchange Palace) in the distance. Perhaps we should begin by speaking of suadade, which translates from Portuguese “as an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul…” (from Nick Cave’s Love Song lecture, Vienna, 1999.) What, […]