No, I Still Don’t Like Olives

These past few days I have been in Lisbon, Portugal and I must say that I’ve developed a fascination with the buildings here. It’s not that the buildings all have amazing architecture, because they are all a Pombaline-like style. Think of the cookie-cutter buildings you see in suburbia, add some Portugal flair, and that is essentially Pombaline style. What makes these buildings so unique though is that they do not come in only four colors like suburbia. No, there are so many colors—magenta, turquoise, robin’s egg blue, sunflower yellow, sunset orange, bright yellow, pink, cobalt blue, cream, white—that I’m sure I could never name them all. When I finally get around to posting all my photos on Facebook, and there will be hundreds of them, you will all get to see my obsessions with buildings in Lisbon and probably wonder if there is something wrong with me.

One thing that a person cannot miss while in Lisbon is how dirty the sidewalks are. While I was on a class field lab (like a field trip day), we were told that the stones that make up the sidewalks were placed by hand one by one (something Claudia, a tour guide, told us) but in the cracks there are countless cigarette butts, shards of broken glass, and napkins littering the ground. I also must have kept standing by manholes or sewage gutters because somehow my nose constantly picked up the sewage smell. The pigeons also rule the city. They walk around like they own the place—much like other large cities where pigeons don’t have to search for food because it lands in front of them. Since I was around acquaintances and strangers, I did not chase or harass the pigeons—something I totally would have done if I was with family or close friends. Chasing pigeons is one of my lovable quirks.

The field lab I went on was for my travel writing class, so much of the day was spent walking around the Bairro Alto and Alfama areas of Lisboa (Lisbon, pronounced Leeshboa) and then writing down what we observed in a notebook. Later we went to lunch and were fed a Portuguese staple—codfish. There was a spinach base, then a layer of codfish, then some sort of egg/mystery layer, then a layer of some sort of cheese, and all topped with an olive in the center (check my Instagram lex_rigoni, for the picture). It was amazing. I’ve always compared my-self to a human garbage disposal, an odd comparison, I know, but I’m really not picky when it comes to food. This dish was delicious. I told one of the girls in my class that I would eat one olive because Claudia was so proud of the Portuguese olives and because I thought, when in Portugal, right? I think I was hoping there would be some miracle and when I ate the olive I would suddenly love them. THIS DID NOT HAPPEN. I ate that one olive and grimaced as it went down.

We listened to some Fado music, music the Portuguese are well-known for. We were told in pre-port on the ship that Fado is a type of mourning music (basically, they made it sound like super depressing music that I was dreading because of the how it was described. While there were some longing tones in the songs the man and woman were singing, it sounded nothing like it was described and for that I am very happy. Later, after walking around the streets of Lisbon, we decided to stop for—wait for it—Pasteis de nata! Pasteis de nata are pastries that I could try to explain to you but could never do them justice. They are little pieces of heaven and are famous in Portugal and I ate two of them, because as everyone says, you can never just have one. Guess who’s going to look up the recipe when she gets home?

 Portugal is awesome. Wish you all could be here!

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Alexis

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