Shaking the snow globe in Lisbon
Pawel, me, and my brother GB at A Taberna, a waterfront restaurant in Trafaria, across the river from Lisbon. I’ll hold the memory of that languid, late afternoon fish lunch in my heart for a loooooooong time.
A couple of weeks ago my husband Pawel and I skipped town to attend a 50th birthday party in Lisbon, Portugal.
We don’t normally do this kind of thing. We’re not jetsetters. We try to watch our spending, budgeting for mortgage and school fees and summer visits to family in Italy and Poland and piano lessons and new car tires and blah blah blah.
But we’d accrued miles so the cost of plane tickets wasn't an issue. Our friend's brother put us up at his beachside house so accommodations were all set. The question, then, was stay home and argue about whose turn it was to do the grocery shopping or go to Portugal? Yeah. No contest. The day before we left, Pawel texted me from work to say it felt like we were cutting school in the middle of the day. My reply: “teeheehee…!”
Our daughter being happily settled with school friends, we landed late in the morning of Wednesday the 12th, rumpled and sandy-eyed, after about 16 hours of travel. There followed four blissful days of poking around. We had no agenda. We'd read a few “36 Hours In Lisbon” articles but we weren't feeling particularly ambitious. We were content to explore a smattering of sites - the exquisite Jéronimos Monastery, the elegant Gothic Sé Cathedral, and São Jorge Castle's timeworn ramparts - and to spend time with friends, sipping drinks in the city, or watching the swell at the beach on the Atlantic coast. There, Pawel and my brother, GB, who’d joined us from Italy, took surfing lessons. My self-imposed task was to lie in the sun doing as little as possible and to (unsuccessfully) keep our belongings from getting drenched by the rascally waves. Our biggest worry was where to have the next mind-blowing meal of crispy, moist oil- and garlic-roasted fish and octopus. Then, early on Sunday morning, after a night of dancing and revelry at a decadent, be-frescoed Baroque villa where we made new friends and promises to visit one another soon, it was time to head back home.
Back in Colorado, Pawel rhapsodized about our little adventure, comparing it to having been in a snow globe that suddenly got a good shake. I love that.
Shaking the snow globe means gaining a new perspective. Changing one’s vantage point. Questioning one’s assumptions. Things that happen when we’re exposed to a new culture, a new place, new people. We not only find ourselves alternately entranced and flummoxed by the novelty but we reconsider what we take as a matter of course in our own culture.
It’s what I aspire to do with Wonderfeast.