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| Great Lakes, Great Proportions |
To take my mind off not being present for this year’s
Thanksgiving, I decided to meet up with a friend in Lisbon, Portugal. We had
the misfortune of choosing an extremely rainy weekend to explore the city, but
I am still very pleased with all that I got to see.
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| Monument to the Discoveries |
Roaming about Lisbon evoked very romantic visions of what I
imagine a European city to look like, where streets and passageways traverse up steep slopes and haven’t yet given way to wheeled transportation- just the
foot and the will of the leg. The sidewalks are still lined with black and
white stone pavers in ordinate designs that lead you around another corner and
up the next hill, and oddly juxtaposed buildings bring you on a story from
past to present. This weekend I was glad I got to relish in Lisbon's antiquity. This feeling of
well-worn age is something I don’t experience too much in Augsburg, although it
is one of Germany’s oldest cities, founded in 15 B.C. (Augsburg = Augusta).
I believe the appearance was due largely to the weather, but
I liked looking at the weepy, sooty buildings and gloom brought about by the
lack of sun. The dreary atmosphere was particularly noticeable in the dimly lit
cathedrals that I visited, which possessed no outside light other than what
shown through the thick stained glass windows.
Also in opposition to the gold leafed and colorfully plastered
cathedrals that I more often see in Germany, the ones in Lisbon remained
austere and utilitarian.
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| 'Weepy, sooty buildings' |
On Sunday, after enduring a full day of rain on Saturday, I
decided that museums were the best way to see the city. Just missing a morning
downpour, I slipped inside Lisbon’s Tile Museum and wandered through tiled
hallways, discovering how tile is also an underrepresented art medium and not just for bathrooms.
