Persistence and Resistance

First, the persistence. Joe kept insisting he was sure where he left his glasses, so I decided the best option was to go take a look. It would have been a great story! No luck, though the woman in the park’s café told me she had a huge ring of keys, including two car keys, that someone lost yesterday. So I think we got off lucky, just losing glasses.

From there we decided to go to the Aljube, a former political prison during the Salazar dictatorship. It has been turned into the Museum of the Resistance. We had been there ten years ago when it first opened, and it was just as chilling as before. So many displays of inhumanity. The last rooms of the permanent exhibition end with an upbeat recounting of the Carnation Revolution — deposing a dictatorship without firing a shot. I thought the museum struck the right tone — not too pollyanish but clear in its message that there was a good side and a bad side.

I found a public elevator I had never seen before — takes you straight down into the middle of the Alfama, the old moorish neighborhood below the castle walls. We hadn’t been down there because there are just too many uneven surfaces, ups and downs, nooks and crannies. But Joe was game, so dowon we went. We did wind up doing a fair amount of up and down through tiny narrow passageways. It is becoming quite the trendy area — lots of Air BnBs, restaurants, souvenir shops, etc, but there are still real people living there, all of whom seem to do their wash on Sunday and hang it outside.

Our plan was to walk down to the center and catch a cab back to the hotel. But there was no traffic going through the streets. I thought surely there must be some huge political demonstration going on, but after walking a mile or so up from the center towards our hotel, we saw that it was an Antique Car Association gathering that had blocked off the main drag in town and essentially stopped traffic going into the historic core. The cops we asked about it were not big fans, but some of these cars were real gems.

Finally, about two hours later and three more miles walked than hoped for, we found a cab and made it back to the hotel. Teaching starts up tomorrow bright and early.Read more