To Lisbon, with love

Earlier this year I went to Lisbon for two weeks with my friends where we rented an Airbnb and worked remotely. I fell in love with the city, which with it’s bridges, hills, climate and friendly people, felt like a European San Francisco. I went on a local guided tour where I learned a lot of the cities history and culture, and the Portuguese passion inspired me to write this prose.

The tale of the guide and Lisboa

At first, the Portuguese guide seems like any other average looking, nice young man. He has light brown eyes and dark shoulder length hair. But when he starts to talk, his eyes sparkle with a life passion that sweeps me off my feet and I fly into the air with his words.

I’m in a large group that starts to follow him in the streets of Lisbon. Unexpectedly, he doesn’t only take us on a tour of the city, but also through time.

We appear in a morning mass on All Hallows’ Eve on the first of November in 1755 when the ground starts to shake. The church shakes violently until its walls collapse over us and create a cloud of smoke. Everyone thinks that this must be the end of the world!

This frightful earth quake lasts for ten long minutes. The smoke lingers until it has choked most of the survivors from the collapse of the building.

The other survivors and I flock to the river, this era’s gathering place, in the hope that our people are still alive and await us there. When we approach the river bank, we are greeted with a giant tsunami which takes thousands of people with it into the sea. A third of the Lisbon population dies that day. The rest wonders if this is the beginning of the end.

After this shocking experience, we travel in time and space to a mainstream shopping street which I had walked in before without knowing that here the city’s poets and artists lived hundreds of years ago. Here they sang the songs of Soldado, melancholic, nostalgic songs about the presence of absence. Our guide bridges the gap back to current times with his poetic song about his Soldado when he was in the navy and missed his beautiful home city.

The sun reflects on the white walls. The wind carries a pink scent of nostalgia. Lisboa is white, pink and yellow. She’s bright and warm.

Next, we travel with an explorer below Africa and over to India. We return on our ships loaded with spices, tea, wine, tobacco and exotic animals. The people that greet us have until now thought of the sea like people in the twentieth first century think of the space. An unchartered, unknown area. For these people, it is a huge step only to come near the frightening sea.

Think about how people today would react seeing space ships land on Earth and aliens appear. That is how they saw the elephants, rhinoceros and the other exotic animals which came with the ships.

The Portuguese king got an excellent idea to make these wild creatures fight against each other. The audience was very disappointed when the elephant got so scared of the rhinoceros that it ran away. These exotic animals weren’t the only living things that came with the ships. There were also dark skinned human being with slanted eyes. Never before had anyone imagined that there exist other human beings so different looking.

Nearing the end, we follow the passionate guide to the middle age neighborhood Alfama, where it’s effortless to get lost in the narrow streets that slither like they want to be a maze.

You can recognize people in Alfama by their emotions that hang on the outside, just like their laundry on their houses. Their personal space is as small as the space in front of their houses. The street is a part of their living quarters. Everybody knows everyone, and they all feel comfortable tight up to each other. I’m never sure the regular Portuguese person is having a conversion or is fighting, and the people here speak even louder, with more emotions and hand movement.

We end our traveling at a viewpoint above the river. The river which is not just a river but also the sea. Everything here in Lisbon has a deeper meaning.

I have a hard time letting go of the guide because I don’t want to leave his stories. I don’t want to leave his emotions he gave us a taste of, like cooled passionate vintage white wine.

I’m the last one to bid him goodbye, and I try to drink as much of him as I can from his eyes. I’m envious of the only woman that will ever own his heart, his lover Lisboa.