I didn’t want to visit Pizarro’s town because of the way he had destroyed the Inca Empire in Peru for some gold and silver which, in the end, was spent on killing lots more people in the religious wars of 16th and 17th century Europe: destruction in one place in order to keep destruction going in another didn’t seem like a good message to me.

The border is now open between Portugal and Spain; no customs. We passed over the border without stopping: you could see the Portuguese had heavily fortified their side of the border at one time: small forts with look-out posts dotted the border. Historically, the English were Portugal's allies againist the Spanish; it was the English which guaranteed Portuguesse security after it was no longer the dominant power in Iberia. The countryside on the road leading into Portugal was covered in cork trees: I had always been interested in cork. The largest corporation in the town where I grew up made cork ceiling tiles and floors: they bought their cork in Spain and Portugal. The wood of a cork tree is useless: it’s the bark that produces the cork, not the wood. We stopped at a roadside rest area and walked over to a plantation of cork trees near the fueling station and snack bar. There were trees peeled of their cork with numbers indicating when they had been last stripped of their bark.

We stopped and had a lunch just over the border and then on to Lisbon: my first vision of Lisbon was from the new 17km long Vasco da Gama Bridge, which is built across the Tagus River. Don Pedro our tour guide - and from northern Spain -  told us Portugal was poor and full of thieves and everything was falling apart because of a lack of money. The country, Don Pedro told us, was in the midst of a political crisis and uncertain times lay ahead. The country had been living on too much credit and now the European Union was stepping in. There was a political crisis - I had read about it - and so his words gained greater gravity with me as he described the incredible dangers of Lisbon. Lisbon was not dangerous as it turned out; it was everything but dangerous, at least to me. Don Pedro was following through on the Spanish predilection of telling people Portugal is a slum and a sub-state of Spain, I think. You hardly ever got any bad feelings from the Portuguese towards the Spanish, so you could see who was winning the battle. Lisbon looked like San Francisco with the huge Bay, but that was about it for me. The hills, the blue skies, the weather and the red bridge, yes, but Lisbon has its own unique relaxed sensibility far different from California (San Francisco is a great city, too). 

We pulled into the hotel where we were staying. It was a modern hotel in a strange part of Lisbon. Called the Metropolitan Hotel. The hotel was in an area that looked like an industrial park with a working-class neighborhood nearby and a large highway behind it. The hotel was very modern with polished modern looking wood and light fixtures. Everything was a dark brown modern wood color with low white lightening and dark marble. The receptionist was friendly and a little short with us, like she wanted to click her heels and give an order. Coming from Panama it was refreshing.

Gabi showered and then went down for a drink at the bar. I finished showering and tried cleaning myself up after the long bus ride. I felt fine, a little weaker than in Madrid but still strong. Gabi was talking with the bartender when I arrived; his name was Antonio, skinny and short and with large dark coke-bottle glasses that made everything a blur when you looked at him. I ordered a cup of wine, rubbed my eyes, yawned and then said to myself ”I know that voice. There is a voice in this room that I know”. The three of us continued to talk: Antonio told Gabi and I that the Spanish buy Portuguese wine and then take it to Spain and sell it as Spanish wine; and that Spanish wine was too acidic because they left the grapes in the sun for too long. Ok, I thought, and said to myself I wonder what Don Pedro our tour-guide would say about that, but more importantly than the wine, I thought to myself, what about that voice I keep hearing; it was circling around the room like a ring of smoke. I looked over and saw a small group of people sitting on leather couches under small halogen spot lighting. I focused in as I realized the voice was coming in that direction. In the middle of the group was someone I recognized and then very quickly I breathed in and out and said Un-Huh to myself through my cigarette: Dennis Farina was talking to a group of people. He was relaxed, I only heard a few comments: he talked jokingly about the size of  his hair in one of my favorite movies, The Thief with James Caan. He also said that he normally plays golf at this time of the year. He left the waiter a $20 tip: the waiter had identified him also, and we talked on and on about his name and what movies he had starred in: Midnight Run and Snatch were the ones we remembered. 

The first night in Lisbon we ate at a very nice restaurant called Pinocchio's. The food was fine but the people and atmosphere were great. The restaurant is a light green color with - the lower section of the walls from the floor, to say, chair back level dark green - very white flourescent tube lighting. And the waiters wear light and dark green uniforms and we were in green as well. Gabi had a light green suit on and so we bled green. The restaurant served a great Bacalau(salted Codfish with olive oil and garlic). The wine was excellent and people were friendly and the whole place had an infectious craziness about it. We talked and talked and had a great time. We walked out into the Lisbon night and loved everything about the city. Walked near the Praca do Commercio: different colored spotlights drenched the square in light as fun carnival music played. Looked up at St. George’s castle (Castelo de Sao Jorge). The bay of Lisbon in front: the streets went up into the hillsides and there were small bars and streets to walk through. Across the water you could see a Christ statue lit up on a small hill.

The next day, which was the third day of the trip, we went to the waterfront in Lisbon and saw the place where the ships had taken off from to explore the world when Portugal was the world’s greatest power. Their empire stretched to China, India, Indonesia, Mozambique, Angola and Brazil. The history of Portugal was interesting to me because they were originally not a seafaring peoples; they were peasants. The Muslim forces that swept across North Africa in the 7th and 8th century also took control of Portugal and Spain in 711A.D.. Iberia became a Muslim Caliphate which was centered in the historic town of Cordoba, Spain: the Muslims came from many different regions of the Muslim world: Egypt, Damascus, and the Arabian peninsula. One of the problems that the Muslims had while in power in Iberia was staying united in the face of their different regional backgrounds, but stay they did: in Portugal until the end of the 13th century; and Spain until 1492. The Spanish Christians fought for 700 years to win back their territory – known as the Reconquest - and because of this a strong state was established in Spain to conduct the religious war against the Muslims, but that strong state was broken up by regional differences among the Christian kings. So there were many wars going on: Muslim against Muslim, Christian against Muslim, and Christian against Christian. Eventually the Christians defeated the Muslims in 1492 and then used all the energy they had earned fighting the Muslims to go and conquer the New World. They wanted to keep on fighting. During the Reconquest of Iberia, the Spanish saw business or commercial activities as not honorable professions for men. Theirs was a true aristocratic society that put great emphasis on war: to the Spanish being a good businessman or “man of affairs” was not the kind of upbringing that created a real elite: only war could make aristocrats, but war on horseback and with your hands and sword. When they defeated the Muslims the Christian Spanish also threw out all of the Jews from Iberia: The Jews were welcomed by the Muslims and were allowed to settle around the town of Salonika in Greece. 

To make sure that the population of Spain remained Christian, pork was introduced as one of the mainstays of the Spanish diet. Jews and Muslims of course do not eat pork because it is seen as a dirty meat. Jamón (Ham) is a mainstay of the Spanish diet and the Spanish make the best jamón. To push the idea of eating pork as a way of showing your Christian faith, the Spanish always eat pork with their hands. We were told that the jamón in Spain tasted so good because they feed pigs a kind of seed, which comes from Pine trees.

The fishing villages along the coast north of Lisbon are interesting. Estoril, is the one I remembered hearing about. Portugal was neutral in WWII and Lisbon was full of spies even more so than Madrid. The casino in Estoril was famous as a place to hatch plots during WWII; it was also the largest casino in Europe at the time. British writers like John le Carré  and Graham Greene wrote about the place – they knew it. I expected the casino to be old but it wasn’t. The casino was a low concrete building with an open lobby, a central bar in the open lobby and around the open lobby and bar, and set back into the building, slot machines. The casino looked small but it must have been bigger than I realized because I saw posters on the wall for entertainment and dance shows. When we pulled up to the casino the workers at the casino were on strike. They yelled and there was some strange background music they were playing as they screamed softly. They said that they wanted higher wages: management was being tight with money and bringing in new people: funny, even in Portugal. It was a bottom dollar problem and they had to go. Did they really need to go? I was for the workers and decided not to gamble, but did have a beer. A very tall and beautiful Portuguese girl dressed in a Santa skirt that was cut very high, was making and serving drinks. Funny later, I realized she had a pair of shorts on underneath the Santa skirt – good. I say that because in Panama sex is around all the time and so seeing a Portuguese girl dressed up as Santa was not that interesting to me: keep the sex out of Santa.

The Lebanese family didn’t go to the casino; they said it was of no interest; they had had great casinos in Beirut they told me, especially in the 1960s. They talked to me initially about their country as if I didn’t know anything about it and that they really didn’t want to give me the details, but I had read about Lebanon. And knew the Catholic Christian, Orthodox Christian, Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim, at one time, Jewish, populations. And the American University and the American missionaries, and that Beirut had been a Paris of the East in the 1960s. 

The next day we drove to Fatima. This is a famous cathedral in Portugal. Apparently, in 1917 an angel appeared and told three people, one of which is a 100 year old nun who still lives in Portugal, that three important events were going to happen that would change the world: Russian Revolution, Portugal would lose its colonies or Russia would go communist, and WWII. When I heard this I thought how strangely topical and political: I was hoping for something other than political commentary and forecasting. The cathedral in Fatima is small; they are building a larger cathedral that is partially underground in front of the original cathedral. The sky was blue and the atmosphere was nice. People walked on their knees a great distance to express their faith and others bought large candles and lit them and then put them in a large metal and bricked out altar. We walked into the town of Fatima and had a coffee and went back to the bus, which was leaving for a artisan market where they made Catholic idols and religious hardware. At the artisan market, people were putting together models of Christ on the cross: his body with all the cruxfiction marks. One of the big silver thrones used in Catholic processions, the kind that needs six people to carry, and with Jesus on it -  it had him nailed to a cross on top of a large silver box – had a sold sign on it. The market was small and very sparse and cold; they had a restaurant upstairs that was like a cafeteria with roasted chicken and veal. I got a huge plate of food and ate little of it. We were deep into smoking cigarettes by now. Every free moment seemed to need a cigarette. The bus driver had been nice but distant, now he began to talk and smoke with us. We had also started to talk a lot with the Australian couple who were very well-spoken and intelligent: Skeet, he told me the name probably had come from California, as his family had come to Australia from California after the Gold Rush. The Australians had a Gold Rush in the 1850s after the American rush of the 1840s. But I took him back one step further and said he looked like a Chilean; they had migrated to California during the Gold Rush; they caught the boats that came around the bottom of South America headed for California. Did they go to Australia as well? Skeet and Melodie told us they could have missed the cathedral in Fatima as well as the artisan shop; we felt the same, but anyway. The Mexicans and Lebanese seemed to enjoy it, though I never asked. 

On the way back to Lisbon from Fatima, Don Pedro, our guide, told us we should go to two places during our last night in Lisbon: one was a bar, the Chinese Pavilion, and the other was a restaurant called Cerveceria Trinidade. The Chinese Pavilion is named so because it was a Chinese shop before becoming a bar. The bar is filled with all kinds of things from around the world. The bar is like drinking in a library and it has a club feel to it with a pool table and rooms that slip off of each other, like in a second-hand bookshop or old library. 

The restaurant was great fun, open and colorful. There were tiles of different colors on the walls and people were enjoying themselves. The dinner was very good and we drank beer mostly, not much food. We had been eating a little, but mostly drinking wine and beer. We had a good last night in Lisbon; the others went home and Gabi and I walked together for a while and caught a taxi to the hotel and went to bed. The next day we were going to Spain. The drive south through the Portuguese Algarve toward the border with Spain now fascinated me.

A Little On Panama

I was told recently by someone who knows, that the horesetrack in Panama City is great fun. So if you’re in town and have some time to kill checkout the racetrack.

Other articles by the author:

• Santa Catalina And Coiba Prison Island ~ Little Known Frontiers
• John Wayne Island ~ In An Imaginary Tropical Western
• Hiding Out In Panama - The Hotel Ideal
• Living And Investing In Panama ~ What To Look Out For
• Looking At Property On Contadora Island ~ Exploring The History And Landscape Of An Island
• Isla Grande ~ The Lost Sides Of Isla Grande.
• An Interview With John Carlson ~ Talking With An Old Hand About Investing In Panama
• Altos del Maria - Another Look
• Carnaval 2003 - Hanging In
• Cerro Jefe ~  In An Old Cloud Forest
• Daytrips In Panama ~Looking At Real Estate And Passing Through Colon
• Deep In Veraguas - Traveling Down Backroads In Panama
• El Cope, Cocle ~ And Some Other Ideas
• On The Pacific Coast Of Panama - Traveling Through The Mountains And Beaches Of Panama
• Up On The Contential Divide And Down In The Desert ~ Hiking And Discovering Panama's Beauty
• Playa Grande - The Beauty Of A Remote Panamanian Beach
• Italy In Winter - From Rome To Venice
• Panama And Costa Rica - Thoughts On Both
• The Panama Railroad ~ Panama City To Colon
• The Chiriqui Highlands - R&R