The Night in Lisbon

Lisbon, Day 1

The train to Lisbon was the fastest I ever took, sometimes I got a feeling that NOW it’s gonna finally take off. It feels so strange to ride along the coast of Atlantic Ocean, on the very edge of the Old World! In Europe, you can see various kinds of industrial and agricultural activity when taking trains, by contrast, in Russia there’s so much space you can place it all far away somewhere. Gleb enjoyed his favorite activity when it gets too boring around: playing GTA San Andreas. This time he was challenging himself in carefully landing the planes. In reality, number of successful landings divided by the number of successful takeoffs is 1 most of the time, but Gleb assured me that if he was a pilot then his stat would be somewhere around 0,2. Sometimes during the flight he flies the passenger plane in GTA and even pretends he controls the one we fly on. Truly, a dangerous man!

Thanks to offline maps in my pocket, we knew our way around to the hostel. It was a good exercise as the way was mostly uphill, through extremely narrow streets where one always has to watch out for the cars and stay near walls in order to let them through. In addition, it’s all brickworks, no concrete historically and aesthetically appealing, but when you try to move your luggage up on these! Not fun. At first one hostel had to be checked for free rooms and for our Czech friends, more importantly. This was a tiny place hidden somewhere in the labyrinth of narrow streets, very atmospheric and unusually-looking, too. We met the guys right on our way out of the hostel.

When we arrived at our place, it turned out Aran didn’t get the booking right, but the owner, a nice Nepalese guy, did us a favor by offering a whole room just for us. This wasn’t his only favor, so stay tuned. I paid attention to a peculiar picture of familiar elephant-looking Indian god hanging on the wall, accompanied by wooden planks with positive phrases like on the picture below. Overall it created a positive impression.

Our balcony overlooked a construction site and some houses with small rooftop areas. Reminded me the view from one of our host flats in Italy. Very chaotic and peculiar sight.

Second time in my life I remembered those funny stories from the childhood when grandma tells you there’ll be people on the street trying to push you drugs (for free to hook you up!). This only happened to me in two places: 1. Prague, and 2. guess where?

Every ten meters there’s a guy with something subtle but very clear about him you immediately recognize, and then he comes over to you offering hashish and whatnot. Everyone was hungry, so we’d prefer pizza to what these annoying pushers were offering and the plan for the evening was set; we went to a ‘restaurant district’ to find a decent place to eat. In reality, that district looked more like slums than a tourist attractor the deeper we went, the less were our chances to find any restaurant at all. Lucky for us, this evening we found what we needed on the way back and tried some real pizza, just like back in Italy.

With two bottles of wine in our disposal, we went to explore the city, hoping to make proper use of them near the bay (it just wouldn’t be right to call it a river as it’s way too wide). Near the shoreline there was a club filled exclusively with black people. Everybody was puzzled, but no one was feeling suicidal enough to ask somebody about it. Then we found a spot nearby and opened the wine.

I thought I should have put on my hoodie; icy breeze coming from the bay was slowly but reliably putting me into a cryogenic sleep. It was a right time to go back to the hostel.

Lisbon, day 2

This was the last day of our long adventure. That’s the bad part; the good part was that we were meeting with our Serbian friends plus Gerard and Manuel again. In Lisbon, a castle stands proudly above the city, often visible from the narrow streets down below, so no surprise it was our next destination.

We stumbled upon a trio of peacocks near the gates that seemed to pay no attention to people surrounding them whatsoever. Except for great views of the city, the fortress wasn’t particularly interesting…

if it wasn’t for an amazing periscope tower which of course can magnify anything and rotate freely in any direction. It’s very strange to see this kind of an analog image on the special curved wooden table where picture at first seems more or less static, but then you start noticing lots of small details: moving leaves, people going about their business, airplanes taking off, all sorts of little things. For some reason this projection seems very alive; if the same image was presented to us on a hi-res display, it would’ve been just an ordinary image to me.

After walking across the ancient structure, we descended back to the city to meet with our comrades at a restaurant.

In fact, we stumbled upon a restaurant street, and of course some guy appeared and started to talk in length about how great his restaurant is and how he guarantees the food quality. Talking, talking, talking… But he got us, heh. There was a surprising moment when some russian tourist finished his dinner and this talker gave him an advice about how professional thieves are there in native-sounding Russian. That left me guessing what to nationality he really was belonging.

Before we actually went to Lisbon, Gleb was eager to visit a museum of electricity, and while looking at the map we thought that it’s too far from the city center and we probably won’t make it there due to lack of time. In the end it turned out we took a bus to the place and accidentally discovered the museum that was housed in the building of an old energy plant.

Still, we hadn’t had enough time to visit the exhibition and enjoyed a rest on the grass near the Big Red Bridge (too lazy to google its name) with everybody.

The goal of our trip here was the Tower of Belem, which, unfortunately, was closed at the time we arrived. Still, it was a beautiful sight. Gleb noticed that it’s almost 20 times older than him and tried to feel through that fact in awe. It’s a real shame we don’t live as long as these keeps and castles do.

We bought ourselves traditional Portugese sweets in a local shop (which is probably famous judjung by how many people were queuing there) and went to a nearby park. I brought some of these sweets home from Duty Free.

We then waited for a long time for a bus or tram to arrive; afterwards it dropped us somewhere in the city. Despite being tired and slightly disoriented, we all agreed to go out and meet again this evening. Only Bogdan decided to stay at the hostel and we said warm goodbyes to each other. We tried to coordinate with others to purchase two bottles of wine in total (whoever does this, notifies others so they don’t buy extra). Of course we failed and it resulted in four bottles of wine being brought to the meeting.

And there comes a second favor from the Nepalese guy (keep calling him that way because I couldn’t quite cath his name): he suddenly offered us half a whiskey bottle so that we’ll remember this meeting that happened simply by chance. And guess he succeeded :)

That last night was spent on a sort of balcony overlooking the red roofs of the houses facing the bay. The place truly had a special atmosphere, we kept chatting and amount of empty bottles was growing very fast, considering that guys went to the nearby shops and bought about four additional bottles.

We a priori beleived that it’s impossible to get drunk with vine which proved to be false a posteriori after experiencing all shit that followed.

At some point a sudden realization came to me. It was about that we’ll have to

1. get back to the hostel
2. take the train back to Porto at 6 am,

which means we have to leave the hostel no later than 5 am which in turn means we have to get up approximately at half past 4. And that taking into account we’re really drunk right now. But no one cared and everybody was doing press-ups which ideally complemented funny craziness happening around.

Gleb didn’t seem to care about our train in the morning, so I tried to walk around and breathe in some fresh air to get slightly more sober. In the finale people started falling asleep right on the spot and we had to get back ‘home’.

With a heavy heart we parted our ways (after the third attempt of endlessly saying goodbyes), hoping to see each other someday again. This was the end of our journey associated with the workcamp, but it didn’t end there for me and Gleb.

The very last day, during which we visited four cities in different parts of the world.

After a tough night I managed to wake up Gleb (who met Boris that night) and in 20 minutes we were ready to head out.

Aran was sleeping peacefully, not reacting to any light or noise we produced. The hostel boss assured us somebody would be at the reception at this hour, but when we descended the stairs we saw an empty desk and the front door was closed. We tried all those buttons, latches and locks attached to the door, but weren’t able to open it. Searching the desk yielded nothing. And the clock was ticking: it takes approximately 40 minutes to rush to Santa Appolonia station by foot from the hostel, cursing the narrow streets and the brickworks under our feet. All our efforts to open the door were fruitless and we went upstairs to look for staff’s sleepling room. Five minutes later we accidentally woke the guy up and he unlocked the door for us, but the amount of time was critical and we rushed through the empty streets and then heard a taxi behind us just in time. During the short conversation with the driver it turned out his wife was Russian and even said a phrase or two in our language. We took a nap in the train and woke up in Porto. Second city in a row.

Zurich. The same day.

We had a plenty of time to spend in Zurich and the best option was to head out and explore the city. We took a train with two floors and watched the suburbs through a large window.

I felt slightly uncomfortable due to the fact that most of locals we encountered looked like serious businessman. And city sure is expensive as (w/h)ell we didn’t eat anything for a few hours but weren’t willing to spend so much on food.

Big gray-ish clouds dominated the sky, the weather was slowly turning rainy, and I left my umbrella in the luggage. Gleb’s a resourceful man so he immediately contacted somebody who was in Zurich recently and the guy sent us a sightseeing map just like in a James Bond movies when he gets blueprints of top-secret bases on request.

So our route was set and we followed the map. The water in the river had a very bright hue and looked like it was taken straight from a fairy tale. The mountains in the distance were always visible; it was unusual to such a degree that at some point they started to seem strangely unreal to me. The city is amazing, beautiful and prosperous, and the population isn’t anywhere high compared to the main Russian (and European, too) cities.

A thing I paid attention to was that most of the advertisements were about finances and investments. Zurich university impressed us a lot; this phrase sums it up: ‘That funny feeling when you realize your university is number one in Dolgoprudny’ (c) Gleb.

We were extremely hungry at this point, but local prices (not just the restaurants’) kept us on our feet: we agreed that a little bit of energy left in us will be just enough to hold till we taste fancy Swiss Airlines supper.

Later, however, we changed our mind and picked fries with nuggets and shared it. There isn’t much more to say about our little exploration, the photos will tell more.

Closer to the end of our sightseeing rain finally started, forcing us to retreat to the train station. My blue hoodie tried its best to save me while Gleb, Gleb Bond got himself a hi-tech rainwear out of nowhere.

In silence we sat on the second floor of the train and looked on the rainy outside, trying to accept the fact we’re returning back home.

Moscow. The following night.

Arrival downed our mood quite a bit: . When we took a taxi and rode through the night, I was feeling strange. I was expecting that getting back to Moscow would bring me back sense of belonging, being home, in my proper place. But it didn’t come, and at that moment came a brain-blasting realization: finally I abandoned my craving for stability and was able to enjoy the trip, making every place where I stayed feel like home. Too much has happened and it changed a lot irreversibly.

The next morning I woke up and looked around. Everything was shockingly ordinary (I mean exactly that) and the trip felt like a dream: only my bag suggested it actually happenned. Before I knew it, the dream was all over; daily routine that seemed 5000 kilometers away in Lisbon kicked in once again. But it was just the beginning of another story I’ll share someday.