Whelan's Travels: Portugal Part 1

Onde pode acolher-se um fraco humano,
Onde terá segura a curta vida,
Que não se arme e se indigne o Céu sereno
Contra um bicho da terra tão pequeno?

[Where may frail humanity shelter
Briefly, in some secure port,
Where the bright heavens cease to vent their rage
On such insects on so small a stage?]

-- Luis de Camões (1524-1580)

Portugal is a very poor, very faded, very wrung-out type of place. You could see it in the chipped paint of the walls of the buildings, the rusty metal balconies, and the sad-looking potted window-boxes. If you go so far as to read about it, you start to see it in the country´s history -- its periodic subjection to the Spanish crown, its devastating earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, its always-tenuous and quickly-relinquished hold on its piece of the colonial pie. It´s like the poet Camões said... the heavens have been venting their rage on the Portuguese for centuries, and everything is still crumbled, still not recovered.

Look, for example, at the colors of Coimbra, the small, charming university town that we visited first on our trip to our neighbor country...

Since Coimbra is a comparable city to Salamanca (there uni was started in 1280, ours in 1218), I found it so interesting that they tried, in their way, to make the town colorful... But in the end, everything fell into the same kind of medieval European disrepair that Salamanca has. The difference is that in Salamanca, everything is old-looking tan-colored sandstone, and it can´t look anything but antiquated. In Coimbra, the lazily-painted walls were like a quick inadequate whitewashing of the city´s poverty... like a woman trying to paint over a burn on her face with bad cover-up.

Notice in the top photo the façade it covered with bluish square tiles... These are called azulejos, and they come from Seville. At their prettiest, they look like these, which are from a hallway in the University...

Absolutely everything in Portugal is covered with them, because when the big famous early modern buildings were being built, they didn´t have enough money for the stone carvings and elaborate marblework of Salamanca. The azulejos are a constant reminder of the subjected, melancholy feeling of Portugal.

The University of Coimbra, however, was fantastic. It must be quite the experience to study there, with a library that looks like this (that´s my friend Christian in the fore)...

And a quad (plaza) that looks like this (hi, ashley)...

and this (hi big john, miguel)...

with its big, imperious clock tower (and matt, thinking)...

And a chapel with an unbelievable pipe organ (miguel again)...

and guys like me looking goofy while posing for pictures with the coimbra rooftops in the background...

and with their old faded, blackening statue of the university´s founder, João I, which looks remarkably like Hans Holbein the Younger´s portrait of Henry VIII...

and again, with Pepe courting Ashley at João´s feet...

And here´s the Law School... Note the words... ¨Faculdade de Direito¨. In Spanish it would be ¨Facultad de Derecho¨. These are the types of similarities that allowed me to annoy everyone by trying to speak Portuguese, which for me meant applying the three or for Portuguese pronunciation rules directly to Spanish. I was a real hit.

A lot of the students at the University live in co-ops called republicas. Here´s an IES staffer, Alfredo, posing with a republica in the background...

Most students who live in the republicas voted for GW Bush, as you can tell by the stickers on this door, which are being so helpfully highlighted by my buddy Jose...

And here´s a republicano himself, who stuck his head out the window to tell us that his republica, was, in fact, co-ed, but only at night, after they get a few drinks into the gals...

And after the university, we saw Coimbra´s small, but fantastic cathedral (with evan and ashley in front)...

and again, with dave...

and finally, with me, pointing out to yinz that leaves are in fact a symbol of portugal, and that´s why they´re all over the entranceway to the cathedral...