Portugal Part 3 - Sintra, Cascais, Lisboa

Moving on through Portugal, we checked out Sintra, famous for its Royal Summer Palace of Prohibited Photography, where the royal family lived, without flash photography for hundreds of years. I took some (3) cool pictures outside of it though. Sintra was a beautiful city...

Here´s the hills across the street from the palace...




And here´s Evan standing in a doorway...


And here I am, standing on the railing of the castle...


From there, we went to Cascais, a rich beachy suburb of Lisboa. There was a sign that said that the water was unfit for bathing because of all the pollutants and fishing boats, but we swam anyways...



And right near Cascais was the Cabo del Infierno, the Mouth of Hell, a big rocky inlet gorge (a fjord?) that was, I believe, the westernmost point in all of Europe.



Daniel climbed on the rocks with me...


And I looked like a fool, as usual...


Then on the bus to Lisboa I ate some queijos da serra, these delicious portuguese cream cheese tarts that taste like cinnamon and delicious...


Then when we got to Lisboa, which was a very pretty city, and which I wrote a lot about, I forgot my camera, leaving it in the hotel room, so I only got a few pictures later on of the LP (lisbon, portugal)...



There are also street cars in Lisboa, and I took another Robert Doisneau museum-worthy photo...



Then I took several shots of the Lisboa rooftops in what I call my 'kissing series', which means I look at people standing next to eachother and say 'Kiss!'. Brigid and Amy...



Evan and Kelly...


Rachel and (different) Amy...


And finally, the ride home...

Portugal Part 2 - Convento la Batalha, Monasterio de Alcobaçah

Okay all you architecture freaks and Marilyn Manson fans... You´re all in for a treat this week because today´s blog entry is totally GOTHIC.

During my Portugal trip of two weeks hence, after Coimbra, I hit up two sweet cathedrals. The first was called the Convento de La Batalha, which means 'Nunnery of the Battle'...



It was built in the 15th century to commemorate the battle of Alijubarrota, which happened on August 14th, 1385. Basically what happened is this: the Spanish we´re constantly trying to invade Portugal, and the Portuguese constantly fighting them off. Meanwhile, over in England, this lairy geezer called John of Gaunt, who held the bad-ass post of Duke of Lancaster, was charming the pants of this bird called Costanza, who happened to be daughter of the Spanish king Pedro. John of Gaunt was so lairy, in fact, that according to Shakespeare, here´s what he said on his deathbed:

¨This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings...¨

For all the Whelans reading this, you might remember that Uncle Wake (or maybe Grandma) has a book at Thurmont called ¨This Realm, This England¨, which is pretty distinctively Whelan, and pretty cool, now that we know where it comes from.

Where was I? Oh yeah. So after John of Gaunt marries Constanza, he tries to take over Spain, unsuccessfully, several times. One of the ways he does this is by supporting the Portuguese. So in 1385 he sent 500 drunken Brits with crossbows to Alijubarrota and they helped the Portuguese beat the tar out of the Spaniards. The Portuguese celebrated with several decades of hard labor, hauling and hoisting stone, not sleeping in on Sundays, all to build this convent that I saw, which was, admittedly, rather impressive. Here it is in black and white, because really, all cathedrals shouls be shot in black and white:



It had a sweet doorway with dozens of saints carved in intricate detail. Here´s Evan standing in it (which, by the way, is part of a series I have of Evan standing in doorways)...



And here´s the doorway by itself...



It had a little statue of some saint with a hideous demonic beast on a leash...



It had a sweet gothic ceiling (Kelly modelling),



It had Jesus...



You better believe it had buttresses...



And it had a sweet equestrian statue of Nuno Alvarez Pereira, the lairy general who won the battle for the ´Guese... He was so lairy, in fact, that he got out of control and had to join a Dominican Order at the end of his life. But for a while, he kicked ass. Just look at this...



The next cathedral we went to was called Alcobaçah, and it was rife, rife, I tell you, with romance, stonework, and GOTHICNESS. Here´s Jorge, one of the goofball IES staffers standing out front...



Here´s Matt looking introspective by the inner cloisters. This photo is, incidentally, part of a series that I have of pictures of Matt looking introspective...



And the best part about Alcobaçah was the story of Dom Pedro the Cruel and his boo Dona Inez de Castro. She was a hot noble from Galicia, who came as a lady-in-waiting to Costance of Castile, who was getting married to Dom Pedro, the rising king of Portugal. Pedro and Inez met. They danced. They sucked face. Sparks flew. It was a lot like that J-Lo movie The Wedding Planner, in fact. But the powers that be wouldnt let Pedro marry his boo, so he made a wifey out of Constance, and when she died, Pedro was all set to marry his true love. Not so easy. In the meantime, Constance´s brothers had decide that in order to preserve the purity of the throne, they had to off Inez, who was, as I mentioned, totally hot and ready to get it on with Pedro. Pedro was so infuriated that he killed ALL of Constance´s brothers, as well as several hundred other people who had nothing to do with the situation, and became a really ornery old geezer who loved killing people, eating steak tartar, and playing darts in dive bars for the rest of his life. He also loved GOTH stuff and first-person shooter video games.

Pedro and Inez are buried toe to toe in Alcobaçah so that when Jesus comes back, they´ll both stand up and be able to play some tonsil hockey together again, like old times... It looked like this...

Dom Pedro...



Dona Inez...



If you don´t believe my version of the story, here´s what Portugal´s main man of letters, Luis de Camões, has to say about it...

As filhas do Mondego a morte escura
Longo tempo chorando memoraram,
E, por memória eterna, em fonte pura
As lágrimas choradas transformaram.
O nome lhe puseram, que inda dura,
Dos amores de Inês, que ali passaram.
Vede que fresca fonte rega as flores,
Que lágrimas são água e o nome amores.

This act of horror, and black night obscure,
Mondego's daughter long resented deep;
And, for a lasting tomb, into a pure
Fountain transformed the tears which they did weep.
The name they gave it (which doth still endure)
Was Ines' loves, whom Pedro did keep.
No wonder, such sweet streams water those flowers:
Tears, are the substance; and the name Amours.

- Luiz de Camões, Os Lusíadas, Canto III

Also, when we were at Alcobaçah, there was a wedding party waiting outside for the bride and groom, to throw rice at them. We, like proper tourists, walked right through the affair, all 60 of us, without noticing what was going on, but just before that, I scored these two artsy shots, which I think are shoe-ins for the Robert Doisneau / Henri Cartier-Bresson school of pretentious black and white character shots. They could be called ¨Waiting for the Bride, No. 1¨and ¨Waiting for the Bride, No. 2¨ or something creative like that. Or maybe I should title them in French. That would be sweet.





Love,
Robbie

Portugal Part 1 - Coimbra

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...




and that is where I leave you, for it´s time for literature class. Coming up: more cathedrals, art shots, and bella Lisboa.

Love,
Robbie