Technicolor Vertigo

As we descended into Lisbon, Corey spotted pink buildings from our plane’s window. Two hours later, we stood on the balcony of our tiled apartment building, enjoying our view of the Castelo de São Jorge. After the dark corridors in which we’d spent the last month in Madrid, Lisbon felt like stepping onto a Technicolor movie set.

“I love it!!!”

We walked nearly as far on that first day as we’d walked on our first day in Paris — down the tiled calçada portuguesa of Avenida da Liberdade, through the Christmas Market in Praça Dom Pedro IV, past the sardine shops of Rua Augusta, through the Arco Triunfal to the Tagus River, and past many trolleys up the hill to Alfama.

On the street, we heard as much if not more English than Portuguese, which felt rather strange after our time in Paris and Madrid. We learned later from Alejandro, a local friend of a friend, that the Portuguese — well aware of how hard their language is for foreigners — teach English in all the schools.

We’d met Alejandro on a Saturday night in the Praça das Flores, where Corey had arranged to meet up with her friend Clay from LA who, like us, had chosen to live for a bit in Lisbon. We arrived at the park first and sat on an open bench. I sipped a Sagres tallboy I’d picked up along the way, oblivious to the characterization I’d later hear from a Porto native —namely, that Sagres tastes like “warm piss,” much unlike the north’s beer-of-choice, Super Bock.

Soon Clay arrived with Alejandro, a bartender she’d met on her second day in the city. As we chatted, the park got increasingly lively. First, the benches filled up, and soon after that there was barely any room to stand. We made sure not to leave the bench unattended, which became easier after more of Clay’s expat friends showed up, taking turns to get beer at the quiosque or food at the Cantina Flores, where Clay’s Brazilian friends were dining.

We eventually left the park to visit The Royal Vessel, the bar where Alejandro works, so he could make us his special martini. I wish I remembered his recipe — it was a specific type of gin and something special with the vermouth — but by this stage in the night the tallboys had started to impair my memory capacity.

We wound down the night first with food delivered to the sidewalk outside the bar — burger in one hand and martini in the other — and finally with a nightcap back in the park, where Corey remarked to Clay that at this point I was “in the Emerald City.”

We saw Wicked in theaters while in Portugal and luckily it wasn’t dubbed

Five hours later, waking up in our apartment, I felt smack dab back in the middle of Kansas.

I’d reserved a rental car for 10am so we could drive to Sintra, but neither my mind nor my body could function quite yet, so I laid on the couch for an hour staring alternately at the ceiling and my phone. By 11:05 I’d made it to the rental car place, only to meet with the news that they’d given my car to someone else. Fortunately for us, Uber cost only €23 for a 45-minute ride out of the city, and we made it on-time to Pena Palace despite their “zero delay tolerance” for our timed entry tickets.

Up high in the Sintra Mountains, we were back in the land of enchantment. Turning from the multicolored castle to look across to the next hilltop where a stone sentinel kept watch felt like stepping from once scene into the next.

The walk to Quinta da Regaleria, on the other hand — required thanks to our lack of car — brought us down to reality. What Google Maps claimed would be a 35-minute walk turned into an hourlong hike, and unlike the rock climbers we passed, we had neither the correct shoes nor temperament. But one step into the Quinta transported us back into dreamland.

The day before Thanksgiving, we took a fast but winding train ride up to Porto, during which we could barely walk down the aisle on account of the centrifugal force caused by the curves. My first order of business upon our arrival to the Cidade das Pontes: devour a Francesinha, which I accomplished in a restaurant full of dudes glued to the UCL match between Monaco & Benfica.

The next morning, my dad and brother Henry alighted. We all met up in the lobby of our hotel, the Hospes Infante Sagres, for a welcome drink of port and snack of sardines.

Through Porto we hiked to the top of the Torre dos Clérigos, laughing at teenagers wearing capes and holding big spoons. We perused the selections at the magical Livraria Lello, where for myself I bought The Phantom of the Opera. We walked across the Ponte Luís I to Vila Nova de Gaia, where we passed wine cellars and the barcos rabelos that stocked them for centuries.

The main event of our Thanksgiving weekend came far down the river in the heart of the Douro Valley, where on a hilltop in the Cima Corgo we sampled port at the Quinta do Seixo vineyard. Depictions of the Sandeman’s “Don” mascot inundated nearly every corner of the winery; seeing this apparently-iconic figure felt akin to hearing a song that sounds instantly familiar, even though you’re hearing it for the first time

And who is this mysterious-looking man? He dons a Spanish hat and a Portuguese cape, created for the sake of representing a company founded by a Scot. So you could say he’s a multicultural mix, not unlike his staff, made up of Indian immigrants in the fields and a guide who was born in Portugal yet raised in Germany.

Needless to say, we tasted tons of ports and all were very sweet. Lunch offered a reprieve from so much sugar, as they mercifully offered a few non-ports in their colorful lineup of wine pairings. Even Corey got in on the fun, the sweetness of the port and the pinkness of the sparkling Mateus being too appealing for her to pass up. After the final sips of a particularly delicious vintage, she slammed her wine glass down in such excitement that the stem snapped right in half.

At dusk we drove down the hill, along the river, and across the bridge to the Vintage House Hotel. Despite the lack of snow, we all agreed that its emptiness and the ubiquity of its portrait paintings rather evoked the hotel in The Shining.

We felt ported-out by the time we sat down at Bomfim 1896, opting for Japanese whiskey until they ran out and we switched to Irish. After a meal of shrimp, kid goat, and lobster risotto, we returned to our room where we postgamed with tawny port and Corey, performing under her alias DJ Pink Kitty, handled the tunes.

Our rabelo boat ride the next morning calmed my stomach down a bit, but the long, winding drive through the Douro Valley back to Porto made me so nauseous I could barely think. That still felt better than our train ride back to Lisbon, though, where the conductor realized Corey didn’t have her passport on her, putting her in violation of their online ticketing policy. He threatened a massive fine, and were we not too obtuse to realize it, we likely would have saved ourselves a lot of grief by offering him a bribe. Instead, Corey put on an “acting job” and more or less begged until he finally relented.

“Lyle, I just put on the role of a lifetime.”

For the final few weekends, we’d run out of energy for trips or excursions and hung around Lisbon, focused mostly on eating & drinking in-between the working & shopping.

While working from home during the weeks, I’d leave the apartment once a day to get food for lunch. One day I walked through Campo dos Mártires da Pátria and laughed out loud when a chicken appeared suddenly on the path in front of me. It led me to a whole group of chickens and roosters — outdone only by the Castelo São Jorge and its pied peacocks.

Down the Tagus, after visiting the MAAT, Corey and I dined at Canalha. Their line-caught squid tasted like it was pulled straight from the nearby Atlantic, smothered in sheep butter from the Serra da Estrela mountains, while the partridge empanadas transported us to the dry plains of Alentejo.

Based on the name of Cervejaria Ribadouro, I imagined their garlic shrimp came from the river, as impossible as that may be. Their lack of frills contrasted sharply with the seafood at Rosamar, where on top of just one oyster they fit cranberries, soy sauce, chili, tobiko, and sesame. And they didn’t slack on dressing up their cheese either, stuffing their grilled pão de queijo with anchovies, truffle honey, and grilled peppers.

Just past the Fado house at which guitarists had rang in my thirtieth birthday, we found Essencial, whose French-inspired meal would likely have cost double in the cuisine’s mother country. I can’t think of a single dish from our travels that fall that beat their lobster and sweetbread vol-au-vent.

Down the hill from Bairro Alto and its Miradouro Christmas Market, we came to a short line outside a nondescript door just off the Praça da Alegria. Confirmation made, the man at the front walked us inside, down some stairs to a wall on which he knocked. He apparently knocked the right knock or said the right words, for the wall swung open revealing the dimly lit Red Frog, where we sat next to some Chinese tourists.

My experience would have been complete with just the house Martini, served at -20 degrees from a dark bottle. But, as usual at these sorts of establishments, I got ambitious, straying into the Umami Sazerac and the Holy Smokes — perfectly tasty drinks in themselves albeit not quite up to par with the martini. By the time we stumbled into their South-American-themed sister bar next door, I had to slow down to beer just to keep my debate with the bartender about the NBA somewhat cogent.

If you walk from Red Frog towards the water, past the Elevador de Santa Justa, and take a couple of turns, you’ll arrive at the Ivens hotel. The bar there is much more brightly lit; Corey had found the place on a TikTok praising its “Wes Anderson vibes,” and perhaps that’s how the other Americans found it too, for instance the trio of Houston moms that we sat next to, who sipped espresso martinis as they gabbed about their children and pilates class. I listened on to Corey’s conversation with them in a bit of a haze on account of one of the Ivens’s specialty Negronis, this one made with elderflower in place of Campari.

On a cold December evening, in between the hills of São Jorge and Santo André, we were the first guests to arrive at SEM, where they surprised us by accommodating Corey with a vegan variant of their tasting menu. Perhaps they respected that Corey chose to be vegan because of the environmental impact of the meat industry; their restaurant has a no-waste rule — every bit of food that comes into the kitchen gets used — and rather than serving overfished sea fish, they serve only an invasive species of river fish. Their menu even had an impact key, detailing the ways in which each dish supports their sustainable ethos.

On the unsustainable side, we come to Corey and my trip down the old tram near our apartment. We’d walked past the Elevador da Glória many times on our way to & from Bairro Alto, and one night we decided to take a ride down, me enjoying a Super Bock tallboy, blissfully unaware that nine months later this very same trolley’s cable would snap, its brakes would fail, and it would careen 170 meters down the hill, derail, crash into a building, and kill 16 of its passengers.

I experienced a similar, though less tragic, dissonance during our day trip to the Boca do Inferno. I felt no inkling of the hell described in its name, instead feeling peace and calm looking out at the waves and across the Atlantic, back to where we would be headed all too soon.

Thank you for reading! The story will resume with our Honeymoon in Southeast Asia.