Where's Waldo?

That’s correct! I’m standing in front of the Ponte 25 de Abril, Lisbon’s version of the Golden Gate Bridge built in 1966. Last week I spent 5 days in Lisbon, Portugal mainly for business but decided to stay on for the weekend. Every 6 months one of our distributors goes all out and sends their 200+ field application engineers to an “exotic” locale in Europe for training. Moving forward they’ve decided to pick a seaside or Mediterranean spot for their spring training (Malaga is coming up I believe) and hold their fall training in Munich during Oktoberfest. Yeah, these guys have it rough. The first couple of days were pretty hectic since I was there to train some of the field application engineers on our products and where/how to sell them. (Side bar…Whoever thinks I’m capable of training engineers is sadly mistaken). The part that is really exhausting is that they get to meet face-to-face with someone directly employed by the supplier so it’s a field day in terms of airing their complaints. Some of them are actually valid but they mostly just want to be heard and then they’re done so I don’t mind too much.

I did get rewarded for my work as the final night of the training culminated in what I have to admit was a pretty glamorous and creative party. This distributor launched a major platform called Snakbytes about a year ago so this set the theme for the entire evening. They bussed us to the Botanical Garden which was built as a playground for the children of the royal family. This was to be the stage for our night in the “Garden of Eden”. They hired actors to play Michael the Archangel, Adam, and Eve and the centerpiece of the garden was the “Tree of Knowledge” dotted with apples. They even had a snake charmer for entertainment. Food and drink were plenty so I have to say it was a good evening. Just when I think I’m done with all the corporate parties, they suck me back in. (Extra points if you can name the movie I’m loosely quoting from.)

Thursday night I was joined by my new American ex-pat friend Tonya. Tonya has just finished her masters thesis so it was a nice break for her I hope. It was also good to have a travel companion again since I’ve mostly been traveling on my own these days. Friday was a pretty low-key day for us with a bit of sightseeing but we mostly spent the day shopping. With the dollar at ~$0.50 to the GBP, shopping in Euros is very tantalizing for us, although the dollar isn’t doing all that well against the Euro either these days. After a bit of a rest at the hotel we hailed a cab and headed to Kais restaurant for dinner. This was to be the first of our two cab adventures. We got in the cab and showed the driver the address. He nodded in acknowledgement and we were off. A couple miles later, he stopped on a street that was lined with cab drivers waiting for fares. He systematically went cab by cab trying to figure out where our restaurant was and mind you he did NOT stop the meter. He finally found someone who had a general idea of where the restaurant was located but he still had not figured out exactly where it was. He then drove us about another mile and got out again at a restaurant to ask for directions, also not stopping the meter. At this point we were parked in front of a large wooden building so Tonya and I looked at each other and said, “I bet that’s our restaurant right there.” When he returned he drove us about 10 meters because, yes ladies and gentlemen, we were stopped right in front of Kais. I, of course, refused to pay him the full fare feeling that I’d been taken advantage of and as we walked away I believe some expletives were shouted in my direction. Kais turned out to be a beautiful restaurant that was in an old converted power plant right on the waterfront. With its architecture, décor, and location, it could easily have been a restaurant in San Francisco and it was the first of several reminders of home. We capped off the night with a visit to the Port Wine Institute where I discovered that I'm not the biggest fan of port.

The next day was to be a full day of sightseeing split between the area of Lisbon known as Belem and a nearby city called Sintra. In Belem we went to the Monastery of Jeronimos, Monument to the Discoveries, and the Tower of Belem. After a late lunch we got into a cab and set out for one of the palaces in Sintra which we were told was an easy 20 kilometers away. Our cab driver turned out to be the same variety as the one from the evening before. He drove around the block and stopped to ask 3 other cabbies where the palace was. I had a really uneasy feeling at this point and wanted to go with another cab but Tonya is much more trusting than I am. We got on the motorway towards Sintra and about 30 Euros later we finally saw a palace on top of a mountain that looked to be at least another 10 miles away (note that all of our other taxi rides had been less than 5 Euros up to this point). We decided at this point to just bite the bullet and head back because the palace looked so remote we had no idea how we would make our way back to the hotel. We did indeed make it back and decided to play it safe and go to the Barrio Alto area for a quiet and relaxing dinner.

Overall my impressions of Lisbon were very mixed. I’ll definitely take the climate in Lisbon over London as it was nearly 30C everyday while it’s pouring rain in London right now. Lisbon isn’t the prettiest of European cities and perhaps it was where we stayed, but it seemed very commercial to me. We enjoyed the Barrio Alto area the most and found it to be the area with the most “soul” but unfortunately we didn’t discover it until our final evening. In many ways I did identify with Lisbon though, probably because it reminded me so much of San Francisco. It’s the western most part of Europe, was once a great port of Portugal, and has its own Golden Gate Bridge. On the “Oakland” side of the bay there is a massive monument of Christ that made me think of the massive Mormon Temple. Lisbon has also been devastated by fire and a great earthquake so it is commonly referred to as the San Francisco of Europe. Well take a look at my pictures and I’ll let you be the judge.