Jardim Botânico de Lisboa

Posted on May 23, 2024 by admin

On the map, the Lisbon Metro station Avenida looks fairly close to the Jardim Botânico de Lisboa. It is, but it turns out to be close to the walled-off backside of the garden. Some serious uphill walking is between you and the Lisbon Botanic Garden’s public entrance, via a twist of small streets and a sizable public staircase.

Not a bad thing, necessarily. We got an up close look at the neighborhood: the tilework, apartments and small shops (including one selling tile to builders), and some of the enormous amount of graffiti that Lisbon sports.

We passed by a few of the many construction projects in the Portuguese capital. Development goes on, despite a recent drop in residential sales in response to higher interest rates, because Lisbon residential properties fetch more than twice what they did 10 years ago, according to Cushman & Wakefield data.

The faux façade draping over this site was amusing. That’s what it will look like, we promise!

A larger development, also apartments.

A redevelopment — tear down — opportunity along the way.

The view from atop one of the public staircases along the way, which is a pedestrian continuation of the street below.

So some effort was expended to get to the garden, but it turned out to be worth it.

That’s how to get off the beaten path. Just a little lateral movement from that path.

Not a lot of the masses of overseas visitors to the city seemed to be at the Lisbon Botanic Garden. The place wasn’t empty, but you could enjoy pleasant walks through the lush springtime greenery without much in the way of crowding. For some reason, we heard more German at the garden than anywhere except Sintra later in the week, where one can hear many European and non-European languages.

It won’t be much of a botanic garden without lots of plants to examine.

Artwork is nestled among the greenery. Or sometimes on the bare patches or in the fallen timbers.

A favorite: ants overrunning a picnic. Really big ones. If ants were actually that big in Portugal, the country might not be such a tourist destination.

“Ants Picnic” by Tara E. Bongard, an Anglo-Portuguese artist.

Toward the end of our visit, I noticed this.

Araucaria Heterophylla: The mighty Norfolk Island pine.

Funny-looking tree, straight up like a pole with ridges. Not true pines, as it happens, and not native outside the South Pacific.

I don’t remember when I heard about them, but hear about them I did, years ago, maybe in one of the histories of Australia that I read. I didn’t think I’d seen one before with my own eyes. There it was. There they were, since the gardens include more than one. Everything else was very nice, but that really made my visit. (Just my visit, no one else was impressed.)

Knickknacks, An Expatriate Scotsman & St. Anthony of Padua – Rather, Lisbon

Posted on May 22, 2024 by admin

Souvenir shops usually don’t make much of an impression, though there are exceptions, such as Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland in Frankenmuth, Michigan.

Another exception: the small shop facing the small plaza just downhill from the Sé de Lisboa and in front of the Church of Saint Anthony of Lisbon (Igreja de Santo António de Lisboa). The place, Gaivota Citadina, was wild with tiles and other high-quality souvenirs.

Look carefully, and you’ll see cork in the pictures, too. Cork souvenirs come in the form of coaster bottoms, but also wallets, bags, neckties and more, though not all of those were at this shop. Cork, incidentally, lines the backs of seats in the Metro cars. If you go to Portugal, you will see cork.

As far as tourist souvenirs goes – the knickknacks offered in countless small shops worldwide that exist to sell just such knickknacks – many Lisbon stores rate highly, carrying an unusually distinctive and good-looking stocks of items. Tiles and cork, but much more than that. Best of all, many of them still sell postcards, often for 50 euro cents each, and not just the usual pictures of the absolute most famous sites. Interesting postcards at popular prices: something we can all get behind.

While Yuriko and Ann were poring over tiles at Gaivota Citadina, and I’d already picked out a selection of cards, I had a short chat with an English-speaking fellow who seemed to know the proprietor, or at least the people running the shop that day. A Scotsman, he turned out to be a resident of Lisbon. I asked him how long.

“On and off for about five years now. I came on holiday once and just stayed.”

As if anticipating a next question, he then told me that other parts of Europe aren’t as pleasant or hospitable as Portugal these days.

“France, Germany, those places are on fire,” he told me. “Literally in the case of France. It isn’t like that in Portugal.”

Actually, he was wrong about literal wildfire; Portugal has suffered some recently. Regardless, though he didn’t quite put it this way, he said that the Portuguese have an underappreciated talent for living well. And leaving well enough alone.

Could be. I’d only been there a day at that point, and had (and have) no way to assess his feelings on Portugal. But he did seem enthusiastic about the country even after five years.

Later, I parked myself on the plaza’s only bench and watched people throw coins at a statue of St. Anthony. The goal seemed to be to land the coins on a flat part of the statue. The saint’s open book, as it turns out. Tradition, according to the museum behind the statue.

That was hard, but this fellow in red (not the Scotsman, someone else) was able to do it.

The baroque church itself – a replacement for the one destroyed in 1755 – rises where St. Anthony was said to be born, as Fernando de Bulhões, in 1195.

In Lisbon, he isn’t Anthony of Padua, since they claim the popular saint as their own. Anthony of Lisbon, and don’t you forget it.

Sé de Lisboa

Posted on May 21, 2024 by admin

Uphill from the flat Praça do Comércio – a lot of places are uphill in Lisbon, its seven hills famed, at least among tour operators – is the storied Lisbon Cathedral. Or in full in English, Cathedral of Saint Mary Major. In Portuguese, Santa Maria Maior de Lisboa or more simply, Sé de Lisboa.

Parked in front of the cathedral are tuk-tuks, motorized rickshaws. Rather than being a form of ordinary transport in Lisbon, they take tourists to tourist destinations. That isn’t a surprise. There’s some horse-drawn transport in Chicago for the same purpose. The surprise is that they’re called tuk-tuks, same as in Bangkok, where they are more ordinary transport, or at least were 30 years ago.

The Sé is cavernous.

So while the cathedral attracts a fair number of visitors, it didn’t seem crowded, except maybe in the narrow staircase leading both to an exterior balcony overlooking part of Lisbon, and to an interior balcony under the rose window.

Unlike some large churches, the side chapels at the Sé were well lighted and generally not behind bars. Tombs, in this cathedral’s reckoning, shouldn’t be dim places.

Dimmer was the second-floor Baroque Treasury, which displays antique silver, ecclesiastical vestments, manuscripts and relics of Saint Vincent. Low lighting must count as a conservation measure for the treasures.

One question: Where was the sign or memorial or marker noting the spot, or at least pointing to the spot, where a mob tossed Bishop Dom Martinho from a cathedral window in 1383?

The people of Lisbon defenestrating the Bishop D. Martinho de Zamora during the 1383–1385 Portuguese interregnum. Illustration by Roque Gameiro, in Leonor Telles (1904).

Maybe I missed it, but you’d think the cathedral would want to point out something like that with some prominent plaque or sign – like in Prague Castle, where you can see the very windows where the Defenestrations of Prague occurred?

A grim fate for the bishop, if Wiki is correct in citing an early Portuguese chronicle: “In 1383, to celebrate the acclamation of King John I, it was ordered for all churches of the realm to ring their bells. However, upon the lack of any ringing coming from the capital’s cathedral the populace of Lisbon revolted and rammed their way inside the building. Bishop Dom Martinho of Zamora was accused of treason by the populace for being Castilian and schismatic and was, therefore, defenestrated from one of the bell towers.”

Only the Fool in His Heart Says There is No Cod

Posted on May 20, 2024 by admin

One of the sweeping plazas in Lisbon is Praça do Comércio, with an entrance marked by a sizable arch populated by allegories and historic individuals, all in stone. The plaza’s centerpiece is an equestrian statue of King Joseph I of Portugal, the Reformer. Ringed on three sides by long structures, the praça otherwise stone-tiles its way down to the Tagus River.

Jose I (d. 1777) had the misfortune to be king when the 1755 earthquake struck. The plaza was once home to Ribeira Palace, residence of Portuguese kings since the early 16th century, but the earthquake and fire took it down, along with most of the rest of the city. The disaster reportedly spooked Jose so much that he preferred to live in large tents afterward, and for the rest of his life.

Terreiro do Paco (Ribeira Palace Yard) by Dirk Stoop, 1662

In our time, the crowd makes it way to the riverfront. As we did last Monday. As well we should, to take in the views of the wide Tagus, along with buskers and other entertainment, such as a fellow building sand sculptures in a narrow strip just off the plaza stones.

After 1755, the plaza took its current form, with its ring of buildings sometimes occupied by government offices, but more recently restaurants and bars catering to tourists. And the Centro Interpretativo da Historia do Bacalhau.

That was a find. A museum devoted to codfish. We lucked into it.

Above the ticket desk: depictions of drying cod. Life-sized? At first I thought no, but later saw photos of enormous cod filling small boats, so maybe so.

The Portuguese love their codfish, have for centuries, and you should too, the museum insists in subtle ways. It didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting for us to agree that codfish were manna from the sea. At least it is in the hands of the Portuguese cooks whose fish we sampled during our time in Lisbon. Just a small sample, but a delicious one.

The place is part maritime museum, with models of the cod fleets and fishing tools; part cooking museum, with cod dishes illustrated and videos showing cod preparations; and part devoted to the geopolitics of countries along the Atlantic coast of Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, as they affected the North Atlantic and its fisheries.

A detail from 20th century poster glorifying Portuguese fishermen hard at work feeding the nation. Apparently that notion was something the Salazar regime encouraged, even though the industry was diminished from its glory days a few centuries before.

Cod isn’t just integral to Portuguese history or essential to its cuisine, the museum says.

It’s a fun fish, too.

Lisbon ’24

Posted on May 19, 2024 by admin

Recently I took a small survey among family members about Vasco da Gama, for reasons soon to be obvious. Namely, I asked Ann whether her U.S. elementary school education, about 10 years ago now, mentioned the Portuguese explorer and his voyages. Yes, she said. I asked Yuriko whether her Japanese elementary school education an ocean away and some decades earlier did so. Yes, she said.

I should have guessed it. Da Gama didn’t go all the way to Japan himself, but paved the away – was a maritime pathfinder – for other Portuguese, who arrived in 1543, bringing firearms and Catholicism to the Japanese archipelago at a time of civil war.

Fifty years ago in South Texas, I also learned about Da Gama, the stuff of textbook paragraphs and illustrations in the chapters on the European voyages to Asia and the Americas – and in the same league as Leif Ericson and Columbus and Magellan and Drake and Hudson and Cabot. Other kids might have been uninterested, but not me. What better than accounts of exploration?

So he’s taught in American and Japanese schools across recent decades. Quite a posthumous feat.

Last week, we stood in front of Da Gama’s tomb, in the Belem district of Lisbon.

That was a moment during our recent six days in Lisbon, except for a day trip foray to Sintra, which these days seems to be a far suburb of Lisbon. We returned yesterday.

History certainly brought us to Portugal. For a smallish country, it punches above its weight in history. Including more recent history.

But that’s not all. We had some idea that the food was really good. Really, unbelievably good. It was. Pastries and pastas and seafood and sandwiches and many other true delights on our plates; coffee and tea and lemonade and beer in the glasses. We didn’t have a bad meal in Lisbon, or even mediocre.

Flour sifters decorating the ceiling of an unpretentious cafe in a mid-Lisbon hotel.

At an entire museum in Lisbon devoted to Portuguese cod fishing and cod as a staple in the Portuguese diet, you can pretend to take a small boat out on choppy waters.

I don’t know that Lisbon has the greatest parks in Europe, but it’s got swatches of greenery.

Portuguese tiles – azulejos – decorating buildings large and small, draw your attention often enough.

You look at the azulejos for their beauty. The stone sidewalks, which were extensive on the many blocks we walked, demand attention for another reason. Their surfaces are reasonably flat. Mostly. But more than occasionally there will be damaged, irregular patches just waiting to land the unwary on their bum, or worse.

With the launch of the Age of Discovery, Lisbon embarked on becoming an international city. That might mean different things in the 21st century than it did when Prince Henry the Navigator schemed to further Portuguese exploration, but so what. The world comes to Lisbon.

The world comes in the form of millions of people every year from many corners of the Earth to this distinctive, aesthetic corner of that same planet. We were glad to join them.

Eclipse Leftovers

Posted on May 9, 2024 by admin

Time for a second spring break. It isn’t really spring unless you can squeeze in two. Back to posting around May 19.

Today didn’t much feel like spring, anyway. Cold drizzle. Not that cold, really, but it felt that way after a run of warm days.

I’ve read about people who become eclipse followers. There’s a word for it, at least according to Time: umbraphile. (Time is still a thing?) It’s an impulse I appreciate, but I don’t know that I’ll join them.

On the other hand, Pamplona (say) on August 12, 2026 sounds good in all sorts of ways, so we shall see. I’m not counting on being unshuffled when it comes to this mortal coil on August 12, 2045, which is the timing of the next North American total solar eclipse.

Last month, we passed through Farmington, Missouri, which is the seat of St. Francois County.

The courthouse, fourth on the site, dates from the 1920s. “Innuendoes about fraud led to a grand jury investigation; the solution to the architect’s questionable procedure apparently was resolved by closer supervision,” says the University of Missouri about Norman Howard of St. Louis, the architect of the current courthouse.

There’s a story in that line, the details of which may be lost to time.

Who can you see outside an antique store on the main street of Potosi, Missouri? Betty!

Who can you see on the wall of the Laura Ingills Wilder Home in southern Missouri?

A young Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter and a writer herself, and apparently a foremother of modern libertarianism.

Spotted in downtown Nacogdoches.

That’s a nicely designed memorial plaque. Showing the nine flags over Nacogdoches; the usual six in Texas lore, plus three more localized ones raised during various rebellions.

Did I make note of the landmarked building? It was nice enough, but not memorable. Lone Star Feeds, on the other hand —

A pet food plant, about 50 years old now.

For sale in Logansport, Louisiana.

“Vintage oil tank,” yours for $200, as of April.

One of the murals I saw in Shreveport was prominently signed.

Your tax dollars at work: funding by the National Endowment for the Arts. Actually, that strikes me as a good way to spend a minuscule amount of federal dollars.

A redevelopment opportunity in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

That would take some serious coin, but maybe it could work. Step one, hire that structural engineer to do a report.

If you have the urge for barbecue in Hot Springs, this place will satisfy. Cookin Q since ’52.

The sort of place with license plates on the wall.

All that is window dressing. The ‘cue is the thing, and Stubby’s has lasted so long for a reason.

On the side of the road on highway Arkansas 7, part of a wayside park.

The plaque reads:

Dedicated to the workers of the Arkansas Farmers Union Green Thumb whose efforts made this park possible so that others might enjoy the beauty of the state of Arkansas. January 1966 to December 1969. Lewis Johnson, Jr. State Director.

Green Thumb?

“Green Thumb was the first nonprofit organization to run a jobs program for disadvantaged rural Americans in response to the War on Poverty,” the union says, beginning in 1966, employing low-income rural residents to build things, something like the WPA or the CCC did. By the ’80s, Green Thumb had vanished.

At Uranus, Missouri, off I-44, Yuriko was driving and I happened to have my phone handy. We were too tired to stop.

I’d driven by Uranus a few times, but not stopped. Something like the Snake Farm on I-35 between Austin and San Antonio. Clearly, I need to visit sometime. Uranus, that is. Maybe the Snake Farm, too.

“Beyond the appeal of what [Uranus owner Louie Keen] insisted was very good fudge, Uranus enticed travelers as a kind of dysfunctional, self-contained utopia, like South of the Border and Da Yoopers,” Roadside America says.

“Uranus, said Louie, was the kind of place tourists want to find on a road trip, with life-size dinosaurs, cheesy photo-ops, ridiculous souvenirs, two-headed freaks, the World’s Largest Belt Buckle, and various shops and attractions such as a hatchet-hurling venue named The Uranus Axehole.”

Oakton College

Posted on May 8, 2024 by admin

We’re in that rarefied period when neither the heater nor the cooler kicks in much. You could say God is my HVAC. It won’t last.

How many community college campuses have enough outdoor sculpture to qualify as a sculpture garden? Say, a dozen pieces or more. It’s an odd question, but it occurred to me at Oakton College in Des Plaines as we walked around recently, taking in the fine spring day and an assortment of outdoor sculptures on that campus.

That online search didn’t take long. If you wanted to figure out which community colleges have sculpture gardens, looks like the International Directory of Sculpture Parks & Gardens would be your go-to source. For all its insanity, the Internet continues to amaze.

Copses of trees and bushes ring the college’s wide parking lots, giving its small cluster of buildings a semi-suburban feel. A small creek runs through campus, and signs next to a small bridge over it say Turtle Xing, with turtle silhouettes on the yellow traffic signs to remind us to watch out for shelled reptiles in easy-to-smash spots. Not sure I’d ever seen one of those kind of warnings before.

The sculpture isn’t off in some field. A representative is right there in your face at the edge of a parking lot.

A little more subtle, but just as close to the parking lot.

Closer to class buildings.

“Pink Hydrant 15” by musician and sculptor Irwin Hepplewhite.

Never mind, I made that up.

“Silver Oak” by Barry Tinsley (1983). A Chicago artist, still apparently active. Glad to hear it.

I had to puzzle that for a moment. Chi-ca-guo.

Of course, Chicago, “wild onion,” a version of an Algonquin word for the weedy onion marshes where the Chicago River met Lake Michigan, pre-Fort Dearborn.

This was good to learn: a certified wildlife habitat.

I know there’s a nonprofit and good intentions behind that designation, but I can’t help but laugh a little. Where is this certificate posted, anyway? Can animals request a copy?

I know where it must be: in this building.

That’s a show-stopper: The Margaret Burke Lee Science and Health Careers Center, a 2010s addition to campus. Modernist glass blended with Prairie School (?) and I’m too dense to know what else, but there’s some exceptional design skill on display in the structure, which is perched next to the campus’ central pond. Maybe the other buildings, presentable enough but a little ordinary, envy Margaret for her green-tint good looks.

Design by Legat Architects, a regional practice. Nice work, Legat.

Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Des Plaines

Posted on May 7, 2024 by admin

We happened to be in Des Plaines recently, so we dropped in on the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It occurred to me that it had been a long time since I’d been there, and that Yuriko never had been. The last time I visited was well before I went to the Guadalupe shrine in Mexico City or even the one in Wisconsin.

“Its origins date to 1987, when a group of Chicago-area Catholics decided to launch a mission to promote devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe using a special pilgrim statue from the shrine in Mexico City,” says the Catholic News Agency.

“In 1995, construction began on an outdoor shrine in Des Plaines modeled after Tepeyac Hill in Mexico City, where the Virgin Mary appeared to the indigenous Mexican St. Juan Diego in 1531. The Virgin Mary left her image on his cloak, known as a tilma, and asked him to build a church on a hilltop.”

Their depiction is a replica of the sculpture at the basilica in Mexico, known as “The Offering,” by sculptor Aurelio G.D. Mendoza from Guadalajara (d. 1996), a man of considerable talents, known as El Mago de la Escenografia (The Magician of Scenography).

Nearby.

“The Apostles Cross,” an artistic representation of the vision received by the Mexican mystic, Concepción Cabrera de Armida, and the spirituality of the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit.

Hidden Creek Nature Sanctuary & Constitution Trail

Posted on May 6, 2024 by admin

Late yesterday afternoon, while Ann was saying goodbye to friends, we had a few hours to spend in Normal. Before long we were walking the short trails of Hidden Creek Nature Sanctuary, which is part of the local park district.

At about five and a half acres, the park isn’t large, but it is lush here in rising spring. Some of it is a standard park.

With the sort of small memorials you sometimes find in parks.

“Squirrel whisperer”? That’s a new one on me, but of course the idea’s been kicking around a while. Such as a mention in this 2014 report about tame squirrels at Penn State and the student that interacted with them, who was called “a squirrel whisperer” and who posted their pictures.

Update: Dozens of squirrels were arrested at protests at Penn State last week. Tame, my foot.

Elsewhere undergrowth luxuriates on either side of unpaved paths — and a bridge.

A crick runs through the spring greens.

The hand of man is never very far away. Young man, I suspect.

Constitution Trail runs next to the sanctuary, pointing both north and south. Go south, and you come to Illinois State’s campus. Go north, and you walk behind Bloomington residences, some single-family with large yards, some townhouses clearly built to take advantage of the trail as an amenity.

We went north about a half-mile, then back. We could have gone on past I-55 via an underpass, and on to the edge of town, but we didn’t go nearly that far. It’s part of a network of trails in Bloomington-Normal, and beyond, and not especially new. The dedication of the trail was on the 200th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1987.

Another branch follows the former U.S. 66 as it traverses McLean County. I’ve trodden the trail at Tawanda (a little).

The branch we walked was obviously a former railroad line, or so I thought. I was right: an Illinois Central Gulf RR line, abandoned about 40 years ago. One railroad that merged to create that company was the famed Illinois Central, the line represented in the mid-1800s in some cases by a certain well-known railroad lawyer from Springfield.

Standard Oil Gas Station, Odell

Posted on May 5, 2024 by admin

One place to stop between greater Chicago and Normal, Illinois, is the town of Odell. I bet not too many people do, but those that do come for a look at the former Standard Oil gas station that once served motorists on the former U.S. 66.

That’s what we did today. The main purpose of the drive was to fetch Ann and some of her belongings from Normal, where she has completed her junior year. I figured a few minutes in Odell (pop. 1,000) — which is between Dwight and Pontiac — wouldn’t be wasted. The gas station counts as a link in the tourist chain that is Route 66, though still fairly obscure even in the grand scheme of that creation. So much the better.

“In 1932, a contractor, Patrick O’Donnell, purchased a small parcel of land along Route 66 in Odell, Illinois,” the NPS says. “There he built a gas station based on a 1916 Standard Oil of Ohio design, commonly known as a domestic style gas station. This ‘house with canopy’ style of gas station gave customers a comfortable feeling they could associate with home.” (And not Big Oil.)

Later other brands of gas were sold there, and eventually – after U.S. 66 was no more – the building became an auto repair shop and then abandoned. A typical arc for such businesses, in other words. The village of Odell acquired the station around the turn of the 21st century to make it into a tourist attraction. We were duly attracted.

More of a stabilization than a restoration, looks like, at least inside the former garage space, with odds and ends here and there, and souvenirs for sale.

The gas station is one thing, but I couldn’t leave town without taking a look at the Odell water tower.

Started as a town along a railroad, as so many others did, and named after a shadowy figure named William Odell, one of the original owners of the land in the 1850s. Apparently he didn’t stay long, selling his interest but leaving his name.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There