Global People Watching

Bon Dia from Lisbon or Lisboa as they say here.

Lisbon is a beautiful city. Having trouble trying to understand Portugese. It has a lots of shhhhh sounds in it. With my limited spanish, I’ve resorted to sign language. Our hotel room is huge, Mom & Dad liked that. Maybe 20 x 25. Unfortunately we arrived at our hotel in the afternoon and every food place was closed. Siesta, you know. I thought that was a Spanish thing, but I thought wrong. We walked around a bit to see if anything was open, we found one place and a familiar menu item, hamburgesa. Which came without a bun, plus fries and a scoop of rice. I reminded the parents, when in Rome…..which will be our new saying wherever we are.

They next day we got up early to make the pilgrimage to Fatima which has been a dream of my mom’s for some time now. Fatima is a sacred place to Catholics as the Virgin Mary appeared to three children there.

We took the autobus there, one thing I learned is never to tell mom the exact time of a bus or train, as if it doesn’t happen (which most times don’t come on time) I hear it. It’s best to say around this or that time. The countryside outside of Lisbon is beautiful. The dirt is a deep red. Another thing I learned is everything is a 5 or 10 minute walk wherever you go. When asking for directions to Fatima, it was a 5 min walk which turned out to be a 15 min walk uphill. We had to stop halfway as Dad was out of breath.

The scene from the large square is something to see.  Under a covered awning there was about 500 people saying the rosary.  There was also a strip of tile about 500 feet on top of the square slanting down towards the basilia on which people were walking on their knees, some were carring these plastic sculpters of different body parts, hands, arms, legs, feet, heart.  I asked a lady and she told me that people walk on there knees as a sacrifice cause they are looking for healing for a certain body part.  It was hot and we ducked into the visitors center to get out of the heat and get some info.  Mom thought this was the place where Mary had visited and has said to left healing waters.  The visitors center told us, no that is Lourdes, France.  Mom said, I’d give anything to go there.  I laughed as dad has already said he has no interest in going to France. 

We walked around a bit

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 11:57 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.