I met Zoe my second day in New York City, during orientation for the small liberal arts college that I spent the next five years half-heartedly trying to graduate from. We were 18, though her ID said she was 24, and as I eagerly leafed through the welcome packet listing “Fun Things to Do in New York City” I caught her rolling her eyes. “I’m Jordan,” I said, my cheerful, Midwestern manners undeterred. “I’m hungover,” she replied, “and by the way, these are not the fun things to do in New York City.”
It’s been 20 years, and while that’s probably not the exact transcription from our first meeting, it sums up the tone. The very next day, Zoe took me and another girl, who was to become the final piece of our unholy trinity, to get fake I.D.’s in Times Square. From that moment on, Zoe became our unofficial guide to the city, getting us in and (more often) out of two decades worth of trouble. So, when she mentioned that her family of four might be able to come to Lisbon for a few days, I was psyched. And so was Billy, after three insular months on the road he needed a break from the demanding job of being my bestie.
We met in Sintra, a fairytale of a town a half hour outside of Lisbon (or, as the local say, Leeshboa). With its rugged pine tree forests, elaborate gardens and more palaces than Detroit has McDonalds, it served as an escape for Portugese royalty during, like, royal times.
This colorful lady is Pena Palace, the grande dame of the bunch, and basically the only thing I took pictures of because Zoe and I were too busy squawking away about Really Important Things like haircuts, diastasis recti and existential crises. Built in the mid-1800's atop Moorish ruins as a quaint summer home for Portugese royalty, the palace seemed downright modern compared to the ancient sites we'd been visiting. I didn't think the inside was as impressive as the exterior (everybody's a critic), but the kitchen was to die for. Or to eat for. To cook for? Whatever, it was awesome.
We spent the next two nights at Chris and Zoe's Airbnb in Lisbon. We hadn’t spent much time in a big city since Marrakesh and it was fun to run about, watch the kids feed off the energy of all the people, the busses, the trucks, the trains, THE TROLLEYS!!! Dear god, if I could just siphon some of their excitement over mass transit and save it to spritz on their future ambivalent thirteen-year-old selves…
The next day Chris and Zoe offered to swing for not one, but two babysitters to accompany us to Cascais, a beach town a half hour outside of Lisbon, so the adults (and baby Sadie) could escape for a grownup lunch while the kids played on the beach. It was a gorgeous day and I didn’t take one picture of our adorable frolicking children because…there were oysters and wine in my future! We dumped the kids on the sand, frisbeed over a pizza and got the hell out of there.
Being so close to Lisbon, the vibe is more beach babe than beach bum, more stemware than beer koozie, which suited us just fine. The beach is lined with cafes churning out cod fritters and pizza, while the pedestrian-only old town a few blocks away has a grab bag of raw bars, vegetarian restaurants and gelato parlors. We went for the raw bar.
It’s always the “one last drink” that does it. Having gotten our first taste of freedom in three months, Billy and I wanted more, more, MORE, so when the last of the rosé had been sipped and the oysters had all been slurped we suggested going for one more. The babysitters texted that the kids were just fine so, with the sun high in the sky, we set out for our “afternoon-cap.” And then. Then Sadie needed a diaper. So Chris ran back to the beach to get the diaper bag, saying he’d meet us at the next place. Only he never showed up to the next place. We ordered a drink and waited, and waited, and that’s when we realized that with Chris went the only working phone. Billy’s wasn’t making international calls, mine was dead and Zoe’s was in the damn diaper bag. I tried not to stress (and look natural).
Figuring that Chris must’ve gotten caught in a sand storm of meltdowns, we gave his description to the bartender and headed back to the beach to assist. But when we arrived, they weren’t there. The beach blankets, the pizza boxes, the backpacks, the beach bags, the sunscreen, the sand toys had all, along with our children and the babysitters, vanished.
Oh how life goes from rockstar to Lifetime movie in a split second. We started spit-balling. Somebody must’ve had to go to the bathroom. But why move everything off the beach? Maybe they were hungry? But they just had pizza. We searched the boardwalk, the cafes on the boardwalk, the grim spaces underneath the boardwalk, nothing.
At this point I started saying things like, “If some sort of tragedy just occurred I don’t think those people would be so aggressively playing Kadima, right?” Billy ran back to the bar to see if Chris had turned up. Zoe and I kept our post on the boardwalk, silently screaming expletives in tandem without saying a word, trading sighs and dark humored laughs, shaking our heads and smacking our lips when finally, the swarm of beach bodies parted to reveal Chris, his hands in surrender, walking towards us.
“They wanted ice cream,” he said. Of course they did. When we arrived they were in a sugar-induced ecstasy - as evidenced by this picture of Nakota dry humping a bear.
And just like that, life went back to being - well, not quite rockstar, actually not even a little bit rockstar - but for the moment it went back to being simple and perfectly sweet.
I loved Lisbon. With our limited amount of time there I could've skipped the puppet museum, but these are the sacrifices we make for the luxury of adding kidnapping and drowning to our daily thought salad. The kids weren't crazy about it either, there was no puppet show and they weren't allowed to touch anything, but I think we all appreciated the creepiness factor.
Our last night we went out on the town and saw how the Lisboetas get their swerve on, remarkably similar to how we do it in New York. The only difference - the winos here actually drink wine! Look closely - that's a bottle of full-bodied red in his hand! Maybe that should be a slogan for a new tourism campaign. Europe. Even Our Bums Are Classy. In defense of our bums, wine costs less than water over there.
In that annoying way that travel writers ruin things, Portugal has been deemed the place to go in 2018 by everyone from Conde Nast to Bloomberg news. Like anything that's been oversold to me (The Shape of Water, coconut water, baby slings) there were moments (probably somewhere between the 10th and 11th day trips) when my attitude was a little "eh." But the country is loaded with gems, and as cities go, Lisbon shines.
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