Greg Wesson's Esoteric Globe

Portugal!

Unchained from my desk for a week, I decided to jet down to Portugal and Spain for a quick site-seeing jaunt. The first few days were spent in and around Lisbon.

Lisbon is Portugal's capital and largest city. It is situated on the River Tagus near where it drains into the Atlantic Ocean, making it a vital port as well.

The centre of town is still filled with very historic buildings, and lots of bendy and narrow streets. It is also exceedingly hilly, so I spent most of my time marching up and down. I realized that I need new shoes, as the tread on my shoes is almost warn off and on the smooth worn cobblestones, I found myself often losing grip and sliding.

I started my day at Santa Apolonia, and walked from there. It's about time somebody recognised the good work that Apolinia did in Purple Rain, though I think sainting her might have been a bit much.

Up the hill is the National Pantheon, which also has a small market outside.

From there, I ventured further up hill to get to the Miradouro Sra do Monte, a church atop a tall hill in Lisbon. From there, there are nice views of the city.

On a hill not far away is the Castelo de Sao Jorge (Castle of St. George). I hiked down and sweated my way back up to the top to see the Castle.

From there, it is a short (thankfully downhill) jaunt to the Cathedral of Lisbon. Along the way, I passed a number of interested houses and sites.

In the Cathedral

If you don't feel like walking, there are trams that can take you up and down the hills. On the part through the tourist area, they run olden trams that are wooden and rickety. Other trams in the city are modern ones.

At the bottom of the hill, near the river, was a modern art museum, which had giant statues of The Beatles that had them dressed up as their Sgt. Pepper alter egos on one side, and reflective on the other.

In the main part of the city is a number of squares, including Praca da Figueira.

Nearby is the Rossio train station. Modern and old at the same time.

An old exterior...

...and a modern interior

Another hill would take you up to Bairro Alto. I climbed it, but if you want you can take the Santa Junta Elevator. It is basically a vertical subway with only two stops - down and up.

In Bairro Alto is the Ruinas do Carmo, where there is today an archaeological exhibit. The ruins themselves are a church that was being restored, but the money ran out so no roof was every put on, leaving it open to the elements.

Not far away is this nice looking theatre - Teatro de Trinidade.

Back down the hill, and more walking - this time at least on mostly level ground, along the Ave. da Liberdade. Some nice tile work on the sidewalks here. There's lots of nice tile work in Lisbon, probably due to the fact that it was controlled by the Arabs for a long stretch from 700 to around 1150 AD.

Finally back to my hotel. I took a different tube line back to my hotel, and came out to find this graffiti.

At first I thought it funny because it had Bender on it, but as I walked out of the basin that the tube station was in and up onto the street, it seemed more ominous. The court of the metro was dirty, with graffiti and imposing tower block. It felt very urban jungle and unsafe. I walked along a road was cut off due to a construction site, but the large concrete barriers blocking traffic just reminded me of checkpoints at army bases. I crossed a busy road that had an uneven dirt median under an imposing concrete overpass, and then passed an and overgrown empty field. On the whole, the scene made the place seem very dodgy.

I ended up walking the wrong way. Even though I had a map, not all the streets were labelled on my map, and street signs in Lisbon are sometimes rare. Therefore I ended up walking around lost for a while. The sky had turned grey, and on the whole my mood darkened as well. Luckily I was staying at a big, bright, shiny American hotel, so I was able to see their bright red sign from blocks away.

It's quite possible that the metro stop was fine, but after that I went to one of the other metro stops near the hotel instead of that one.

Another day I went out to the western tip of the city, near Gare do Oriente and the Vasco da Gama Mall. Back in 1998, Expo was held in Lisbon, and the area around the train station is where the pavilions were. Today it is a shopping mall, arena, aquarium and river-side walkway. It also includes a cable car that runs along the river front.

Nearby is the Vasco da Gama Tower, shaped like a sail in honour of the explorer. Normally you could go up and get views of the city, but the tower is currently closed as they add on a five-star hotel. Take that, Dubai!

So instead I found a nice spot on a patio and had a beer.

Sure, it was only 1:30 in the afternoon, but it is a holiday, after all.

More to come from this trip. Sintra, Salamanca and Madrid are all coming up as I get pictures and text organised. Stay tuned!

In the early 1950s, English football team Wolverhampton Wanderers did a tour of Europe playing “friendly” matches. A friendly is a game played between two sides that doesn’t have any league or title consequences. These games are often played in the off season so teams can stay sharp. The Wolverhampton team (“The Wolves”), one of the best teams in England at the time, beat a number of the top European clubs. The British Press started calling the Wolves “the Champions of the World” due to this success across the channel on the continent.

This didn’t go down too well with teams and fans over in Europe, so in 1955 the European Champion Clubs’ Cup tournament was started. At first only one team from each country was invited in (the winner of the national league competition), but in 1990s, the format was extended to include teams who are runners up, depending on how “good” the league they come from is deemed. At present, the England’s top four teams from the Premier League enter the Champions League (or more properly the UEFA Champions League), the most from any country (tied with Italy and Spain, who also send 4 teams).

The 32 teams are divided into 8 groups of 4 teams each. The teams then play each other twice, one home game and one away game. The top two teams from the group stages move on to the knock-out stage. For the round-of-16, quarter finals and semi-finals, the teams play two games (one home and one away), and the winner is the one with the highest aggregate score. If there is a tie in the scores, away goals count more than home goals.

The final two standing teams play one game at a pre-determined site to declare the winner. Last tournament in May of 2009, the final was played in Rome. This tournament, Madrid hosts the final on the 22nd of May, 2010.

Right now, the UEFA Champions League is in the group stages. One of the four English teams playing in the Champions league this year is The Arsenal.

Arsenal’s history dates back to the 1886, when a group of coworkers at the Dial Square workshop of the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich decided to form a football club. Calling themselves the Dial Square football club, the boys played their first match against The Eastern Wanderers on December 11, 1886 on the Isle of Dogs (where I used to live). It was a 6 - 0 win, over a club which I can find no more information about other than they lost one game to a team that would become one of the top teams in England. Despite the similarity in name Wanderers, they were not the same club that kicked off the Champions league back in the 1950s.

The Dial Square football club changed their name soon after to be known as Royal Arsenal. The club remained an amateur side for the workers at the Arsenal until 1891, when they turned professional and changed their name again, this time to Woolwich Arsenal. They joined the Football League, a collection of mostly northern based professional teams in 1893. However, the Woolwich team didn’t do well against the more established northern teams, and soon found themselves floundering both competitively and financially. In 1913 the team moved from Southern London up to Islington (where I currently live), to a grounds in Highbury. They dropped the “Woolwich” from the name (for obvious reasons), and have since been known simply as The Arsenal, or The Gunners.

Famous Arsenal fans (who are called Gooners, as a play on the Gunner nickname) include Nick Hornby, who wrote a book Fever Pitch about his love for the club. The book has been made into two movies, though admittedly one was about baseball. Other fans include The Queen, F1 racer Lewis Hamilton and singer Dido. As an aside, if Dido ever reads this... “Hey, how you doing? Drop me a line. Maybe we can go out and grab a drink. We can talk about whatever - Arsenal, your music, my blog, the fact I often still have sand in my shoes...” (I think Dido is foxy...)

As for me, I think I may becoming a fan of them as well. I wrote about the need to pick a football team to cheer for back before I moved over to England. I had talked about maybe Chelsea or Tottenham - both London based teams, but never committed to either. I flirted with the idea of cheering for West Ham or Millwall back when I lived on the Isle of Dogs due to their geographic proximity, but never connected. Arsenal though, I think is a team I can get behind. They have a fancy stadium (which happens to have a travel related sponsor even), are close to home and are one of the top teams in the league. I like that in team, after years of living in Toronto where we had the definitely not top of the league Toronto Maple Leafs.

Plus, I’ve already bought a shirt.

The Arsenal played at the ground at Highbury until 2006, when they moved to new, flasher digs just down the road. The new stadium was initially called Ashburton Grove, until a deal to sell the naming rights was secured with a middle-Eastern based airline. The stadium is now known as The Emirates.

The Emirates is just up the street from my flat, a 30 minute walk or a 2 stop tube ride. The stadium holds over 60,000 fans for football matches (including over 7,000 seats in the high priced “club level”), and is often sold out. On the outside, the stadium has a number of large glass covered areas which reflect the blue sky during day games and show off the fancy club level restaurants and bars at night.

Arsenal, after finishing fourth in the Premiership, qualified to be in the Champions League tournament. They are in group H along with Olympiacos from Greece, Standard Liège from Belgium and AZ Alkmaar from the Netherlands. After three games, Arsenal are atop the group with two wins and a draw. Their last game was against AZ Alkmaar in The Netherlands, where they drew 1-1.

The match on the fourth of November, 2009 at the Emirates was a chance for Arsenal to get revenge on AZ after the draw, which Arsenal thought they should have won. A win would also keep them comfortably atop Group H.

For Champions League games there are a few changes at the Emirates. Firstly, it’s not called The Emirates. Due to conflicting sponsorship between the clubs and UEFA, stadiums are not referred to by their “naming rights” names. Arsenal’s ground is called “Arsenal Stadium” on Champions League game nights. Also, they don’t sell beer. You can bet, though.

I had nice seats in the upper tier behind the north end goal. Despite being in the upper deck, the view of the field was still very good, and it wasn’t a problem to follow the action at all.

The fans were on fine form, chanting and singing throughout the match. “We love you Arsenal” was sung every four minutes or so. After the first goal, the faithful started singing “One-nil to The Arsenal” to the tune of “Go West” by the Village People. After the third goal, putting Arsenal up 3-0, the fans started a chant of “Are you Tottenham in disguise,” referencing Arsenal’s 3-0 win last weekend over hated cross-town rival Tottenham Hot Spur. One of the best chants was in honour of The Arsenal’s coach Arsène Wenger, where the fans sing “There’s only one Arsene Wenger” to the tune of Guantanamera.

Arsenal ended up winning handily, with a final score of 4-1. The game was great to watch as a fledging Arsenal fan, as it featured an almost endless offensive push by Arsenal and not much life from AZ Alkmaar. Probably not so good if you were an AZ fan, though. I bet all the visiting Dutch fans off in the south-east corner of the stadium were sitting there and looking at each other saying, “Waatsch haappening, guysch? We aare getting schlaaughtered!”

Now I have a footie team to cheer on. All I have to do is start learning some of those chants...

One-nil to The Arsenal... one-nil to The Arsenal...

At least I already have the jersey.

In honour of the ghosties and goblins, some creepy shots I have taken...

Egham, Surrey:

Bunhill Fields, London:

BOO!

I just went out to get my lunch, and it is an absolutely beautiful day today. Sixteen Celsius, very mild and bright despite a layer of clouds in the sky. Gorgeous day.

Everyone should have the day off today, so we can all be out and enjoying this weather. Everyone could go to their favourite park and have a picnic. Everyone could have a “nice weather day.”

Well, not everyone, obviously, because we would need the train drivers to get us to the picnic grounds, and the tube and bus drivers to get us to the train station. Everyone else, though, should have the day off.

Oh, except for the folks who work at Tesco’s, the grocery store, because I don’t have the stuff for a picnic lunch and would have to pick it up. So the train, tube and bus drivers and Tesco’s employees would have to work, but everyone else should have the day off.

Wait, I’ll like a cold drink when I get to the park, as I imagine everyone would. So any off license, news agent or convenience store near a park will need to stay open and have someone at the cash register. Train, tube and bus drivers, Tesco’s employees and off license cashiers, all report to work. Everyone else, take the day off!

No, just a second. I’ll probably want a pint later in the day from the nearest pub, so the pub landlords will need to be open. Sure, I could get a can of lager from the off license, but I’d prefer my beer in a glass pint. Therefore, the pub will need to be open. Okay, where are we at? Pub landlords, train, tube and bus drivers, off license cashiers and Tesco employees are all at work. Everyone else has a free day.

Oh, hang on! All those people in the park will create a lot of rubbish. We are going to need someone to pick all that rubbish up and clean out the rubbish bins. Park staff will need to be in to do that. Right, train, tube and bus drivers, off license cashiers, Tesco employees, pub landlords and park cleaners - man your posts! The rest of us are going to take a free day.

Though, I don’t really like the idea of all those people in the park at the same time I am. I’d prefer a nice quiet patch of grass. Actually, I guess when it comes right down to it, I really only care if I get the day off. The rest of you I don’t care about. So that’s it – everyone report to work but me.

Hey, here comes my boss. Wonder what she’s about to say?

I need to work overtime tonight? No chance of getting out and enjoying the weather?

No picnic for me today. I suppose it is some consolation that I can see the parking lot of my office from outside my window. It sure looks nice out.

Last week I took the tube down to Piccadilly Circus to pick up a train ticket. The ticket was for a train from Lisbon, Portugal to Salamanca, Spain on the 9th of November. Those of you who read this blog for actual travel stories rather than just my general musing about my domestic life will be happy to hear that I am off travelling again. Sadly, it’ll just be a quick trip - a week long vacation taking in Lisbon, Salamanca and Madrid.

I had booked the train ticket online, but much to my chagrin, I couldn’t arrange to pick up the ticket at the station. The ticket had to be issued physically, which meant having it mailed to me. If you aren’t local to the United Kingdom then you might not know that Royal Mail and her unions have been having a bit of a spat recently, and as such mail to my flat is generally delivered somewhere around two to three weeks after it was originally posted. Had Rail Europe posted me the ticket, it most likely would have arrived at my flat sometime in the middle of the week when I was in Portugal and Spain.

As I needed the ticket prior to that, I arranged to trundle down to the Rail Europe office in London (convenient, that) and pick it up in person. I picked up my ticket and it is now sitting on my bookshelf, underneath my passport, so I don’t forget it.

It is strange, having an actual physical piece of paper that I need to take with me on my trip. The rest of my trip has been booked electronically. Having to actually have a physical ticket for something seems so 2003, when I went to South America and last had to take physical tickets and coupons for items with me.

The internet has changed the way I travel, and probably the way most people travel. In 2003 I lugged around a three inch thick copy of Lonely Planet’s South America On a Shoestring to provide me with city maps, hotel recommendations, travel options and schedules and sight-seeing options. Nowadays I just troll the web for the plethora of tourism board, travel advice and hotel review websites.

Once on the road, things are a lot different than back in 2003 as well. My South American blog entries are pretty light on photos because I had a film camera with me at the time, along with 9 rolls of film. The photos are currently stored in photo albums sitting in my father’s storage locker in Toronto. Someday I’ll get around to scanning them, but for now my images of South America are mostly in my memory and an inaccessible storage locker halfway around the world. Other than my film camera, I didn’t have a single piece of electronics with me.

On my trip to Portugal I will likely be travelling with my digital camera, iPod, USB flash drive, laptop and mobile phone.

On the 11th of November I am planning on taking a train from Salamanca to Madrid. Instead of trolling through the pages of the Lonely Planet to find the train times, I’ll hook into my hotel's free WiFi, look up train schedules online and probably even set up an SMS alert to go to my mobile phone in the event that there are delays on the train lines.

Partly the changes in the way I travelled from 2003 until now are down to the inevitable march of technological improvement. Even the rough-looking Aussie backpackers drinking on the sidewalk outside the Journeys Kings Cross Youth Hostel down the street from me all have mobile phones and digital cameras, or even more likely a mobile phone that is also a camera, mp3 player and GPS system.

Partly the changes can also be traced to the type of trip I am undertaking. Two months backpacking in South America is a different type of trip than jetting down to Iberia for a week away from work.

Mostly though, I think the changes relate to the fact that as I age, I become less and less of a backpacker.

I was recently watching my favourite TV channel - Dave - during one of the few hours of the day when the channel isn’t showing repeats of Top Gear. Instead, they had on stand up comedy from the Apollo Theatre in Hammersmith, where Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain was talking about travelling in Australia with a bunch of 19 year olds.

Speaking to some of the young people in the crowd, he says, “go for the rucksacks for a while, and later on, you stop, you never go back.” He talks about the kids on his Australia trip, in their “rucksack stance - all of the weight up on the shoulders, pushing down on the hips,” talking about how much they “feckin’ love backpacking.” The kids go through their experiences with backpacking - seeing Australia on 13 dollars a day, getting damage to their “lower lumbar regions” and sleeping in dorms with “nine Norwegians who I neither know nor trust.”

At the end of the whole line of backpackers is Dara, with his luggage - a rolling suitcase. “Look, its on wheels, you feckin’ eejits.”

Thanks to Tux In the Backpack for the video of Dara. If you have trouble seeing the video, check it out on YouTube

I know exactly what he means. I am too old and frankly have too much money to bother with hostels anymore. The last time I stayed in a youth hostel was during my ill-fated, sleepless night in Dublin. After that I decided I may as well spend some of these dollars and pounds I am collecting and get a nice hotel with a comfortable bed, air conditioning, a safe (for all these electronic goodies I am carrying nowadays) and free WiFi.

Yes, as I get older, I become less and less of a backpacker and more and more of a flashpacker. A flashpacker is someone who still embodies the “spirit of the backpacker” (whatever the feck that means), but is willing to splash out to have a little more comfort.

I first heard the term flashpacker last summer in an article on Vagabonding. Since then the term has come into normal use, at least among travel writers and marketers. At first I resisted the term, but as it has now entered the general lexicon, I guess I can’t help but admit it.

I’m a flashpacker, and I like my own bathroom.

So in a few weeks time you’ll be able to find me somewhere in Iberia. I’ll still be wandering around looking for good local places to eat, drink and interact with some of the locals, like a good backpacker. I’ll just be doing it with a nice hotel to head back to at the end of the night.