Lisbon, Portugal - It’s 11am and I’m sitting at a small neighborhood café called Chave D’Ouro in the Alfama district, the old Moorish quarter, with its tiny twisting cobblestoned streets. The narrowness of the medieval streets here mean most lie in shade, until that one time in the day when the sun, directly overhead, illuminates them ever so briefly. The street I am on however, is on an east-west lie and at this time of the year, its uphill path and the suns trajectory are in a bright synchronous harmony, which is perfect for saturating all of the brilliant colors of the buildings across the street, covered in their entirety with the classic blue-white patterned Portuguese tiiles.
About 20 meters to my right , the track lines of the number 28, an electric rail car, wind around the corner and up the hill, marking the heavily trodden yellow brick road of tourists as it heads through the Alfama and up to the high point of the famous Castello de Sao Jorge. But while most turn left, following the golden path, I turned right into a small square where the old men in the neighborhood are still gathering at the Chave D’Ouro to smoke their cigarettes and drink espresso.
I’m not above the tourist trail by any meanns and when I’m done here, I’ll head up to the Castello and join the throngs but there is something about sitting here in this café long enough to absorb the personality of this street corner with its vestiges of times once were, that is missed when you breezing by on your way to the next attraction. Like a Hitchcock movie, theres a mini vingette unfolding in each of the windows across the street, such as the old lady on the second floor cleaning her windows, or the dog in the first floor at his helm, aggresively barking at every passer by. On the front stoop, a gathering of women are laughing loudly about something I can’t understand but is infectious and I can’t help but giggle anyway.
I feel like some kind of Jane Goodall, inconspicuously sitting here at my Coca Cola sponsored table, next to a group of retirees, wishing I could decipher their highly animated conversation. But my juxtaposition is obvious; them with their 1970s leather jackets, mismatching jogging pant suits and newspapers tucked under their arms and me with my map of Lisbon, folded a thousand times and a gleaming white acer mini laptop, the height of technology.
I’m looking at a guy next to me with an thin old school moustache. He’s an archetype of all the others sitting around his table. His face is thin and dark and wrinkled, especially around his beaty eyes which squint from from lots of exposure to the sun. He looks just like ‘Angel Eyes’ from ‘The Good the Bad and the Ugly’. Maybe its from sitting here at this café for the last decade but I would rather romanticize it a bit and prefer to think he was once a fisherman. He looks the part for sure and it wouldn’t be that far fetched being that Lisbon is a port town. He’s got a never ending cigarette in one hand and holds his other hand by his face a lot when he talks which makes everything he says look important. His laugh is that sort of chest heaving flegm filled laugh of a lifetime smoker and his decaying teeth make me think back to a different era. One with less flouride and more dictators. Given their age, I’m guessing these faces have seen the world war, the rise and fall of various fascist and socialist regimes and decaades of military dictatorship. And just when I start to get cynical and think this is a dying tradition of old men, or that today’s people are more insular and separated, a group of young twenty somthings sits down at the open table, ordering coffees and hand rolling their cigarettes.
If there’s one thing I really love about parts of Europe, its this… its that legacy of the neighborhood, the corner, the local café and the tradition of leisure, bullshitting with your neighbors over a beer or a cup of coffee and not taking life so fucking seriously.
