Recently I received an email from a friend, who pointed about the stagnant state of this blog and he came up with two logical explanations for this; either I didn't have an easy access to a computer or I had a latin lover which took up all my time. This friend is a very smart person and knows me quite well, but neither of his educated guesses are correct. The truth is that I just don't have a lot of idle time on my hands and my daily life isn't exactly thrilling (see last entry) to write about, although I very much enjoy it. I could tell you what I have for lunch or my constant battle with the 5 past tenses in Spanish grammar (pretérito pluscuamperfecto being the last one I learnt but also the simplest one, pretérito imperfecto and I get along pretty well but pretérito indefinido and I still haven't quite clicked), but that would be worse than not writing at all.

Last weekend I did something interesting though; I went to Lisbon, which is a beautiful city. It was also nice to go somewhere else, hear something else than Spanish and enjoy another culture and a different environment. Don't get me wrong - I love Spain - but I just need to see something different every once in a while (I'll never be able to settle down, will I?). And to make it even more enjoyable the weather was great, 12-14°C. It snowed in Lisbon about 10 days ago, when Spain practically closed down because of snow, but that was for the first time for 56 years.

The train takes 7 hours from Salamanca, through lovely landscape and countless idyllic towns and villages, very picturesque. I'm used to hassle at borders but in this case there was none, another perk of travelling in Europe. I'm never quite at ease if nobody looks at my passport though; if you've got a stamp you're always OK but without an entry stamp... I don't know, I just never trust it that everything will be OK. At borders I always feel like I've done somehting wrong, but maybe that just comes from too many dodgy border crossings in Africa and whatnot. Crossings in the Middle East aren't too great either.

But more about Lisbon; I stayed there for three days and thoroughly liked it. It's very different from Spain, doesn't have this continental feel to it, reminded me a lot of Salvador de Bahia in the Northeast of Brazil; similar architecture, very colourful buildings, small winding cobblestone streets and narrow shady alleys, the port (hte harbour that is, not the wine), hills with fantastic view, lots of ascensores (funicular elevators)... and of course the Portuguese, although differrent from Brazil's it sounds beautiful. On the train I listened to a Portuguese crash-course I've got on the ipod, which I listened to last year before going to Brazil, and made the promise not to speak any English in Portugal, a promise I mostly kept apart from when I spoke to the staff at the hostel where I stayed (it's a fantastic HI hostel by the way, I can recommend it), my Spanish-Portuguese hybrid is not quite good enough for a proper conversation, at least not if I want to come across as a moderately knowledgeable person.

Legend has it that Ulysses founded the city, although it was more probably the Phoenicians. Since then many have stopped by; Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Moors, Spanish, French... After Napoleon's four-year occupation of Lisbon from 1807, the city, like the rest of the country, fell into political chaos and military insurrection for over a century. In the early 20th century, a 16-year period brought 45 changes in government. António de Oliveira Salazar headed an authoritarian regime for 36 years that lasted until 1976, with the usual; censorship, propaganda, secret police etc. Like in Spain it's amazing how much things have changed in a few decades and though of course the countries have got their classic issues to deal with they have certainly surged forward in many aspects. But I'm not going into politics or history any further, maybe one day I'll try to explain a bit of what's going on in Spain these days, what with Catalunya wanting independence and all, but that will have to wait.

So yeah, that's it for now.