Lisbon, Day 4.

Visited Graça. Took me 3 hours to walk there. Mostly because I got lost. Several times. {shrug}. Ran into a Kiwi friend from the YH. Visited Panteão Nacional, which contains the tombs of very famous Portuguese figures, including the renowned fado singer Amalia Rodrigues, the navigator and explorer Vasco da Gama (his is not a tomb, just a tomblike memorial), and several Portugal ex-presidents.

Afterwards I headed over to the National Tile Museum (Museu Nacional do Azuleijo), which I was quite looking forward to since a great number of Lisbon houses' façades are covered in this kind of work (see for instance pictures here. Apparently the Portuguese had a taste of the exotic, and were quite taken by the Moorish custom of almost completely covering house/palace interiors and exteriors in intricate tilework, so they copied it here, except they "europeanized" it a little. Well, not so little, as you can see from some of the depiction styles in the photos (i.e. the blue on white, which is a bit reminiscent of some Dutch ceramics). So much for the exotic. But I guess this is a prime example of innovation, right? Take something good, then tweak it to suit you. (Only this innovation came in art, as opposed to technology, or rather, that's not quite true, because the Portuguese started using tile relief, thus requiring casting tile molds, which the Moors did not, so...). Heh, in the 1700's, the Portuguese were already showing the makings of the engineering instinct. ;)


Oh, by the way, I'm re-thinking the photo/video sharing system. Instead of posting links here in the blog for you to click on, from now on just access the following root directory from your browser:
http://www.streamload.com/epasquali/PICS
and
http://mediamax.streamload.com/blueshrimp/Hosted.
From there you can see both the pics and the movies, respectively (of course, you can also access through blog links, I'll provide one on each post where there is stuff to link to). If for some reason you can't view/download (you can view without downloading, I think), be patient, it means my quota was exceeded. Email me and I'll either find a way to increase it or send you another link).