Portugal. Part I. Main details

January 10–17, 2014

Portugal is one of the most incredible and amazing countries that somehow manages to remain relatively unpopular with travelers, even though it ranks up there with Italy in terms of joie de vivre and uplifting the soul.

All the sidewalks in the country are paved with black and white stone. The Portuguese learned to do this a very long time ago. (Anyone who visits Macao will immediately recognize whose colony the country used to be; the same goes for Mozambique.)

Even the pavement markings are laid out in stone.

Walls are often decorated with glazed tiles. This never fails to looks pretty, and sometimes it’s simply magical.

Portugal seems to be particularly adept at building car tunnels, even on fairly narrow streets. The tunnel walls are also laid out with tile, of course.

No other country has such a large number of magnificent old storefronts.

Inside, the shops are about twenty years behind the times (even Klintsy’s are cooler these days). This is one of Portugal’s interesting features: the country is stuck in the 1990s in terms of development, yet manages to retain the charm of the 19th century.

A curious detail (locals looked surprised and claimed they’d never heard of this): all the doors and windows on the ground floor of shops are numbered. In other words, it’s not the buildings that are numbered, it’s the entranceways. And very often the window displays and windows as well.

An equally curious detail: all doorways on the front of a building must be the same height as the windows on the first floor.

Post boxes are abundant and diverse (most models resemble the British ones, but there are a few surprises as well).

Fire hydrants are also abundant and also vary widely in appearance.

A popular form of panhandling in various cities: playing the accordion while a tiny dog holds the bottom of a plastic bottle in its teeth to collect change.

A Portuguese payphone.

Hotel keys often have triangular keychains.

Portugal has a somewhat strange symbol for trucks (this is how Cape Verde ended up with theirs, by the way).

Finally—a country where lane control signs have arrows of different lengths for same-direction and opposite-direction traffic (before now, I’d only seen this in Kiev; the reader can guess why).

If getting to a city requires changing highways, the distance is indicated in parentheses, like in Ireland. That way, the driver knows to look out for signs instead of simply hoping to get to their destination after a certain number of kilometers.