FURTHER: A TRAVEL BLOG: LISBON-FIRST DAZE

Flying has become one of my least favorite parts of traveling. Flying multiple time zones to the east is the worst of the worst. It takes several days to get on a somewhat normal schedule and the first few days are a nightly hell of short bursts of deep sleep followed by hours of wakefulness.

After a particularly bizarre dream my eyes open to tiny pinpoints of brilliant sunlight streaming through the steel roll down shutters that cover the windows in our apartment in Lisbon. I stagger to my feet and wander through the white IKEA decorated rooms trying to get my bearings. Am I in an IKEA store? Am I still dreaming? I gulp a glass of water and glance at my phone. In large digital numbers it tells me it is 12 noon. "Up at the crack of noon...again", I muse to myself. I hear Deborah groan in the bedroom, "What time is it?"

"Guess," I reply.

"Oh, noon"

I laugh because it is so scary how much we are on the same wavelength so much of the time.

It is our fourth day in Lisbon and we have not been able to accomplish much more than getting up late, eating and wandering around the city with little desire to see the sights. Our main goal has been to get over the jet lag.

I make some tea and after a quick bowl of cereal, I feel more conscious and almost human. We are determined to do something today...anything today...after all we did not come 5,000 miles to vegetate forever in a jet lagged state.

I peruse our digitized guidebook and suggest a trip to the Gulbenkian Museum which is a little known (outside of Lisbon...at least I had never heard of it) world class museum. I google directions on my phone and start pushing Deborah out the door. It is now 2PM. We walk down two flights of steep, narrow, stairs. (I don't know why, but it seems the countries with the shortest people seem to have the steepest stairs) and squeeze through the 18" door onto a narrow cobbled lane. We walk like drunken sailors over the uneven cobbles. Our route takes us through narrow canyons of three storied colonial buildings trimmed in yellow (to ward off evil spirits) and blue (to ward off the even more evil spirits known as flies). Above, a wedge of brilliant blue Iberian spring sky full of fluffy white clouds is rimmed by the red tile roofs of the canyon. Narrow juliet balconies of cast iron jut out over our heads waving flags of laundry in the early afternoon breeze.

After a ten minute walk we arrive (after a few miscues) at the proper bus stop for the #728 bus that will take us to the museum. Our bus soon arrives and we file on with the other passengers touching our pass to the reader that beeps and lets us know we are good to go. Thirty minutes later we spy the large tree lined lawns of the park that contains the Gulbenkian Museum (say that three times fast).

The museum is a squat cube with a massive flat roof jutting out over the walls. The stone pathway to the door is bordered by a large pool filled with reeds full of ducks and young ducklings paddling in and out. We walk through an expansive glass wall (it contained a door, no worries) into the large modern lobby of the museum and find the ticket desk. After a quick transaction, (one of the few things I really enjoy about getting older is that the senior rate is half price) with tickets in hand we set off to explore the museum.

The collection was donated to the museum, along with a sizeable endowment, by a billionaire oil man; kind of a Portuguese version of Getty. He was a voracious collector of antiquities, sculpture, paintings, furniture and it seems practically anything else he could get his hands on. The collection spans a period of about 5,000 years and quite frankly it contains some of the best examples of art the world has ever known. The guy had taste.

Since art is best seen and not heard (or read about as the case may be), I will close now and let the eloquence of Deborah's pictures describe our visit to Lisbon and the Gulbenkian Museum.