Symposium in Lisbon (notes afterwards)

Photos of the speakers, by Antonio Souto (shared by permission):

I'm going to add more photos and comments so that someday I can find them, I hope.

Conference site, Lisbon

The community center where we'll be speaking is in the old part of downtown. I didn't take enough photos of the inside but here are a few around the entranceway and of the office (the glass wall) and of Marta:







What Marta wrote on the site of the event:

Temos excelentes notícias hoje: encontrámos, finalmente, um local óptimo para o simpósio! O simpósio vai, então, ter lugar no edifício da Junta de Freguesia de Santos-o-Velho -- muito agradecemos ao Senhor Presidente daquela Junta de Freguesia, o Sr. Luís Monteiro, pela amabilidade com que disponibilizou as suas instalações para este evento.

We've got excellent news today: we finally found a great site for the symposium! It'll take place at the Local Council of Santos-o-Velho -- many thanks to Sr. Luís Monteiro, the Council's current President, for kindly letting us have our symposium there.

About the site: http://www.jf-santosovelho.com

The photo makes it look like a one-story building, but there's a gym on top of the big room, and upstairs and to the left are offices and a kitchen.

Street art in Lisbon

There's just a tiny section of tile near the upper left, and the rest might have fallen off or have been stolen. You can see where the door and windows were filled in, long ago. But only the front wall is there. There are a few holes in this big fish, and here's the view through one of them:

I spy, I spy with my little...

I spy, I spy, with my little camera's zoom function...



This is distorted; the wall was mostly straight, partly curved toward us, not away. Here's Joyce, in those moments.   But down in front of us was something...

Something interesting and old(ish)!



A washtub with a scrub board, I guess. Maybe more particular than that. Maybe some sort of construction or art supplies. Could be both. The pipes above it, I don't know. The wheel behind it, I don't know.

In the distance is a bridge like the one in San Francisco, and a castle.





That building in the foreground has a great roof-room and terrace.

There were churches all over the place.

There was a photoshoot up top, of a bride and groom, and in the parking lot was their getaway vehicle, a rented motorcycle with sidecar.



It had white bows on the back.



We spent a lot of time in the tile museum, and those photos will come later.

First glimpses of Lisbon

Marta will take us to some beautiful places. What I've seen thusfar is probably mundane and (to the locals) boring. Everything I've seen thusfar is (to me) new and exciting.

After mostly cloudy views from London, I finally started seeing the ground!

We rode from the airport with Marta, got to her street, went up and got settled a bit, walked a few blocks to the park Constança wanted me and Joyce to see, and Bruno walked us up another little way to a viewing platform sort of... park with a view. Then we walked back.

I'm tired and should stay in, though we had an offer to go back out. Tomorrow we will see more things!

The last bit is an older building, uninhabited, perhsps with the tile stolen off the front. Many have a fully tiled front wall.

The distorted verticals are the view out of the bedroom where I'm staying for two weeks.

The photos seem to be coming in reverse order; sorry.

Moss garden at Julie's

I'm stuck being fascinated by plants that can grow without being watered by people.

On the wall between Julie's house and the road is a beautiful miniature moss garden.

Shopping, Trafalgar Square, train back

Today was busy and good, but not very photogenic.



The National Gallery doesn't want anyone taking photos. I did take one, of part of the mosaic floor. It's all in the style of Roman mosaics, and in color and shape and all it has that appearance, but the subject matter is more pedestrian (to be chariotable).



I saw some actual Brueghel the Elder paintings, and actual Vermeer. I saw several things by Gerard David. I wouldn't even know who Gerard David was, except he used the same basket twice, and I started a collection. I was sad NOT to see that basket in any of the several paintings of his at the National Gallery.

I saw another things related (in my own head, I mean) to my site: Venus at her Mirror, by Diego Velásquez, which wasn't on our list of things to see, but was in a room we passed through when we were on our way out. I was happy to see it.

The train on the way back wasn't very exciting, but I thought a few moments of non-excitement still might be exotic. I caught the Nero's coffee depository, and some skyline and some trainside, and other trains.

The second video is very short, but has the river.

I was hoping to get a big group of allotment gardens we had seen on the way there, but I missed them (slept through them, I think, second time).