Houses of Lisbon

The city itself hosts some 1.3 million inhabitants, densely distributed over a small area bounded by water (think of San Francisco). A typical view consists of some hills and red-roofed buildings along them:




Most traditional buildings are of 2 or 3 stores, each level is really high, I would estimate as 3 or even 3.5 meters, an interesting thing is the numeration of levels. When you enter the building, the first floor, the one which is at the same level or just above the street, that is, is called "r/c" (or "t/r" for more europeinized reader), then you go upstairs to get to the "first" floor and so on. Noe that due to deep changes in elevation one side of the building may have ground exit at say second floor, while another at the usual r/c.

Not all people live in regular flats. Some prominet ones, say King Jeorge and his court, used to live in a castle (mind you, this was 700 years ago, thi sdays he would not afford the morgage and parking fees in the center of the city):



Apparently in those days people did not trust usual "No tresspassing" signs and door locks, instead they used rather cumbersome equipment



What I have to mention is the sad fact that it is really annoying to live in a castle: first, there's almost no shadow, so you would burn yourself under the sun after couple of hours guarding the walls; second, climbing up and down the stairs



is a really athletic procedure, provided that they are narrow, do not have hand rails and after the centures of polishing by your predecessors are quite slippery.

Another thing is water. During rare rainfalls all the water is accumulated in reservoirs, and you are supposed to drink it for the next few months (can you imagine, how fresh it becomes after even a few days?). Here's the usual feast of a poor castle citizen:

By the way, cats are very important part of the medieval life -- they protect groceries from mice.

Now, to finish off with King Jeorge, here's his 2-bedroom apartment in the castle (about 12 square meters, 1 meter 80 cm at its highest point and, well, not sure how to put it, it smells a bit:



More ordinary people are entitled to slightly less fashionable apartments, say a typical person enjoys a flat with two or three rooms in a neighbourhood like this one:



or this one:


What you should pay attention to is the soft pastel colour of the building (this is rather traditional, the aforementioned red roofs are in fact the brightest parts of the buildings). Also, and on th elast photo this is even more so, you can see that there was a tendency to cover the facades of the buildings with ceramic tiles. This is amazingly neat, but in the same time the tiles were obviously handcrafted and as such, presumably extremely expensive.

Vehicles in Lisbon

The streets in the city are pretty narrow and not quite horizontal:


This of course imposes certain restrictions on the type of cars and transport means in general.

In addition to a subway system, there are traditional busses, a tram

(note that it goes not much in a horizontal direction, but rather in vertical :)), and some public elevators - the first picture in this series shows its tower; one uses a regular bus ticket in order to board the elevator.

As to more contemporary vehicles, cars, they are definitely smaller that American ones:


and also sometimes do not provide the usual comfort level, such as say doors and engine-powered climate-control system:



My personal favorite is some kind of a station wagon, or 2-volume vehicle, it always looks really assertive, like on the following picture


Of course, there are always some dried versions of pickup trucks, here I treat you with what Matt's white Shevy S-10 could look like if he were born in Europe:



Interesting to mention, there are also Corollas and Civics, but they are mostly not the means of transport, but rather the statements "look, I am so cool that can afford to spend 2 hours parking this into a regular parking spot".