Friday
I had another attack of the night terrors on Thursday. I awoke in a panic, and my agitation woke B up in turn. I started screaming out questions: for a brief few moments I was unable to distinguish my nightmare from reality.
It was the final day of the conference and our last full day in Lisbon. We got up at a quarter to 8. I had just a banana to eat for breakfast. Then we went over to the university, taking some seats near the front of the auditorium for the final keynote talk — and the one I had been most looking forward to. It was to be given by Christos Papadimitriou.
Papadimitriou is probably best known, at least among Computer Science students and researchers the world over, for his magisterial textbook on computational complexity, a real classic of its genre; but he’s an important figure in the field of complexity on the basis of his original contributions alone; and on top of that he was recently the co-author of a highly acclaimed graphic novel about the life (and madness) of Bertrand Russell.
His talk was going to cover various complexity theoretic issues related to the computation of Nash Equilibria in Game Theory. There were sound problems at the beginning however: the mic wasn’t working properly, plus, Professor Papadimitriou has a bit of a tendency to mumble, which on top of his thick Greek accent, meant that even those of us sitting near the front caught only a little of what he was saying. The situation was rectified in part when he was passed a hand held microphone by one of the conference helpers.
Then 15 minutes before the end, to thank us all for sticking around for the last day of the conference – something he admitted he personally would never have done in his younger days – he began a brief presentation on recent work detailing the evolutionary benefits of sexual intercourse as opposed to the forms of asexual reproduction practised among lower forms of organism – at which point, of course, every one in the auditorium perked up and started paying more attention.
Inevitably, all the questions at the end, and there were quite a number of them, were about sex; for some reason no one wanted to ask anything about Nash Equilibria.
After Papadimitriou’s talk, B and I took a train to Rossio and had a brief wander around the town centre; this time we headed for the Barrio Alto. The sun shone brightly. During our stroll, we walked past a sex shop that had a sex toys section entitled “contra natura”, and stopped off in a small piazza with a bronze statue of a ticket collector, with whom we posed for photos. We walked down a stone staircase which smelled heavily of piss; there was a poor hunched-over old gypsy woman at the bottom wearing a black shawl. I gave her a few coins.
The streets of the Barrio Alto were shabby and the buildings graffiti ridden, though not to the extent of the blocks I’d visited on my first day here. The whole neighbourhood was pretty deserted and supposedly only came alive at night: the locals were wont to party all night long and sleep through most of the hours of broad daylight — a lot of the windows had their shutters closed to keep the light out. Aside from the sex shop, and the streets littered with fag ends and covered in last night’s beer stains, I really didn’t get to see much of the hedonistic side of Lisbon; in fact I feel like I never really got too much of a sense of the living, breathing essence of the place, just a bunch of old buildings and some admittedly stunning scenery. But that’s fair enough: after all, I was here at the university’s expense to attend a conference on artificial intelligence, not to investigate the culture of the town where it was being held.
We walked back to Rossio and went to sit at an outdoor café facing the Praça da Figueira; I wasn’t impressed: €2.30 for a can of Lipton’s Ice Tea. We took the train back to the universidad after deciding to have lunch (for free) there. But we arrived a little too late and there wasn’t much food left on the buffet tables, and what was left had gone cold. B and I had a few slices of quiche. After eating I went back to the hotel to get B her laptop. It was sweltering outside, but I was dressed for it in my Hawaiian shirt and black knee length shorts.
I returned and gave B her laptop before heading to the final technical session which had at least one talk that seemed as if it might be relevant to what I was working on – and it was, kind of. After sitting through all three talks of the session, I went back to B in the canteen. She was in one of her fits (or rather furies) of organisation, and was absolutely adamant that we had to arrange every detail of tomorrow’s trip right there and then, even down to calling the hotel in Brno to double check our bookings; I was, on the other hand, a little too laid back. We tried to call the hotel on Skype but the internet connection wasn’t too great and our attempts were finally cut short by the need to get to the closing session, which was to be a goodbye from the organisers.
During the session, one of the organisers, a small, stout man, got up and began to talk about the challenges of setting up the conference, the preparation for which had began years ago. At one point he explained how the stress of organising everything had been compounded by the fact that he’d been dealing with a major personal crisis at the same time – after mentioning which he started to choke up. It was more than a little uncomfortable – I guess Computer Scientists aren’t used to such naked displays of emotional vulnerability. But I guess the Portuguese don’t tend to button up and repress their emotions like us Northern Europeans do; and I put it all down to the Portuguese predilection to over sentimentality at the time. We gave him a loud round of applause as a token of our gratitude and to drown out our embarrassment at the scene.
B and I went to the final reception. The attendance was rather sparse: most of the (now former) conference attendees were either out enjoying the sunshine, or were in the process of returning back home. I had a few pastries and drank some cold draught Super Bock; the stuff had been available on tap throughout the conference, during the morning and afternoon breaks and lunchtime, and I had developed a real taste for it.
I didn’t want to be saddled with my shoulder bag the rest of the afternoon; so I trudged back once again to the hotel to leave it in our room; before going back out to meet B at the Campo Grande station — she had gone up ahead of me. We rode the train to Baixa Chiado, and decided from there on to go to Estrela: I was interested in seeing Fernando Pessoa’s old house, which had been turned into a museum dedicated to his life and work.
So we took the 28 tram up the Rua São Jorge and climbed the rest of the street to the Jardim da Estrela where we rested briefly in the shade. I carelessly dropped my tourist map at the bench where we’d been sitting and when I went back to retrieve it a few minutes later, saw a couple of children playing with it. I decided just to leave it – we had the little map in the guide book to refer to after all and how churlish would it have been for me to have asked for it back?
We had something of a problem trying to find the Casa Fernando Pessoa. On the first go, we left the park by the wrong exit, though this had the advantage of leading us straight to the Basilica da Estrela – which we were too tired to give more than a quick glance to. And so back through the park we went: at which point B decided she’d prefer to rest on a bench by an old antique iron pavilion and listen to her iPod — letting me traipse off by myself to look for the Casa FP – and of course I was to call her when I found it.
So off I went by myself, took a few more wrong turns and inevitably got lost: I’m usually not too bad at orienting myself to unfamiliar surroundings, but Lisbon is a fucker for losing your way in. Eventually, by retracing my steps back to the roundabout after the park, I managed to get my bearings. My confused little wander that afternoon took in an Anglican church, an English cemetery and the headquarters of a troupe of amateur English theatrical players: all remnants of the centuries’ old Anglo-Lusitanian alliance.
Finally, I managed to find old Fernando’s house – five minutes or so before it was due to close of course. I
phoned B to tell her this; she seemed not to mind and told me I should go and take a look for myself. So I did.
The museum had a gallery of Pessoa inspired paintings, a library containing his complete works as well as a wealth of secondary texts, and they’d also set up his former bedroom to look like it had when he’d lived there – which since I wasn’t really that familiar with his works, only with his general reputation as a modernist genius, didn’t hold much intrinsic fascination for me. After a brief look around – and it had to be brief given the time – I went back to B at the Jardim.
It was decided that for our last evening in Lisbon, that we would revisit the Alfama – and so once again, and indeed for the final time, we went to board the number 28 tram. Once we arrived we settled on a Goan restaurant that lay on the cobbled pathway that led up to the Castello. We were the first two there that evening and the waiter – who, alas, wasn’t very Goan looking – was very attentive and pleasant to us. The food was ok: my shrimp curry was nice; B’s fish curry was a bit bland however. We washed it all down with — what else? — two glasses of chilled Super Bock.
We walked back to the Praça do Comércio and took photos of each other in front of the monument or with the triumphal arch and the rushing traffic as background just as the gloomy dusk was beginning to settle. I wasn’t able to rub out the smudges on my camera lens and that turned up on the periphery of all of the photos we took.
And so, our final evening in Lisbon over and done with, we took the train back to the Campo Grande. B went straight to the hotel, but I stopped off in Lidl first to buy some fruit. It’d been less than a week but I’d very quickly grown attached to the Campo Grande and the stadium Lidl which I must have visited every day I was in Lisbon: so that that last visit was more for sentimental reasons than any real desire to buy fruit. Finally I got back to the hotel. B lay in bed while I packed my luggage.
