Ok, now in Lisbon – seems like only yesterday I was in India and now I’m here – even with a weekend in Chicago and Leadville. A lifetime ago I was in Lisbon and Portugal – spent a summer working on a farm further south of here – and Lisbon is definitely a bustling city with lots of tourism and AirBnB business at the heart of the city. Today Kerry and I (we’re both here for a tradeshow) went on a cool walking tour of street art / murals in the city itself. Our guide (Diego) was super knowledgeable and is part of a local street art project. He brought his dog, which was fun – the three of us walked about 8 miles… (keep reading for more.)

You end up winding up/down streets and being taken to some pretty unique vistas in the journey for local art. All the streets seem to be cobblestones and walking all day on them I’m now ready for a break. We did find a great local restaurant last night and had Bacalao (local Portuguese dish) which was amazing. Once the sun goes down – it drops from say 75F to 65F pretty quickly so it was a cold walk back to the local hotel. We’re staying in a nice place near the city center so everywhere is a walk and an adventure.

The art work that you see on the street is really good, they do get covered up regularly and then painted over or again. Some of the pieces have actually been there for years so part of the city now and the locals don’t want them to be re-sprayed or vandalized since they are pieces of art. I think it comes down to your skill level with the spray can, if you are really an artist, the ones of lesser abilities don’t try to mess those up and leave them alone (validated by Diego so I’m sure I have the world view of spray painters exactly right).

We walked by a building that basically crumbled due to a new house being built right next to it – pretty amazing to see a house in this condition – top floor was an AirBnB. There are supposedly 25,000 AirBnB’s in Lisbon, and a lot of places where people used to live are more like AirBnb rows now with no one actually living there anymore – sort of a bummer really as a lot of the culture is changing due to these changes.

Other than that working through the jetlag – woke up early and went running on the treadmill. Last night took a melatonin about 9:30 and was probably asleep by 10:30 – and was able to sleep until my alarm went off at 7. It is interesting that when you wake up it does feel like 1 or 2 a.m. so you have to jumpstart yourself and just get outside into the sunlight as fast as possible. Generally feel pretty good, so I think I’ve figured out the jetlag formula that works for me. Also drinking a 5 hour energy in the morning seems to jolt you awake, which first thing also helps.

That’s about it, if I can will post again – In Lisbon until Thursday then to Morocco then back home in a week.