Lisbon

While I hesitate to call an entire city ugly, I will say that I find it aesthetically disagreable here. And to people that think that Lisbon is beautiful, I think that we must have different tastes.

Of much more importance than the aesthetics though are our micro-interactions with people. Predominant emotions seem to be things in the sadness, impatience, frustration and anger realm. Which is perhaps in starkest contrast to our time in Japan, where I would have used the words: friendliness, graciousness and agreeable formality.

Part of this could be a cultural interpretation issue, but in many ways thats actually irrelevant to my subjective experience. There is something fundamentally difficult to be exposed to negativity of this sort on a broad scale. Clearly, my experiences are limited to a very particular slice in place and time.

Between the above and in some ways just not being into being in a large city, we’ve decided to cut our time in Lisbon short and make our way to Madeira Island. Where we hope to spend a lot of time on hikes like this.