Catblogging the Last Day in Trujillo (Dog-blogging too)

Trujillo traffic: Yes. It is all taxicabs

This is the day I say farewell to Trujillo.  You want off-the-beaten tourist path vacation sites with a well-developed tourist infrastructure waiting for the tourist hordes to descend?  Trujillo.  You want the "real" Peru without the overly-commercialized mass-market tourism?  Trujillo.

On my last night -- my appetite finally returning just as I am about to leave Peru -- I ate at a "Chifa."  No pictures because I stupidly broke my own rule of always carrying my camera.  A "chifa" is a Chinese restaurant serving  Chinese-Peruano fusion cuisine.  That makes it sound upscale.  It's anything but.  This is downscale Chinese for the Peruvian market.  I ordered the "pollo con tamarindo," largely because, on the Spanish-only, English-free menu, this was a dish that (a) I could recognize the name, and (b) I knew for certain was something neither Chinese nor Peruvian restaurants in the USA would serve.  It was quite good.  Apparently this is a standard "chifa" menu item as I saw it on the menu of other chifas.  And there were many many other chifas in Trujillo.

So where are the cats I promised?

Since my cat pictures are the only ones anyone ever seems to grab off this blog, I vow now to take pictures of all cats I come across on my travels.  Trujillo is not a big cat town.  So this fellow (or lady) (I can never tell with cats) (they're all kind of sort of transgender to me) is the full extent of the Trujillo cat blogging.

But Trujillo is a dog town.

These three dogs seem to run Plaza de Armas.  They were there every time I walked through the Plaza in my four days in Trujillo.  They looked healthy and happy -- although the black one in the second picture seemed a bit bossy.

We end the animal blogging with bird-blogging.  See the birdie?

Let's move in for the close up of the statuary man in the foreground:

Oh the indignity.

There was a band playing in the Plaza de Armas then, too.  Things like that make a place a magical place to visit.

Tree-blogging.

And we will end our tour of Trujillo with a photo of a photographer desperately trying to get the right angle to get the entire facade of this old church (Iglesia La Merced) into a single frame.

Ending with a metaphor.  Next stop:  a few days in Colombia before heading home.

Welcome to Portugal: Afternoon in Alfama

Lisbon's Alfama neighborhood is lousy with trams

Reporting live from Lisbon, Portugal.  Today was a Jeb Bush kind of day: low energy.  It was a six-hour flight from JFK to Lisbon and it left a few ticks o' the clock before midnight, so there was not a whole lot of sleeping going on.  So I stuck to exploring the neighborhood in which I am staying:  Alfama.

This is the old "Moorish" section of Lisbon.  The extremely narrow streets will tell you this was laid out well before car culture.  Well before "horse and carriage" culture for that matter.

That is not the ocean.  That is the Tagus River.  It's the estuary, so I'm guessing it's salt water.  But it's not, technically speaking, ocean water.

This is up in one of the high viewpoints within Alfama.  Alfama is quite hilly.  In fact, the steepness of the slopes is the reason trams are so popular as public transit.  There may be no tram in this picture here, but there are tram wires:

Here's an example of some non-indigenous wildlife:

Turista Americana.  These types often can be found in viewpoints of various European capitals.  Especially when there is something photogenic, such as an estuary, to form the photo background.  Hey.  I would've snapped a selfie but I was too tired from overnight flight,

Upon at the viewpoint a band was playing something that sounded Afro-Brazilian.  One of the great things about Portugal is that has done a better job than anywhere else in Europe absorbing the racial minorities from its former colonies into its territory.  And since all of its overseas colonies seem to have awesome musical traditions, that means lots and lots of awesome music.

And stairs.  Lots and lots and lots of stairs in Alfama.

This is the Igreja do Sao Miguel.  Lisbon is lousy with beautiful old church buildings.  Some of which are still used as churches.

Now, let's look at some museums, of the "offbeat" variety:

Museu do Fado, the museum dedicated to Portugal's indigenous bluesy/sea chanty music, fado.

The Museu do Lactancio, which translates to the "Museum of Lactation."  Here's my weird observation.  I'm stunned that "lactation" is a masculine-gendered noun.

And finally, in the same general neighborhood:

Museu Militar.  I did not go in any of the three as it was too close to closing time by the time I had wandered down there.  Anyway, there's a police station next to the Museu Militar.

Here's another thing typically Lisboa (Lisbonian?):

The decorative tile facades of so many buildings.

Anyway, since I walked downhill to the water -- estuary, I mean -- walked down to the estuary, that meant an uphill battle to get back to the hotel.

And what's that beautiful white building up ahead?

It's a re-purposed defrocked Catholic church,

But what it was re-purposed into is impressive:  The Lisboa Panteao.  The Lisbon Pantheon.  Where a boatload of famous Portuguese are buried.  Those little tourist "tuk-tuks" are everywhere, too, by the way,

More trams:

And this is a Catholic Church I found when I figured out I climbed the wrong steep hill to get back to my hotel.

This is the Igreja e Convento da Graca,

My observation about Lisbon after Day One:  what an amazingly friendly city.  People are friendly.  Dogs are friendly.

But the cats aren't friendly.  So in that way Lisbon is just like everywhere else.

Portugal has now become the 22nd (or 21st) (or 23rd, depending on how you count) (which I'm not going to go over here, let's just say that under my preferred method of counting countries visited, it's #22)

I leave you with this, a twilight view of Castelo de Sao Jorge.