Ben Bashford

Every two years Catherine’s office go on a trip to look at architecture in a foreign land, and this year I was lucky enough to be taken along as “Catherine’s partner”. I absolutely love it there. I wish I could have stayed there longer than a few days and explored it without a hangover, as it was a pretty boozy weekend truth be told. (boozy, me?)

On the first night we had a meal of crabs, clams and the biggest prawns I have ever seen then went drinking in Bario Alto. Bario Alto is ace. Alleyways packed with bars, cool boutiques and lined with some awesome street art. Drinking there is till about 3am and afterward we went to John Malkovich’s club and found ourselves dancing to minimal techno around a big stuffed giraffe’s head. Creepy.

The architects had a coach trip on the Saturday to look at buildings but Catherine and I managed to sack that off in favour of having a very hung over breakfast then lolling around in bed going “aargh my head hurts” till the early afternoon when we mooched about town avoiding the noisy parade to celebrate Portugal becoming a republic. In the evening we went out in an area called Santos. There was an awesome bar called Left that changed colour (they also did huge measures of vodka) and a cheesy club full of “portugese top models” called Mao. I wasn’t too keen on it there but we had fun rolling our sleeves up and dancing around to the pumping euro house beats whilst the bongo players wandered around anoying people. Yes, it was one of those ones.

Sunday was spent mooching about again. We went up to the old castle, checked out the view over the city then had lunch before hot-footing it back to the airport.

More city break weekends please. Thanks.

view all my Lisbon photos