Remembrance of Things Past
Anniversaries and birthdays tend to make one look back, and what I’ve been looking back on the last few days is Portugal.
The reminiscence was triggered by Ron Bernthal’s review in the June 25 eFlyer of the Terreiro do Paco restaurant in Lisbon. I haven’t been to the restaurant, but I’ve been to the square. While I’ve been to the city many times, I remember my first visit well - it was my very first press ‘junket.’
I’d been to Europe before, and I’d been on press trips before, but they’d all been individual. This was the first time I’d gotten to mix with other travel journalists, and I believe I was the youngest person on the trip. I remember being grateful that I’d traveled a bit in the previous year so that I didn’t feel like a total neophyte. There were also some editors who didn’t travel as much as the freelance writers, so I wasn’t the only person who hadn’t been to Lisbon before.
Anyway, I still love Lisbon to this day. I remember how beautiful the Jeronimos Monastery was (is), how impressed I was with the Explorers monument, walking the cobbled streets of the Alfama. Odd things stick in my mind, like what I was wearing the first day, and having a chicken cross my path in the Alfama.
I also remember that it was my first experience of being flirted with by married men, that there were couples who traveled together and I wondered if they both really worked or if it was a dodge, and thinking that a few of the women were ‘old’ - at the same time being glad that it looked like a career that wasn’t age-dependent.
That was 30 years ago, so I guess that means I’m living proof that my last observation was correct!
- Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer
