Welcome to Lisbon, Portugal!

I arrived here by bus two nights ago and was promptly greeted by Frederico, a 34-year-old father of two whom I met on Couchsurfing.com. He’s currentl also hosting a twentysomething Asian-American couchsurfer from Brooklyn. We all share a single-room studio in the heart of Lisbon´s commercial district, just by the water. Both his shower and his stove are broken, but he does have an ironing board, futon and a collection of DVDs.

Lisbon is a beautiful city, with brighter, more cheerful colors and smaller, more detailed tiles and stones than Madrid. It takes on a much older feel; both the buildings and the lifestyle, the number of locals at sidewalk cafés, retain the quaint atmosphere of Old Europe.

In the Moorish district, women still lean out from their second-story windows to have conversations, and grandparents sit on the stoops at every corner. The streets are winding and narrow; in some spots, too narrow for even the trolley cars to pull through.

Frederico keeps taking me out in the evenings to see the ´Lisbon lifestyle,` and it seems people here are 35 going on 19. Monday night was what Frederico called an `early night,` meaning we got home at 2 a.m. Tuesday night, I stayed out until 5 a.m. until I saw that no one else had any intention of leaving; at that point, I bade farewell to my newfound Portugese friends and walked home.

`You see, we enjoy life!` said John, a thirtysomething Portugese who came out with us both Monday and Tuesday. `Leave the hard work to the Germans!`

Its a different scene than late nights in Boulder. No one drinks much alcohol. It certainly doesn’t compare to the levels of drinking in Boulder. But the Portugese stay out LATE, often until daybreak, having conversations and listening to music and dancing. I wonder how they don´t get bored of so many late nights after decades upon decades of the same thing, but maybe there´s not much else to do, or maybe it morphs into a passion.

The Portugese also have a lot of pride in their maritime history; they build lots of monuments to that time 500 years ago when they dominated the free world. Like the U.S., they love exhibiting all the native peoples they conquered. They proudly display maps of their sailors´voyages, and have oversized novelty ship anchors placed in parks and open fields; they erect statues not just of sailors, but also the poets who best commemorated those sailors.

Its fitting, then, that I´ll be spending the next several days by the sea, traveling this afternoon with my newfound clan of age-thirtysomething friends to a beach house in Santa Cruz, Portugal, where about 20 people will spend the weekend.

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