Philadelphia Weekly

Aer Lingus may have the funnier name, but Ryan Air is the airline to choose if you're in Ireland and you want to see some other parts of Europe but you don't have much money.

This is how I did it: I flew to southern Germany, where I got shunted around on the train. In Freiburg, a hoppin' little university town, I ate yogurt and took walks and knitted a scarf and burned beeswax candles. I slept like a baby in a bed that was whiter and softer than any bed you'd ever sleep on in Ireland-unless you're Bono.

I liked what I saw of Germany, admired the wholesome, tidy efficiency of the place, which was unmarred during my visit except for one public-restroom moment. In a pay toilet at the Frankfurt train station, I closed the stall door behind me, sat down and came face-to-face with this little bon mot: "Fuck 70 cents to piss, you cunt."

There's not a doubt in my mind that an Irish person wrote this. An Irish woman, mind you. I laughed out loud, a little hiccup that echoed.

From Frankfurt I boarded a plane to Lisbon, hoping for sun. When I arrived, the friend of a friend, a stranger to me, was supposed to collect me at the airport. Somehow Cinda and I found each other. She was a slender woman in her late 30s with dark skin and hair and surprising green eyes. She'd take me to my hotel soon, she said, but first we had to go to a place called El Diablo, where she had an appointment to get a tattoo.

"Portugal is very poor, and nothing works the way it's supposed to," she said in her deadpan way the minute we got in her car. "It's the poorest country in the old E.U. We've always been poor. I think it's genetic."

When another car cut us off only to idle in the middle of the road, she gestured gloomily as if to say, "See?"

"This is normal," is what she actually said. "This is normal!"

In the tattoo parlor, where graffiti-style Latin ladies painted on the walls near the ceiling looked down on us like a squadron of torpedo-breasted angels, I picked up a city map from a little table. The only English words on it were in the title: "Lisbon: City of Emotions."

I pointed to it and smiled, as if to say, "I'm home!" and Cinda nodded drolly, knowingly.

While the tattoo artist worked, I admired the blue new addition taking shape on her shoulder-a closed lotus flower, the Buddhist symbol for the potential for enlightenment.

Cinda was kind enough to put me up in a pension in a bright, busy blue-and-yellow-tiled square in the city's artsy district.

Everything is so bright in this hoped-for southern sun it's like my vision has been whitewashed. It makes my eyes ache, like I'm literally taking in the sights, getting them permanently emblazoned on my brain like flashbulb afterimages, like Cinda's tattoo.

There's a bronze statue of the modernist poet Ferdinand Pessoa sitting on a chair out in front of the coffee shop next door, a beautiful, ornate place where he apparently liked to sit and write.

The only thing I know about Pessoa is that at some point he lost his marbles and wrote letters to old friends and schoolteachers, pretending to be his own psychiatrist and asking for stories about his "patient," which is so demented it's delightful. I like Portugal too, even if nothing is the way it's supposed to be. What is?