April 2017
Lisbon is a favorite stop for the trans-Atlantic cruises, and we’ve stopped here several times for this reason. We always welcomed an opportunity to visit this city that offers enough things to see and do. This meant, though, we never got to experience the nighttime scene in Lisbon. I wanted to hear Fado music, which tends to be played late in the evening. So we picked Lisbon as a flight transfer point on our way back from Madrid to Los Angeles.
We rented an Airbnb room in Alfama district where many of the Fado joints were. This eclectic hilltop area has lots of murals, cafes, restaurants in narrow alleyways. It is very easy to get lost, but, somehow, you are never too far from where you were going.
We chose A Baiuca for our Fado night. Luckily, we were able to get the same day reservation by calling them around 6 PM. It was a small, tight space. When we got there around 8:30 PM, some of the instrumentalists were getting ready to play. We ordered our dinner and wine (minimum 25 Euros per person) and soaked in the atmosphere. The food was actually pretty good.
A Baiuca appealed to me because it had a constant stream of singers coming in to sing a few songs. We could hear many different voices and songs, and, even a cook came out from the kitchen and belted her heart out. At one point a young lady in her mid-30’s came in and asked our permission to join us on our table. Turned out, she was a singer waiting for her turn. She said she was from Amsterdam. She fell in love with Fado when her mother played the records when she was growing up, and she had to come to Lisbon to learn to sing Fado after finishing college and working to save up some money. After a few years, she got good enough to sing Fado professionally and support herself. She loved her life in Lisbon being a Fado singer.
Our stopover in Lisbon was a total success!
Small Wide World 