Greetings from Lisabon! But how on Earth did I end up here? A very severe binge? Sleep walking?

It all started on New Year's Eve 2009. While others where shouting, embracing and kissing blonde bomb shells with new hope for a better year, I was embracing my good old friend the toilet seat, vomiting my heart out. Whas it something I ate? Nah... surely it was something I drank. Well, three weeks later it turns out to be something pressing on my Cerebellum. I underwent neuro-surgery on the 26th of January. The surgery was successful but a very small fraction of the tumour remained. It was clenched to the brainstem and attempting to remove it would do more harm than good. So here I am in Lisabon, undergoing radioteraphy, losing hair but breathing and having learnt something from this experience. The reasons for why the tumour developed are unknown and it is unnecessary to ask why. The culprits can range from some as big as the Chernobyl Incident to as small as the mobile phone which still sits next to me.

Now, about the city, which seem unwilling to stop impressing me. I rarely heard of Lisabon as a location of top turist interes, situated always in the shadow of famous cities like Paris, Rome, Venice, Prague, Vienna etc. I was sure it is a beautiful city but I was shocked to find out that nothing I could ever imagine would ever scratch the surface of how beautiful this city can be. What first caught my eye was, unlike the situation in my home country, the respect that both the client and the archiect (especially the client) have for arhitecture, old or new; not only for architecture, but art in general. Unlike Rome, a city which I adored, Lisabon seems tailored for an individual, not to big, not to small, a city in which one could live in and not be neither bored, nor overwhelmed. I still have a month of therapy left and to be honest, I hate the fact that nostalgia started to kick in.

I'll submit photos when I'll return to Romania, and the life tempo takes a chill pill because it seems like the past months raced by me like a cheetah on steroids. Until next time, good luck and enjoy the moment.