Straight Laced in Lisbon

I wear out many more shoelaces on a three-week Europe trip than in all the time I spend in the US. In a way, this is a good thing. I get to play the game of "where do the Portuguese hide their laces?" Hobbling along with a busted shoelace, I tried a couple of shoe stores to no avail. Then I remembered the handy tourist kiosk with the slogan "Ask me!" prominently displayed. So I asked. I found you can get shoe laces at any shoe store, like "all those on the right over there." So I went in all of them. I can tell you, shoe stores in Lisbon do not sell shoe laces. Someone should tell the Tourist Bureau.

So I spent the rest of the day touring around on pretty much one shoe lace. I wasn't the only one in bad shape. In the Praca do Comercio there were a whole bunch of carefully placed wrecked cars. I mean really wrecked cars. Cars without enough form to tell you what they were. I figure this was to scare Portugese drivers, who suffered more road deaths than any other country in Western Europe in 2000, at 21 deaths per 100,000 population. By comparison, the UK rate was 6.1 per 100,000 population. Before you USians gloat, the US rate was 14.8 [source]. That's a lot of arbitrary lane changes without looking.

Portugal's problem has been attributed to poor roads. Portugal has been building and repairing roads like crazy since joining the EU in order to alleviate the problem.

Anyway, I finally found a new pair of shoelaces. They were carefully sorted on nails in the wall of a tiny shoe repair/knife sharpening shop run by two great old guys whose hands could make a knife fly over the whetstone so fast the blur was like watching a miniature fireworks show.

So here's the tip of the day: try to ruin at least one article of clothing on your vacation. That way you get to interact with real people and discover places tourists never get to see.