As we get ready to move

Reflections on life on our street (80)

Last week, a new wine bar opened downstairs. IF IF IF features Georgian wines. They’re pet friendly, so Josie has been out of her mind getting loved on. It’s been amazing watching Natasha and her friends create this wonderful space from what was just an empty, unused hole in the wall. Plus, they gave us their IKEA boxes for our move :-)

Opening night of IF IF IF

While it’s great to have something so vibrant happening in our neighborhood, having it literally right under our window has helped us feel better about moving. The music and laughter two floors down from our apartment has been lovely; it also might wear out its welcome over time. The cigarette smoke is already annoying.

It seems like our apartment is giving us more and more reasons to leave. We’re telling it, yes, we’re on our way but it keeps encouraging us to go. We have complained of various issues with our front door intercom since we arrived last June. Last week, the keypad outside broke entirely and no longer opens the door. We got some exercise running down to let in tenants who couldn’t enter the building before a frustrated resident forced the door open and it stopped locking entirely. And our apartment’s doorbell decided to quit as well. At least, though, the good weather makes it easier to leave our windows open to handle the intermittent-but-daily sewer gas smell that appears in completely random areas of the apartment (we’ve been complaining since August on that one).

Speaking of keeping our windows open, spring is definitely here - more flowers are coming out and the weather has been spectacular. Back in the fall when it was nonstop rain and damp and dreary we wondered how long til the weather changed. April is definitely the complete turning point: pretty much sunny and 70 every day. Thinking back, though, March was ok, especially after the first week. The rough spell is mid-October to early March.

Now that the weather is better, we’re out and about a bit more and appreciating all this area has to offer. Which leads us to ponder the name of our street. Most of the street names in the area are long, unwieldy, and frankly completely forgettable. Rua do Vale de Pereiro? Rua Barata Salguiero? Apparently, the majority of streets here are named after people.

The Rato Metro station end of our street

The fruit cart that often graces the Rato end of the street. The fruit is phenomenal quality and price. In the winter it changes to a chestnut stand.

Rua do Salitre, though. Hmm, maybe some historical figure so famous they only need one name? Madonna, Caesar. It’s actually way more interesting - salitre means saltpeter! Saltpeter, of course, is the subject of a widely-debunked urban myth: it reduces libido so it’s put in food in prisons, the army, and boarding schools.

What saltpeter actually does is quite interesting. Most common use? It’s an important ingredient in gunpowder and fireworks. And farmers use it to remove stumps from fields. You get the idea.

Those boarding school boys fearing for their manhood were right on one level: it does show up in food, as a way to salt-cure meats. The list goes on and is as wide and varied as your imagination.

But what the heck does that does that have to do with Portugal’s capital and the street we live on? It’s not even a long street (less than half a mile!), and saltpeter sounds like a pretty valuable commodity. Well, actually, turns out Rua do Salitre was named in 1655 (Quick - when was your street named?) and used to be longer, but progress cut into it here and there. It started where saltpeter was extracted - allegedly in the garden of Carthusian Friars (thanks, Wiki), and extended across Avenida da Liberdade.

All those uses must have made the saltpeter find pretty important. It was especially prized to have a local source given the Kings of Portugal and Spain (although Spain’s was the real deal-breaker) centralizing mercantile transactions which created serious difficulty getting saltpeter and iron into Portugal. (Please, please do not ask us exactly how. We’re not economists. One would think that Portugal, being traders extraordinaire, were very involved in the saltpeter trade route making the commodity easier to get, but apparently not.)

The street nowadays is just as fascinating as its name. Its west end begins at a Metro station: Rato, the terminus of the yellow line. That’s an average area of the city, nice but not fancy. The east end of Rua do Salitre, less than half a mile away, also ends at a Metro station: Avenida, on the blue line. Here we have the Avenida da Liberdade, modelled after Paris’s Avenue des Champs-Élysées, easily the swankest area of Lisbon, and graced by stores like Gucci & Cartier.

A small part of Avenida da Liberdade

The entire street is one way. But for fun it changes direction 3 times. Perhaps it can’t make up its mind to be regular folk or fancy schmancy ;-)

View from the window of our apartment. This block of Rua do Salitre ran from east to west when we took the picture. Since then, the city reversed the traffic so it now runs downhill from west to east.

Aside from the new wine bar in our building, there are several other restaurants on the street. Amy has been a few times to the very busy Portuguese cuisine (and Portuguese language only!) lunch shop. (She’s been known to look up the word for stew and ask for guisado. She then received a yummy and filling comfort food dish. Except for the tripe. That’s not her idea of comfort food.) One of our favorite restaurants is Os Tibetanos (vegetarian Tibetan), which provided our first meal in Portugal, by way of the Too Good To Go app.

Stew from A Ratoeira Minhota. Beef this time, not tripe. Phew!

Tibetan dumplings from Os Tibetanos

Anchoring the bottom of the street near Rato is the historical landmark Chafariz do Largo do Rato, and recently renovated fountain that was part of the 18th-century aqueduct system.

The fountain, and on the street over, home to an aqueduct museum.

Don't sleep on the peacocks who watch over the Rato end of the street

In the end, we’ll miss a lot about this street. And we’re also glad to be moving on to a new one. We’re not going far, only about 750 meters (just under half a mile), so we can come back and visit whenever we want. After all, Josie’s a celebrity downstairs.

That’s all for now.

Love from … Rua do Salitre,

Amy & Scott