recent travels - lisbon and germany

this latest trip was more challenging than most.  a week before we left i stupidly sprained my ankle...uh...fighting off hordes of ninja...yeah, that's it!  this made exploring a hilly, cobblestone-y city like lisbon much more difficult.  thank goodness public transit there is easy, cheap and extensive!

trying to warm up in a small cafe after the rain in Sintra.

(top) inside tram 12E in Lisbon; (middle)
view into the Alfama neighborhood;
(bottom) quick impression of arched
vaults in a cathedral.

originally the thought was that this would give me more sketching time - just set me down somewhere and leave me for a couple hours! - but of course that's never how it works out.  the weather was (of course) colder and wetter than we had hoped; and there are always too many interesting things to see...as i've said previously, the choice when visiting somewhere new is always: either sit there and record narrowly what's in front of you; or cover more ground and actively experience more broadly the new surroundings. as much as i crave the former, i find the latter is more important.  at any rate, as a result, the sketches are mostly little snippets from our experience around town.

(top) cool clock in an apparently famous
bar in Lisbon...not the best drawing, but
in my defense, it was dark and i was
tired...and probably a little bzzzd; (bottom)
quick shivering impression of Sintra in
the pouring rain..

(top) a tiny sewing machine that my
wife was coveting.  i actually remembered
it wrong - it was red, and the box was
blue; (bottom) vintage radio (we saw
many) and the'discoverer' of Brasil!

Palacio Nacional da Pena in Sintra..it rained hard when
 we were visiting Sintra, but there was a brief interlude while here..the black clouds were certainly very forbidding!

our week in lisbon was followed by our obligatory visit with family in germany.  i was still hobbled by my ankle, but as we were in familiar territory, there was less need to 'explore', which meant a little more time to sit and sketch...but only a little, because after a week, one of my new nephews (very likely) gave me a nasty bug that wiped me out for the remainder of our trip.  no christmas presents for him!!

(left) seemed like all of Augsburg was under construction; (right) for
some reason, the side of the Gärtnerplatz (München) i chose to sit on
was where all the homeless people hung out. go figure...

(left top) also in München...don't know why i always draw
parked cars...i guess it's a challenge to make them look
like actual models..maybe also the reflections i find
interesting..(bottom left to right) the idea was to do a
panorama of sorts from Fuggerplatz (Augsburg)...kinda
worked..sort of...