My Trip to Lisboa

Lisboa - a Capital to Remember

A few weeks back, I went to Lisboa with the rest of my class from high school. I've got to say, that it might have been the best trip I have ever been on. First of all, Portugal is such a beautiful country, and the culture is so different than in Denmark, which makes it an even more amazing experience.

On about 6 days or so, we had seen most of the city, but my absolute favorite day is the one I'm going to tell you about now. The day we went on a street art tour, with a tour guide around the streets in Lisboa.
So what made this my favorite day? Well, it amazed me that we had all walked around the city for days, without even paying any attention to all the art, that was actually everywhere to be seen in the city. And other than the fact that it's incredible to look at, there was a meaning behind most of the beautifully covered buildings and walls. 

I love to paint and I've always found graffiti, when done right, to be a way to express yourself through art and graffiti. Some people misunderstand graffiti. I mean sure, some folks out there just care about "tagging", which is where you go around the entire city and just tag your name in different places. But when an artist expresses him or herself, through the graffiti, and makes a piece of art, I think that we should appreciate it. I think we should allow ourselves to see the beautiful aspect of the artwork, instead of just hating the street art part of the culture, which it really has become, especially in Lisboa. 

At the end of the street art tour, we had learned a lot about street art, and then our tour guide gave us the chance to do some painting of our own. The government in Lisboa have set up some special walls in the city, where it's a 100% legal to come and do some graffiti painting. So that's exactly what we did. All though there is a lot of places in the city where the people who own different buildings, actually request for artists to come and make some art on their property.  Of course, the artists that are lucky enough to get this offer, are in most cases part of the somewhat-well-known people of the crowd.  

These last two pictures are part of a very large-scale masterpiece, present in a parking lot in Lisboa. The people owning the grounds of the parking lot had a couple of years ago, summoned a whole bunch of different, very talented, graffiti artists. Together they created an incredible big piece of art, taking place on the walls, all the way around the parking lot.
Actually, it's too bad that we can't see graffiti from the same point of view as it is seen in Lisboa. Unfortunately, it's not everyone in Lisboa who has this opinion about all the street art but it's definitely more accepted and appreciated than it used to be.
This street art tour changed my mind about graffiti painting and opened my eyes to the beautiful yet meaningful part of the culture.