18/07/2026
Lisbon: Money, Earthquakes, Mountains, and Other Stable Things
Lisbon is a city that makes you look up and watch your step at the same time.
Blue-and-white tiles cover the buildings. Balconies hang over narrow streets, and yellow trams rattle through roads designed long before anyone imagined a tour bus. The hills rise where a reasonable city planner might have suggested a flat road. Then you look down and remember the polished stone beneath your feet, because one careless step could completely change the direction of your day.
Lisbon was the beginning of Trek 3. We arrived tired, excited, and still figuring out how thirty-six students and staff were going to move through Europe together without losing anybody, missing a train, or blocking every sidewalk in Portugal.
Over the next several days, the city became our classroom. Students wrote in public squares, presented beside monuments, performed skits inside a castle, debated beneath the ruins of a convent, and wrote raps while climbing a mountain in Sintra.
We covered money, power, religion, exploration, conflict, disruption, free will, sacrifice, empathy, and the possibility that the universe may be completely random.
A fairly normal first week of school.
Our first day began in the Praça do Comércio, a massive square facing the Tagus River. It was once one of the commercial centres of the Portuguese Empire, which made it a fitting place to begin with money.
Students completed their first Morning Note while thinking about what money actually is.
A bill is only paper. A coin is only metal. Most of the money we use now does not physically exist at all. It is a number attached to an account, and somehow that number can buy food, pay rent, send someone to university, or bring a group of students from Canada to Europe.
Money has value because people agree that it has value.
That sounds obvious, but it is also kind of ridiculous when you stop and think about it. Our entire economic system depends on billions of people trusting the same story at the same time.
Before money, people relied more heavily on trade and barter. That works until the person who has what you need does not want what you have. Money gave people a common measure of value. It allowed trade to become larger, faster, and much more complicated.
At the Money Museum, students explored the history of currency, banking, lending, and exchange. The goal was not to convince them that money is meaningless. Clearly it is useful. The goal was to recognize that money is a human invention, and like most human inventions, it only works because we continue to participate in it.
Money is connected to trust, but it is also connected to power.
Who decides what something is worth? Why does the same amount of money mean almost nothing to one person and everything to another? Why do we attach numbers to nearly every part of our lives?
Grades, salaries, follower counts, prices, rankings.
Numbers help us understand the world, but they can also become the world if we are not careful.
That evening, we climbed to Castelo de São Jorge and moved from money into stories.
The students were divided into groups and asked to perform skits based on different versions of St. George: St. George and the dragon, St. George the martyr, and the story of Muhammad and the Green One.
The castle was our stage.
There were dragons. There were martyrs. There were dramatic deaths. There were a few moments where historical accuracy became more of a suggestion.
The whole point of the presentations was to get the students performing.
Many of them were nervous at first, but once the skits began, they committed. They spoke in front of one another, took some risks, and allowed themselves to look a little silly. That is usually where the good stuff starts.
There was also a moment, after the final presentations, when Joe was speaking about God and an olive tree almost fell on top of him.
It happened so suddenly that it took everyone a second to understand what they had just seen. The tree came down, Joe moved out of the way, and thankfully nobody was hurt. It was strange, a little eerie, and definitely one of those moments nobody on the trip is going to forget.
Later, as the sun went down, we took headshots of the students around the castle. The light was golden, the city stretched out below us, and everyone looked slightly more rested than they actually were.
It was a strong first day. The group was still new, but it was beginning to feel like a group.
Our second day focused on Black Swans, unexpected events that completely change what comes after them.
The example at the centre of the day was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
The earthquake struck on All Saints’ Day and destroyed much of the city. Buildings collapsed, fires spread, and a tsunami followed. Thousands of people died.
The disaster also created a crisis of meaning.
Lisbon was a deeply religious city. Churches were full when the earthquake began. People were attending Mass, lighting candles, and observing a holy day.
Why would something like that happen?
Was it part of a larger plan? Was it punishment? Was it random? Was it simply the movement of tectonic plates, with no deeper meaning attached to it at all?
These questions led us into conversations about free will, fate, God, agency, cause and effect, and whether everything happens for a reason.
Human beings like reasons. When something happens, especially something painful, we want to understand why. We look back and try to connect the events into a story that makes sense.
Maybe there is a larger story. Maybe each moment is simply the result of everything that happened before it. Maybe we create meaning because living without it feels impossible.
We did not solve the problem of existence that morning, but we gave it a respectable attempt.
At the Carmo Convent, students stood inside a building that still carries the damage of the earthquake. The stone arches remain, but the roof is gone. You look up and see open sky.
The ruins make the history feel close. The earthquake is not just something that happened in a textbook. It is still visible in the centre of the city.
Lisbon rebuilt itself, but it did not erase every sign of what happened.
I think there is something important in that. Moving forward does not always mean pretending nothing broke.
After lunch, we visited the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos and completed our first cultural connection. Before the presentations, the teachers had picked up pastéis de nata from Pastéis de Belém and brought them with us.
The students explained the history and significance of the pastry near the monastery where it was first created. Once the presentations were finished, we tried them together.
They were warm, flaky, covered in cinnamon, and very easy to keep eating.
For educational purposes, obviously.
From there, we visited the Monument to the Discoveries and began discussing God, Gold, and Glory, three forces that helped drive European exploration.
The monument presents Portuguese explorers as great figures looking out toward the sea. People such as Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan helped connect different parts of the world and expand European knowledge of geography, trade, and navigation.
Their journeys also contributed to conquest, colonization, exploitation, slavery, and violence.
History becomes difficult when we want people to fit neatly into one category. Hero. Villain. Genius. Monster.
Usually, people are more complicated than the statues built for them.
In a nearby park, students wrote fictional journal entries from the perspectives of famous explorers. They had to combine historical facts with imagination, similar to the work we had been doing with historical fiction.
The students considered what these explorers may have feared, wanted, believed, or misunderstood as they travelled into places unknown to them.
Once the writing was finished, we played ultimate frisbee.
This had almost nothing to do with maritime exploration, but it was awesome.
The following day, we took the train to Sintra.
Our theme was disruptors and game changers.
We often celebrate people who change the world, but the word “disruptor” deserves more attention than we usually give it. To disrupt something is to break an existing order. That change may lead to progress, but it can also create consequences that nobody intended.
The people we later call geniuses are often considered strange, dangerous, or completely wrong while they are alive. They move through the dark for a while before everyone else decides to shine a light on them.
Religious figures such as Jesus and Muhammad are clear examples of people who changed the direction of history. Regardless of what someone personally believes, it is difficult to imagine the modern world without them.
Their lives and teachings shaped governments, laws, cultures, art, philosophy, conflict, and the daily lives of billions of people.
They entered history, and completly changed it’s shape.
In Sintra, the students presented case studies on three current conflicts: Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, and the United States and Iran.
They examined the history behind each situation, the interests of different groups, and the narratives used to explain the conflict.
It is easy to reduce a war or political crisis to a headline. It is much more difficult to understand the layers of history, fear, culture, power, economics, and identity underneath it.
The students worked through those complications and presented their research to the group. They were asked to consider not only what was happening, but how different people understood what was happening.
After the presentations, we began the hike to the Castelo dos Mouros.
Before the climb, the students were told that they would be writing raps about the experience. They chose a song they liked and used it as a template, changing the lyrics to create a parody about hiking the mountain.
The catch was that the rap had to be finished before we made it back down.
So the writing happened while we walked.
Students stopped along the trail to jot down lines, worked through rhymes during breaks, and tried to remember ideas while climbing stone paths, narrow stairs, steep hills, and loose rocks. It was difficult enough to make it up the mountain. They also had a deadline following them the whole way.
The castle sits high above Sintra, and we walked the whole way up.
There were several moments where I questioned whether the people who built the castle had ever heard of accessibility.
The hike was difficult, but the view from the top was worth it. The castle walls stretched across the mountain, and Sintra opened beneath us in every direction.
The students wrote about the climb, the fear, the exhaustion, the views, and the feeling that every staircase had somehow produced another staircase.
The assignment gave them a chance to turn a shared experience into something creative. It also gave everyone a reason to complain in rhyme.
We had dinner and made our way back to the station for the train to Lisbon.
Getting into the station was slightly confusing because there were no workers around to help, but Trek 3 made it onto the train without any major problems.
Trek 4 cut it considerably closer.
The train was scheduled to leave at 9:50. The final person from their group jumped on only a few seconds after 9:50, while everyone watched and wondered whether the doors were about to close.
They made it.
The train left.
Everybody breathed again.
Saturday was a free day.
Some students went to the beach. Some studied. Some explored Lisbon, did laundry, went shopping, or had a chance to slow down.
A trip like this moves quickly. Every day brings another place, another lesson, another assignment, and another group decision about where to eat.
Having a day with less structure gave everyone time to reset before our final day in the city.
On Sunday morning, we attended Mass at Lisbon Cathedral.
The cathedral has stood in the city for centuries. People have worshipped there through earthquakes, wars, political change, and generations of ordinary life.
Being inside that space brought us into conversations about religion, symbolism, metaphor, and sacrifice.
In Christianity, God becomes human through Jesus and enters directly into the suffering of the world. Jesus lives without sin and is killed through one of the most humiliating and painful forms of ex*****on available at the time.
He becomes the Lamb of God, the ultimate sacrifice offered for the salvation of humanity.
A person does not have to believe the story to understand what the story is saying.
You have to give something to receive something.
Sacrifice appears in religion, but it also appears everywhere else. We give time to build relationships. We give effort to improve at something. We risk embarrassment when we perform. We give up comfort when we decide to grow.
There is no free lunch.
That idea connected back to where we began.
Money, religion, nations, and communities all depend on forms of belief. We agree that something has value, and then we act as though it does.
The question is whether our actions match what we claim to value.
Our final Morning Muse also focused on empathy and the way we move through places that belong to other people.
When we travel, it is easy to see a city as a collection of sites, restaurants, photographs, and experiences meant for us.
Lisbon is also home.
People live here. They work here. They worship here. They raise families here. They have somewhere to be while a large group of Canadian students stands in the middle of the sidewalk trying to count itself.
Empathy requires us to see beyond our own experience. It asks us to consider how we appear from another person’s perspective and to remember that we are not always at the centre of the story.
That evening, some of the students performed the raps they had written in Sintra.
It was a fitting way to finish our time in Lisbon.
At the beginning of the week, students were hesitant to perform skits. A few days later, they were standing in front of the group and sharing something they had created themselves.
They were funny. They were confident. They supported one another.
There was a real sense that we had accomplished something together.
Over our time in Lisbon, an idea became a Morning Note. A story became a skit. A historical figure became a journal entry. A mountain became a rap.
The students were learning about Lisbon, but they were also learning how to express themselves inside it.
Late that night, we packed our bags and prepared to leave for Barcelona.
Lisbon gave us monuments, ruins, castles, pastries, tired legs, good meals, difficult questions, and our first real memories together as Trek 3.
We arrived with an itinerary and a lot of people who barely knew one another.
We left looking a little more like a community.
Not a bad way to begin.
