Lisbon – summary (Portugal)
Lisbon has a beautiful old city with a lot of charm, from the many tiled buildings, and the beautiful ironwork balconies, to the sidewalks with patterns in black and white stones (sometimes the roads too). Some stores and locations have their names or symbols in the sidewalk. It is, however, a bit of a challenge to navigate, with many roads going one way and most roads not being continuous for more than a few blocks at a time, with lots of strange angles and multi-street intersections the result. Google Maps is your friend.
It has a robust transportation system, including trains, light rail, buses, and trams, but without Google Maps guiding my routes, I would have been completely lost. The walking paths on Google seem to default to the shortest, not the most reasonable, so you may find yourself going down a steep hill, then up the other side again, when you could have just gone around (although sometimes that’s not an option), but it’s really hard to tell from the maps what your path should be, or what you definitely don’t want to do.
I found myself doing, according to my Fitbit, somewhere in the area of 60 to 90 flights of stairs a day, as well as walking 7 to 10 miles each day. This town is not for the weak of calf. I took buses, trains, and Ubers depending on the speed and difficulty of the trip (3 transfers, here I come Uber). The buses are a bit interesting as, as far as I could see, there is no indication of what the next stop is. It’s very easy to indicate you want a stop, but you seem to just have to know where you are, and when you need to get off (thanks Google Maps).
There is lots of graffiti and tons of papered up signs, but it almost is orderly, with each person in one area I saw taking 2 panels of the wall for their artwork and then the next artwork takes 2 panels too, on down the line. There is lots of street art as well as the graffiti.
In 3 days, I covered:
- Parque Das Naceos and the giant recycled cat
- Oceanarium – with penguins (my video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FXPZMAX9fk ) , otters, a sunfish (which I only just recently learned about), pipefish (https://youtu.be/uM5ZnsxdJgE), mesmerizing cuttlefish, sea-dragons (https://youtu.be/0AEhqa8ViIY) and a well-hidden octopus , and a close-up of a starfish (my video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx01cFkWpFo )
- Carmo Convent – a church’s beautiful bones on display
- Pharmacy Museum – interesting – particularly the 3 pharmacies they moved there completely (one is Chinese)
- Praca do Comercio
- Lisbon Cathedral and Treasury (the cloisters was sadly closed for renovations)
- Castelo de S Jorge – Stairs galore with views of the city
- Santa Justa Lift – the wait appeared to be an hour to ride it, so I just walked up the hill
- Basilica De Estrella with its 500 piece nativity set
- Museum of Antique Art – lots and lots of all kinds of old things
- Belem Tower
- Monument to Discoverers
- Jeronimos Monastery and the Antiquities Museum there (watch out for Anubis)
- National Coach Museum – Royal coaches back hundreds of years and an assortment of litters and other carriages
- Pasteis de Belem – Pastel de Natas are good everywhere I tried them, but these really were towards the top
- And ate a fair amount of gelato (marshmallow, mint, salted caramel, Nutella, . . .)
Just outside of town, in Sintra, in one day I saw
- Sintra Palace – I loved the room that was painted to look like wood and then had pinecones on the ceiling, so much more though
- Pena Palace – Cinderella would fit in fine here
- Quinta da Regaliera – I took a trip to hell and dropped my map in a lagoon
- Castelo dos Mouros – have I mentioned stairs, here’s a whole bunch
I’ll write more about each of these in the coming days but wanted to at least put up a first look at the Lisbon area of Portugal.
