Exploring Lisbon

Below is a late post about Lisbon. I needed to recover a bit from our long journey to get here. 

After a delayed flight, missed connection, canceled new connection and then rescheduled connection that include a stopover in Porto, we arrived very late to a rainy night in Lisbon. That sentence was too long, wasn't it?

Our hotel, the Vintage Lisboa, was in a great area and was charming. After crashing and catching up on some sleep, we got up full of energy and ready for our one day exploration of Lisbon. 

The forecast that we had been checking daily for a week before we got here stated rain every day. It actually rained very little and we were able to enjoy the top seating during our hop on hop off bus tours. In addition to the bus, we rode one of the very old and very cool trams around the hills and narrow cobblestone streets in the old part of the city. Well, I guess it's not that old compared to other European cities. Apparently, there was a devastating earthquake and tsunami back in the 1700s and they needed to rebuild the city after the damage these caused. The tsunami even damaged the Spanish Arch in Ireland and the town of Cornwall (Doc Martin) in England. 

I found the Portugese people to be very polite and a bit reserved. Portugese is such an unusual sounding language to me. It reminds me of a combination of Spanish, French, and some kind of Eastern European language. Lots of shhhh sounds. 

In addition to touring around, we were able to sit outside for a nice lunch so Mark got some good gawking time in. At one point it looked like his head was on a swivel. 

One of my favorite parts of the day was walking around an area in the hills surrounding Sao Jorge's Castle. The narrow winding streets with tile houses that had clothes hanging out the windows to dry were nice to explore. Some streets had a lovely view of the Tagus River over the red tiled rooftops. 

Dinner was at the Floresta, a charming neighborhood family owned place near our hotel. I had the best and freshest salmon I have ever tasted and Mark had the mystery meat. He ordered chicken and bacon skewers but something else arrived. He ate it but couldn't identify it. We later learned that the waiter accidentally switched plates with the table next to us and what Mark had was veal. Hey, we got a nice glass of Port because of the mistake so no problem. We had a glass of their house wine also for 3 Euros each and it was pretty good. 

We are at the airport now waiting for our delayed flight to Barcelona. We both feel good about what we accomplished with our short time in Lisbon. It's a city that we did enjoy but don't feel that we would come back to. 

Ja