The Bahblog

We spent our Monday walking all over Lisbon and it was delightful. Our hostel is in the Baixa, or downtown, district. It's also quickly become the touristy district, so it was nice to escape it for a bit. We started our day by going back to the Alfama district, where we had been the night before for our fado show. This was once the sailors' district of Lisbon but it was actually established during the Moorish period. It has the characteristic Moorish tangled street plan which makes for fun exploring.

The Sao Jorge castle is the highest point in town. We took an elevator and hiked up many stairs to get there.

The line to actually get into the castle was long (and apparently the inside has been rebuilt and isn't that grand) so we opted to instead explore the town within the castle walls.

The town was built to give Moorish elites refuge from sieges. Most of the houses are from the Middle Ages and the doors are characteristically short. Even I felt tall!

After leaving the castle town we stopped at a viewpoint to admire Lisbon in all of its glory. It reminds me quite a bit of San Francisco with all of the hills and the large, red bridge.

From there, we walked all around the Alfama district. The district wasn't destroyed during the 1755 earthquake and it has an old-world undiscovered charm aspect to it. We learned that few homes here have their own laundry and bathroom, so there is a public laundry and bathroom in every neighborhood. Fun fact - my senior year of college I lived on the sixth floor of an old tenement building in the lower east side. There was obviously no elevator, but the apartments on the fifth floor didn't even have bathrooms. There was one bathroom that everyone on the fifth floor used.

Back to Lisbon. As we were leaving the Alfama district I ducked into the Casa dos Bicos. The two books I read for Portugal were The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and Skylight, both written by Jose Saramago. I recommend them both, but especially Skylight. Saramago is the only Portuguese author to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. The Casa dos Bicos is a museum dedicated to him and his ashes sit underneath an olive tree in front. It was a lovely museum and I recommend it if you've read any of his books.

We had a delicious lunch at Cruzes Credo that included a salad, chorizo, cod, and Lisbon brewed craft beer (for Nate).

Full from lunch, we set off to explor the Bairro Alto and Chiado districts. Bairro Alto sits above Baixa and we took a funicular to get there.

Nate referred to the funicular as the "Graffiti Tour", and we even saw a tagger in the act.

We got off and there was another lovely view of Lisbon right in front of us.

We walked all around the streets of the Bairro Alto and ducked into the Sao Roque Church. The painted wood, false-domed ceiling is a real optical illusion.

We also stopped in a music store selling traditional Portuguese guitars.

We explored a bit more and took in the views from the top of the Elevador de Santa Justa before walking down the Rua Garrett shopping street.

Needing some fuel from all of this walking, we went to Manteigaria and got pastel de nata. It was delicious and had more of a cinnamon and honey taste than the ones in Belem.

Fueled by sugar, we hopped on a trolley and took it to Praca do Comercio (we actually overshot our destination - turns out you need to press the red button when you want to get off the trolley or the driver doesn't stop).

Once there, we went to Wines of Portugal tasting room. Wines of Portugal is actually a non-profit and they have a self-serve tasting room. We served ourselves a variety of reds and whites (including vino verde - a Portuguese specialty) before tasting Moscatel and Port. All of the wines are from Portugal. It was fun, but some explanations would have been helpful.

We finished the day with another lovely dinner at O Marques. I tried grilled pork, Nate had steak with egg, and we had rice pudding and biscuit cake for dessert. It was all wonderful and this is definitely our favorite restaurant in Lisbon.