We Awoke In A Different World!

After meeting at the Lisbon airport last night and making our way to our hotel, we slept well and woke at 8 in a different world. Breakfast was made up of rolls, cheese, meats, yogurt, fruit, juice and endless coffee!

After breakfast we set out to explore the hilly city of Lisbon which has a very compact historic center made up of three different neighborhoods. Each one is easily walkable, and they’re connected by various forms of public transportation including trolleys, buses and funiculars, all of which we rode.

We spent the morning in Baixa on a self-guided walking tour, with a stop in a great urban park where we had our first outdoor cafe au lait.  We returned downtown to explore and had lunch at a sidewalk cafe, eating something like a pork culet with salad and fries,  accompanied by a beer for Cathryn and wine for Bob (not an option during the 2 1/2 weeks in Morocco).

The afternoon was spent exploring Alfama, a neighborhood on a different hill and including the Castle of St. George, originally constructed in the 1100s by the Moors and rebuilt in the 1500s by the Portuguese. We sat at yet another sidewalk cafe on a catwalk overlooking the Tejo River which pours into the Atlantic Ocean, sipping a beer and listening to a street band play nice music. Ah, Europe!

One conversation we have every place we travel is whether we could imagine living in the place if we were to leave the U.S. long term (which we won’t do, but still it’s fun to discuss). With only 24 hours under our belt, Lisbon strikes us as a place we could happily live, and we think it’s under-rated as a European destination.

 

Situated on the water with lots of hills, trees, 250 year old buildings (most of old Lisbon was destroyed in a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami in the mid-1700s), it’s less expensive than France, Italy or Switzerland, almost everyone speaks some English or Spanish, and the road and hotel signage and menus are easy to interpret as the language is Latin-based. Traffic and driving are no big deal (though navigation is tricky as the streets are not on a grid and have many one-way roads and pedestrian streets closed to autos).  The weather is perfect at the moment – sunny and in the 70s – not bad for October!