For our long weekend in January Ben and I decided to go to Lisbon. We flew out Friday morning at 10am and landed 10:20am local time. It was nice to gain an hour. After we landed we caught the metro to where our pensão was. It took us about 30 minutes and three different maps to find it! Turns out we walked by the side street about half a dozen times before we realized it was the street we needed to turn down. We had about an hour to kill before check in so we wandered around the surrounding streets before finding a little café to sit down and eat.
That afternoon after checking in we went out exploring. We went first to Igreja São Roque. This church looks very plain on the outside but it houses the world´s most expensive chapel, Saint John the Baptist´s chapel. This chapel was constructed in Rome and is made of ivory, silver, gold and many other precious expensive materials. One of the doors into the chapel is made of solid gold! Also, instead of paintings, they used mosiacs. It is hard to tell because the tiles are so small and tightly fit together! After visiting this igreja we wandered down to the water front, Rio Tejo and the Praça (plaza) do Comercio. While we were in Praça do Comercio, some English guys came up and asked if we could take their picture. Then they each wanted pictures with us. They were funny. They asked where we were from and when we said the States they got very excited! Then they told us they thought we were German or "foreign", which confused me because we are foreigners. Next we were headed to Castelo São Jorge. On the way we saw Sé Catedral. By the time we made it up to the castle it was closing in 30 minutes so we decided to come back another day. On the way back from the castle we somehow managed to pick up a homeless guy. We tried to ignore him but he was chattering away at Ben in German! After about 5+ minutes he realized we didn´t speak German so he switched to English. I thought he was going to follow us all the way back to our pensão but eventually he just walked off.
When we got back to the hotel Ben looked up a good place to eat. He found a yummy sounding African restaurant so we headed out! It took us about 20 minutes to get there and when we did it looked like the restauarant had been closed for at least two or three years. There was no sign and even the street number had been torn off the building. We were bummed because it sounded good but also because we were starving! We started to wander back in the direction of our pensão when Ben thought he saw some chickens roasting on a rotissoire. We decided to go in and check it out.
The food was amazing!! While there I think we managed to break any and all social norms for eating out in Portugal. For starters, when the waiter gave me my Coke, he said something that I didn´t quite catch. I realized later he was telling me there was a glass on the table for me to use to pour my drink in. You NEVER see people here drink soda out of a can!! Next, half way through the meal we realized we were eating off the serving platters and that the white plate in front was not for the bread but so that you could take small bits of your meal at a time and put it on the tiny plate in front of you. Oh well. Ben had ordered the fish and I had ordered the chicken. We recieved huge quantities of food! Ben got the entire fish, skin, eyeballs and all with a big plate of veggies and rice and I got half a roasted chicken with a big plate of fries and rice. Along with that we had two beers and a coke and the bill only came to 17€! (Roughly $22) We had found quite the deal.
After dinner we headed home to rest up for the next day. We were planning on seeing a lot!
As we were walking around, we were surprised at how run down everything was. A lot of the older buildings have never been restored and lie in ruins through out the city. There was a huge tsunami and earthquake in 1755 and many of the builidngs were never properly restored. Also, everyone we talked to spoke very good English! We had a little phrase book with us so I tried to use some poruguese but when ever I did people just looked at me very confused. I realize my pronunciation might have been a little off but I don´t think it was that terrible. In the end it was just easier to use English. I was able to understand the gist of most of the signs and plaques because portuguese is similar to Spanish. Even Ben picked out a few things!
We didn´t leave much food in our fridge before leaving.
Our hotel room.
The hair dryer.
View from our room of Praça da Figuiera.
Praça do Rossio
It was a steep climb to Igreja São Roque.
This is inlaid alabaster. So amazing!
These are actual bones from old saints! There were so many of them!
One of the arm bones.
The women saint´s bones.
This case had some skulls in it.
Saint John the Baptist´s chapel:
The solid gold door.
This mosiac is on the floor of the chapel.
Praça do Comercio:
Rio Tejo
Sé Catedral
This stamp was printed everywhere! At first I thought it meant pedestrian crossing but upon closer inspection I realized it was a warning to watch out for pick pocketers.
Some little plaza near out pensão.
Grilled sea bass for dinner. Yum!
The elevator, Santa Justa, to see above the buildings and get a great view of the city.
View from our room at night.
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