Lisbon, Portugal

June 11, 2019

What can I say about Lisbon?? It is one of our favorite cities in the world. In fact, we could easily live here. While Portuguese is the official language, most people speak English and they are very gracious people.

The city is spread over seven hills north of the Tagus River estuary and in many ways it reminds you of San Francisco. Even the bridge.

Here are some pictures of our arrival. We arrived at 1 PM on Tuesday and will be in until 5 PM Wednesday – plenty of time to enjoy this beautiful city.

Many of the buildings are covered with beautiful tiles, this is typical of many Portuguese homes.

We were planning to have lunch with Ray and the entertainment team so set out to walk to the Time Out which is a market in which more than half has been made into a kind of gourmet food court. Beautiful weather and lots of sights to see along the way – we walked along the water.

Time Out is a very unique concept and one that is coming to other cities around the world including Boston and New York. High end chefs have booths that have smaller versions of the meals they offer in their restaurants.

I guess we thought it was good!

Time Out is in what is called the Baixa (Lower Town) and we decided to head to the Bairro Alto (Upper Town). There is a big elevator which we used last time, but this time we climbed the stairs. By the end of the day our fitness trackers said we had climbed 36 flights!

There are also trolleys that operate in the city and two that can take you up and down between upper and lower towns.

Our destination was the botanical garden. This turned out to be quite a serene place with mostly different kinds of trees including some giant redwoods. There were some beautiful hydrangeas too. Some very bizarre sculptures which looked like they were just made of junk were found throughout the gardens.

We found delicious ice cream at this place.

Here are some of the other sights including the tiled buildings.

Not sure I am signing up for the Blood wine. But I guess they like the fried chicken! Me taking the picture!

There is a festival going on and we walked through the music and the booths on our way back to the ship.

Lots of sangria and grilled sardines.

Speaking of sardines, there was a whole store featuring sardines in cans depicting years. Not the year they caught and canned the sardines, but perhaps your birth year or other significant year in your life. This is not how I would choose to memorialize my birth year. First of all, I don’t like sardines, but it really seemed kind of weird. Wonder how much of a market there is for these? Fun shop though.