2024 Portugal

Our curiosity and spirit of discovery continued today and if we focus on the nearby area of ​​Alfama yesterday, today we wandered a little further towards Lisbon’s historic center Baixa de Lissabon and Chiado. The neighborhood looks pretty much the same with a lot of old, a little new, but most of it was pretty fresh and nice even though there was a lot of graffiti everywhere, which in itself feels like it is all over the country. I don’t know if they paint like crazy here or if they’re just worse at washing it off, but if there’s a free space, they paint it. I don’t mind and since there are a lot of throwups and more paintings instead of just bombing their tag, I think it can be a bit fun to see.

The areas we walked around today were a bit more up-to-date than where we live and we found one or two clean shopping streets with everything from Gucci to Rolex stores, nothing was bought in any of those stores but we did have lunch at McDonald’s. Now we may not have chosen McDonald’s because of the culinary delights served there but because it is convenient with a changing room and heating baby food but anyway, we came in, we ordered our food at the self-service kiosk and boom, an employee was right there and took our receipt to make sure we would get our food right away. Apparently, it is a law that pregnant women, people with small children like us, pensioners and probably more have the right to priority and we passed probably 30 other customers who were waiting for their food. The same goes for grocery stores, they have a separate checkout for us with toddlers and we are actually let forward in line to avoid queuing, fantastic and even though our son is certainly behaving himself, I can imagine that it is nice for everyone to avoid screaming toddlers 😉

This, combined with the fact that the people here are extremely child-friendly, everyone does their utmost to help and hopefully get to spend some time with the child, means that I have to say that Portugal is the #1 country to travel to with small children.

As I said, the weather hasn’t been great here the last few days and today we got enough even though it started to clear up. Instead of walking up and down the streets in torrential rain, we decided to visit Lisbon’s aquarium, or oceanarium as it is apparently called. Depending on the source you read, it is one of the largest in Europe and combined with the entrance ticket there, you can also buy tickets for the cable car that was built for the World Expo in 1998.

The cable car itself runs along the shoreline over what was the exhibition area, today it is a nice promenade with various bars and restaurants and if the weather is nice I think you get a really good view. However, they cannot be compared to the cable cars in La Paz and El Alto which are actually used to transport people around the city but as part of the visit I still think they were worth it.

The oceanarium itself was large and really well built, it felt like all the aquariums were connected and that there was only one, gigantic one, but I suppose they are different so that the sharks don’t eat the otters for example. They could have had a little more information about the different fish and animals as the ones I saw were only occasional and fairly brief pictures that described a few, hiring your own private guide was possible but felt a bit overkill, I’m not that interested.

The weather continues to play tricks on us and last night’s thunderstorm was something out of the ordinary. The entire apartment was lit up by lightning, the windows rattled and the house shook. We woke up to a much calmer day but traces of the storm were visible in the form of gigantic puddles. However, that didn’t stop us, armed with a good mood and an umbrella (for three people) we set out to visit a city park and possibly do some shopping.

The park we were aiming for is Park Eduardo VII which is located in the middle of central Lisbon and is named after an English king. It’s a bit strange to name one of the larger parks in the capital after a foreign king, but what can you do to promote relations between countries? The park is big, really big and contains both a botanical garden, statues and fountains, which I think meets what can be required, a bit of fun is that it is built on a hill, which means you get a fantastic view of the park and the center of Lisbon. Now in January, the park itself didn’t shine in its full glory, but I can imagine what a green oasis this is in the summer.

The shopping went so well, we trotted over to a shopping mall that was adjacent to the park and thought that this would be perfect. The first store I saw when we entered the mall was Rolex, next door to Armani and Prada and so on. Seven floors of design and designer clothing, the top floor of which contained a food court with gourmet food. The fact that I was allowed in at all is a bit of a miracle and even though they were very nice, it was a couple of levels above my budget.

Instead, we headed for lunch at a small, local restaurant that wasn’t even featured on Google Maps. The menu was amazingly translated directly by Google Translate (or maybe more Bing Translate) because nothing seemed right or what they say “look in the oven” as a meat dish. Regardless of the menu, we sat down and received some of the best service during the entire trip. The waiter explained as best he could what the different dishes actually were and he looked just as confused by the menu as we were, the entire staff which turned out to be a family with a grandfather who was driving around trying to charm the little one, chatted with us a bit and to showcase a classic Portuguese dish they offered grilled sardines and some kind of porridge made from bread. That particular one may not have been the tastiest I’ve ever eaten but it’s experiences like this that make me love traveling.