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.
