We got to go to Lisbon because Jess was invited to present a workshop and a talk at the Lisbon UX conference. As a guest of the conference, I was welcome to join Jess for all the conference meals and events and on the days when Jess was busy with his workshop and talk, I was given free tours of Lisbon. I could definitely get used to joining Jess at conferences. He's a really good speaker and is starting to get invited to speak at more and more exotic locations.
This is at one of the dinners. It was a Brazilian steakhouse and the waiters kept coming around constantly with skewers of gigantic slabs of meat and carving slivers of meat onto your plate.
One of the days we were there, Jess didn't have to speak so we decided to visit the nearby town of Sintra. It was a 45-minute train ride.
This was the Oriente train station in Lisbon, just down the street from our hotel. Lisbon has amazing architecture, both modern and old. This train station seemed like a modern take on gothic cathedral ceilings.
One thing we noticed about Portugal is that there is graffiti everywhere. Except for historical buildings, it seemed like the first floor of every building had some sort of graffiti on it. These are some pictures from our train ride:
It was apparently the beginning of sardine season when we were there. I ate a lot of seafood in Portugal including octopus but I never did try any sardines.
The first thing we did in Sintra was take a bus up the hill from the town to a hilltop palace called Pena. It started out as a monastery built a thousand years ago and then in the 1800's, a German prince married into the Portuguese royal family, and he decided to change the monastery into a palace but quickly decided it wasn't big enough so he added on to it quite a bit. Today, the part that's painted red is the original monastery and everything else was added on by this prince. Then he turned the entire hillside all around the palace into his royal gardens. This palace is incredibly picturesque and charming. Everywhere you turn, there's something beautiful to look at. So this post is pretty heavy on pictures because we took so many!
We learned that Portugal is famous for a few things including tiles and pastries. Many buildings are still covered in patterned tiles both inside and out. And there were a lot of pastries in every restaurant. Of course we sampled quite a few! They all have an egg custard filling of some sort (in fact, almost everything you order in Portugal has eggs in it in some form or another - they really like eggs. And seafood).
Looking out from the palace, you can see the lush gardens all around and then beyond that, you can see the town of Sintra, and a few other towns spread out around, all with charming red tiled roofs, and then the ocean beyond that.
This series of photos made me laugh. Jess took pictures of me climbing down from a tower and as you can see, it was a bit breezy.
Much to Jess's delight, you were allowed to take pictures inside the palace as well. The Portuguese royal family only ended up living in this palace for a couple of generations (they were overthrown and Portugal became a republic in 1910). So, the inside has been preserved to show what it would have looked like in the late 1800s.
On one of the verandahs, there is this interesting sundial. The thing on the right is holding a magnifying glass at just such an angle that when the sun shines through it at noon, it heats up the little cannon at the base enough that it shoots off a small explosion to announce the time.
Along the way, there were all kinds of charming surprises like this statue of a warrior up on a rock, and a "Temple of the Columns", a little playhouse type of building tucked in among the trees.
The High Cross:
This is your view of the Palace from the hill of the High Cross.
After the gardens, we headed over to another nearby hilltop, which has a Moorish castle at its peak. This castle was originally built by the Moors in the 900's. When the German prince who built the Palace at Pena saw it, it was in ruins and he decided to restore it. So, it has been rebuilt but only partially because he liked the romantic Victorian idea of a castle in ruins. So the walls have been rebuilt but the vegetation that has grown up inside and all around was left. Apparently, he liked to sit on top of one of the Moorish castle towers and draw or paint. You have a good view of the Palace from the Moorish Castle - they are on neighbouring hilltops.
The Moors were pushed out of Portugal in the middle ages and so there are a lot of Christian influences here as well. This is an old chapel built around the 1200's or 1300's. The wooden floor and roof have long since disappeared so they were replaced with a very modern looking floor and roof and the juxtaposition is really beautiful. This is the inside of the chapel.
Just outside the chapel, on the path up to the Moorish castle, we passed a guy from Google maps doing a street view capture with that big blue ball-like camera on his back. Maybe we'll be on Google maps now!
This is the town of Sintra, spread out below the Moorish castle.
This is the view of the Pena palace from the Moorish castle.
Seriously, this is one of the most photogenic places I've ever seen, we could not stop taking pictures!
We finally had to leave so we went down to the town of Sintra to do some shopping and find someplace to eat. People in Portugal don't eat supper until at least 8:00. Most restaurants don't even open for supper until 7:30.
This town was so pretty, we liked wandering the small streets because even those were pretty!
Apparently Lord Byron visited Sintra in the early 1800's and raved to his friends that it was the most beautiful town on earth. He said: "Lo! Cintra's glorious Eden intervenes in variegated maze of mount and glen." And writing home, he described "palaces and gardens rising in the midst of rocks, cataracts and precipices; convents on stupendous heights."
We had a hard time deciding on which restaurant to eat at but finally decided on one with tables up on the roof under purple parasols.
It was like eating in a treehouse - this was the view behind our table:
And this was the view in front of our table:
Then we walked down the hill back to the train station and enjoyed the soft light of the sunset on the beautiful buildings and art all around.
The next day was rainy and Jess was speaking so I spent most of the day relaxing in our hotel room and shopping at the mall across the street. That evening, the conference organizers rented a big boat and we went on a boat ride up the coast. Then we got off and had supper at a Portuguese restaurant.
Lisbon has two landmarks that some people think were copied from other cities: this bridge looks just like the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco and this large statue of Christ looks an awful lot like the statue in Rio. It was put there at the end of WWII to thank God for sparing Portugal from the war.
Mmmm, octopus.
There is art everywhere in Portugal. All the subway stations have artwork made from painted tiles.
Once the conference was over, the conference organizer took the speakers and their spouses on a guided all-day tour of Lisbon. First he took us to some shops including an outdoor book market.
We ate lunch on the verandah of a hotel overlooking Lisbon. I can still taste the passionfruit mousse we had for dessert. This was the view from the restaurant:
We were driven all around the city and saw all kinds of interesting things.
The jacaranda trees were in bloom when we were there and it seemed like they were everywhere with their beautiful purple blossoms.
They took us to the town of Belem (Portuguese for Bethlehem) and showed us the Tower of Belem. This was a fortress used to monitor boat traffic in and out of Lisbon.
There is a very large, beautiful church in Belem called Santa Maria de Belem. And you were allowed to take pictures inside!
Vasco de Gama is buried here.
All of the sidewalks we saw in Portugal were paved with these square pearlescent stones. Usually they were white but sometimes there were black stones added in and all kinds of designs were made with the two colours. Sometimes the roads were even paved in these cobblestones. There are a lot of gaps around the cobblestones and I started to wonder how women managed to walk around if they had stiletto heels. I did actually see one woman in stilettos walking at a fairly brisk pace up a sidewalk WITH a toddler on her hip. I was very impressed.
We climbed up 8 flights of stairs to the top of the Discoveries Monument, a cement monument built in the 1960s to commemorate Portugal's explorers. We had a beautiful view of Lisbon from the top.
Here you can see all the Portuguese explorers carved along the side of the monument with Vasco de Gama at the front.
We stopped at an outdoor craft market but it was closing so we didn't have nearly enough time to explore it
Part of the tour included a ride on Tram 28. It took us up and down the narrow streets (so narrow that at one point you could literally reach out and ring the doorbells on the buildings). All the streetcars and hills were reminiscent of San Francisco.
There were a lot of buildings like this one that were covered in patterned tiles.
We were there a few days before Lisbon's biggest festival, Santo Antonio, and there were streamers and flags being hung up all over the place in preparation.
There was an old fortress at one end of the beach.
Jess bought a huge delicious round of cheese and a loaf of crusty bread and 2 kilos (!) of cherries and that was what we ate for lunch and supper. It was delicious. But we had a lot of leftover cherries.
This beach was really popular with surfers. There actually seemed to be a lot of surfing lessons going on while we were there.
While Jess was taking pictures, I read and napped and ate cheese and cherries. It was a fantastic way to spend the day.
Whenever I looked out at all the surf students, they always looked sort of like shark fins bobbing out in the waves.
This beach was gorgeous and I would have been happy to spend several more days here but our kids were missing us and Spencer and Hannah were probably even more anxious for us to come back so it was time to head home.
