Day Fortyone - Jul 1, 2012
Lisbon, Portugal
Daily Didactic
For our last day in Lisbon we did a little traditional touristing. We started the day by heading to Belem, a parish/neighborhood in West Lisbon and a quick train ride. Belem holds an interesting fort on the water protecting the mouth of Lisbon Bay (Tagus Estuary), a famous monastery and cloister, and reportedly the best pastries in the world. We started on the waterfront and walked until we found the Belem Tower. It was relatively small and pretty interesting. The funnest part for Brian was going up the single person corkscrew staircase to the open top floor. It was fun in spite of the fact that there were two lanes of traffic, one going up and one down, and not nearly enough room for everyone. Theresa felt this made the stairs less fun than the view was worth. After exploring the fort, we moved on to Jerominos Monastery Cloister. This is a pretty big deal and Theresa took more photos of relief carvings than you can imagine. Only one of them made today's pictures. From the cloister we walked up the street to the renowned Pasteis De Belem, home of the best pastry in the world, if you buy into that idea. Theresa does. Even Brian would accept that this was some pretty tasty dough with creme. After eating two "cakes" and saving four, we hit the metro back to Casa Do Sodre and then timidly tried "the best chicken in Lisbon" again. Open and serving and amazing, mostly due to tender and juicy cooking and a really great garlic sauce. Before packing for tomorrow's flight to Berlin, we caught the metro uptown for some reported live Jazz in the park. Started at 5:00, but at 8:00 we called it a no show. We, along with most of the audience enjoyed the very capable DJ filling space. We returned to our room, packed for the morning and hit the hay.
Today's Photos
