LISBON ANTIGUA

It was nice to get back to a full-blown hotel breakfast after our four days of sensible eating at the B&B, even if it was mostly cold items this morning.  Somebody forget to turn on the gas?  Loni kept watching a young couple and their two infant daughters, one of whom reminded us of grandbaby Isla.  The morning was on our own, as they shuffled the schedule to see if the Denver group might arrive in time for the Lisbon excursion.  We wandered around checking out restaurants for future use, then followed a lot of noise and human motion to the big (peacock haven) park that abutted our hotel.  Turns out it was a regional scouting jamboree with thousands of kids in their uniforms.

We had fun watching them troop about in their individual groups, then massing into a giant one.  We didn’t stick around for whatever ceremonies that were going on, and wandered further about the city and found this peaceful central plaza.

Note the carousel to the right.

Most of Cascais is really clean and picturesque, without being too ancient, as befits a town that depends on family tourism aimed at its very nice beaches.  Restaurants and shops were everywhere down pedestrian walkways.

We even found a B&B where we would have stayed in a heartbeat (if the price didn’t stop my heart first).  Actually, I just checked on-line and the prices aren’t hideous, about 120-155E for a double.  High, but it’s pretty fancy inside.

The beaches are what people come for, and Cascais doesn’t disappoint.  I found the mixture of ultramodern and castle-traditional architecture fascinating.

Looking the opposite direction from where I’m standing.

The ultramodern complex you can see in the middle of the first beach picture.  Europeans must love that overhanging box design, as we saw similar in Barcelona.

All this walking got us to the lunch-hunger point, but the restaurants down here by the beach seemed just a tad too touristy, so we opted instead for something more, ah, straightforward.

Well, at least we knew what we were getting, as they had picture menus!  Ah, butterfat.
On the way back to the hotel we decided to take in a little shopping.  Just as we got to that area, the skies opened up and we sought shelter.  An omen not to shop? 

If it was, Loni ignored it.  The above and below shots again demonstrate why I need to stop using the HDR (high dynamic range) function on this camera whenever there is any movement, either in the frame or by me.  Ghosts!

We of course were in search of cork items to buy, since that’s such a huge and unique industry in Portugal.  The handbag and hats are all cork.  Unfortunately, it’s also a very expensive medium.  We ended up getting some cork fans for our daughters-in-law which, while not cheap, at least were in the ballpark.  We later in the trip found out that Cascais is a bit more pricey than other venues.  C’est la vie.
Back to the hotel and we found the Denver group had arrived, been shown to their rooms, had one hour rest (after all-day-and-night flights), and were now assembled to join us for a bus tour of Lisbon.  All except one poor soul, who was taken by the paramedics to the local hospital for an undetermined problem.  The rest were as gung-ho as you can be after being up nearly two days straight.  We loaded into the tour coach and there were a few nodding heads as we pulled into the city of Belem, just to the west of Lisbon.

Here we toured the outside of the great Jeronimos Monestery (1500’s).  He was the first to translate the Bible into Latin.  My picture of the exterior is another HDR flop, so I copied this from the Jeronimos website.  Much nicer day!  (credit to Alvesgaspar)

At the right is the Manueline south portal, a side entrance to the Monestary.  It had a maze of carvings, centered by Santa Maria de Belem.

We didn’t get into the monastery.  What we did tour was the attached Church of Santa Maria, which was about as far from the soaring light and color of La Sagrada as you can get.  This was dark, close, and filled with icons and tombs.  The main aisle and the altar:

There are a lot of small chapels off to the sides, each featuring some statue.  Again, the pervading sense is one of gloom, not joy.  Still, beautiful.

The church holds the tomb of the great explorer Vasco de Gama.  Unfortunately, it’s behind a plexiglass shield which bounces reflections.  An almost identical one holds the remains of Luis de Camoes (d1570), billed as the “poet chronicler of the Age of Discoveries.”  I like the crouching lions supporting the casket.  De Gama’s tomb looks the same, except he’s wearing a helmet and the center design features a ship instead of a quill pen and paraphenalia.

This golden alcove was stunning in its opulence, but don’t ask me what the glass tomb at the bottom is all about.  Creepy.

In line with the general gloom of the place, the crucifix was stark and realistic.

Not far from the monastery, Francisco de Arruda constructed the famous Tower of Belém between 1514-1520, also known as the Tower of St Vincent, patron of the city of Lisbon.  It commemorated the expedition of Vasco da Gama and also served to defend the port of Lisbon.  It used to be on an island in the middle of the river, but following the big 1700’s earthquake and subsequent tsunami, it ended up on the bank of the Tagus River.

Within walking distance is the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, the monument to the 500th anniversary of the death of Henry the Navigator.  It was from Belem that Vasco da Gama embarked on his voyage from Portugal to India in 1497, and it was here too that Christopher Columbus anchored on his way back to Spain following his historic discovery of the Americas. 

The sculpture comprises more than 30 statues of people who played an important historical role in the discoveries, led of course by Henry the Navigator himself. The latter is shown standing on the bow of the ‘ship’ holding a model of a caravel.

Henry the Navigator is flanked by King Afonso V, who supported the colonisation of Africa, alongside Vasco da Gama, Pedro Alvares Cabral, the discoverer of Brazil, and Ferdinand Magellan, the first explorer to circumnavigate the globe.  In their wake come a series of explorers, writers, missionaries, a mathematician, a map maker and other key figures from the epoch. The only female to be depicted is Queen Felipa of Lancaster, Henry the Navigator’s mother, who is credited with being the brain of the discoveries.
One of the most confounding things we saw on this trip was the worm hole that connected Belem with San Francisco.  Way cool.

Yup, the bridge was built by the same designers that did the Golden Gate, hoping to capitalize on their expertise in building earthquake-resistant structures.  It’s quite a shock to see it here, halfway around the globe (well, not quite half).
On the way back to the coach, we passed over these world maps set into the pavement.  Not quite sure why the figure is blowing up a storm at California.

Done with Belem, we reboarded the bus and made the last few miles into Lisbon proper.  I have to say, at least along the routes we took, I wasn’t much impressed with Lisbon as a beautiful place.  This was, however, a whirlwind stop, so maybe we didn’t give it a fair shot.  The main purpose of going into downtown Lisbon was to take in a fado show at dinner.  Needing to kill a little time, the bus dropped us all off near a main square so we could walk around a bit and look at the shops. 
What I was after was something to eat!  It had been a long time since that ice-cream lunch, so a stop at a 180-year institution, the National Confectionary, was in order.  Great diet, huh?

Fortified with sugar and butter, we walked around the square.  The monument is to the 1640 independence from Spain.

The wavy tile surface of the plaza is a theme we saw repeated throughout Portugal.  It looks jazzy, but more than once I got a brief vertigo walking across it.  At the back (below) is the main Opera House.  See what I mean by those waves?

The main shopping walks were busy, and we just took a quick stroll up and down.

One of the city's weirdest landmarks is the Santa Justa Elevator, built at the turn of the 20th century by the Portugal-born French architect Raoul de Mesnier du Ponsard, an apprentice of Gustave Eiffel.  It connects the downtown (where we are) to Bairro Alto, the  highest points of the city.  There must be a walkway that we can’t see at the top.  Originally powered by steam, it is 45 meters (147ft) high, and is an example of post-Eiffel iron architecture. The top of the Neo-Gothic tower, reached via a spiral staircase, has a cafe with views of the city, or so we’re told.  Just looks weird.

Our 45 minutes up, we all assembled at the coach pick-up point and boarded for the trip to dinner.  Well, not all.  Seems we were missing two wives.  We waited, and waited, and stomachs started rumbling.  Finally, our guide said we had to press on.  One of the husbands said he’d stay and continue looking for the miscreants, and they’d cab it to the restaurant.  He got off, we pulled away, and a dozen voices almost immediately shouted “Stop!”  They had spotted the two nitwits just coming out of a store where they’d been shopping without any regard to the time.  The three boarded, with the women’s tee-hee attempts to make light of it getting met with silent glares from the hungry.  We could only get so far on the bus, then the group had to hoof it a number of blocks down small streets to our fado restaurant (on the right, before the line of cars).

Fado is a tradition dating to the early 1800’s of lament singing that grew out of workers singing for their own entertainment while on the job.  They sing about their lives, tragic love, destiny – just about anything loaded with emotion and melancholy.  Fado in Portuguese means destiny, fate.  There are two main varieties of fado, those of the cities of Lisbon and Coimbra. The Lisbon style is more well known.  According to tradition, to applaud fado in Lisbon you clap your hands, while in Coimbra one coughs as if clearing the throat.  Thank goodness we were in Lisbon!  Anyway, the performances were beautiful, and we all appreciated that we were seeing some of the top artists in the city.  I am rather pleased with the low-light performance of this camera.  At least it does something well.

The performance over, we trudged back to the bus (the Denverites weaving noticeably) and it was pretty quiet for the hour drive back to Cascais.  At the hotel, I closed the windows, turned on the AC, and drowned out the peacocks.  Mostly.  Zzzzzz.