Lisbon, 22.12.2024: Pricey Azulejos and Bright Peacocks

Avenida de Liberdade, December morning sunshine

A lazy Sunday with warm December sunshine in Lisbon. We began it with breakfast at the hotel’s breakfast room, since we couldn’t find a way to buy coffee to go with the cheese, bread, sausage, and fruit we have in the room. The little place we’ve gone to two days now for breakfast, Docelândia, is closed on Sunday. A restaurant right next to Hotel Florida told us yesterday they’d sell us take-out coffee, but they open only at 10:30 A.M., and we were up well before that and wanting coffee. A few steps away is a McDonald’s. Steve walked there to see if he could get coffee and found they offer only espresso. So the Hotel Florida breakfast room it was….

Lisbon, 20.12.2024: Black Cats and Closed Churches

So yesterday on the 19th, after breakfast we figured out how to take the subway to the Gulbenkian Museum, and spent several hours there before lunch. Following the directions in Steves’ guidebook proved a bit more complicated than we had anticipated, and as we exited the subway (blue line) at the São Sebastião stop and tried to spot the El Corte Inglés store that’s supposed to be at your back as you walk down Avenida de Aguiar, it proved difficult to find. As we were pondering that matter, a couple, French I thought, came up with their guidebooks and asked if we knew how to find a certain street. Turned out that when we finally got to the Gulbenkian, they were there, so they, too, were trying to follow evasive directions to the evasive entrance to the museum. (Video above: an accordion player on the blue line of the Metro to Bairro Alto, 20.12.2024.)