Lisbon Day 1

 On Thursday morning, we woke up early, had breakfast and then got a taxi to the train station where we rode the train for a little less than 2 hours to Lisbon. The train was comfortable and easy enough. After arriving in Lisbon we took a taxi to our hotel. Our hotel is in another converted convent but this one is pretty new. We dropped our bags and went out for food in the neighborhood. We had pretty good pizza and pasta at an Italian restaurant. After settling into the hotel, we met our tour guide for the day Paula. Paula took us to several neighborhoods around Lisbon. Because Lisbon is SO hilly, we took cabs in a few places to go up hill but mostly walked downhill. We started with the church connected to our hotel. It had suffered a fire in the 1950’s and was pretty ornate before then but when they renovated, they decided to leave the damage to the church visible to honor the fire and also to acknowledge the pogrom that had happened there in the early16th century as part of the inquisition. It was interesting to see a church in that condition intentionally. 

From there we took a taxi to a neighborhood that has the Church of Saint Rogue, which is a Jesuit church. This church was lovely and more of what you’d expect. There was some really intricate mosaics that looked painted. We then went to the Praça do Comercio which is near the water and had a very large statue of King John I. We then got in another cab to go to the top of a hill where the original castle (Castle of Saint George) was. There is still some ruins there and an active dig site. The views of the city were great from there and there were several peacocks just hanging around. We then walked down through several neighborhoods that are preparing for the festival of St Anthony that happens in June. It seems like the city transforms to honor him. We walked back to our hotel and said goodbye to Paula. 

For dinner, we took the subway one stop up hill to a restaurant that’s called Mini Bar. It’s a speak easy style restaurant created by a very famous Portugués chef Jose Avillez. The food was very good and creative in a fun way. We had prawn ceviche, really good sourdough bread, Caesar salad. I had a pork katsu sandwich with sweet potato chips and mom had a steak. We decided to find gelato on the way home and we found an Italian style gelato that was really good. Great start to our time here.