Our Lovely Adventure: Lisboa: Sao Jorge Castle and City Tour

The kids slept until 11 this morning, then we rousted them to go to the Castle of Sao Jorge. D found a little bakery around the corner and picked up some bagels with eggs from a kind man from Angola. Lisbon is a vibrant and busy city with many immigrants from all over the world, reflecting its colonial past. After eating our brekkie in the garden of the Guest House, we set off to explore the castle. It was fun to climb to the top and explore all the little hidden corners.

Yummy mango ice cream and G being a goof!

Our time was short to explore the city, so we decided to take one of the TukTuk tours of the city. We saw the old Alfama district with its tiny, snaky streets, beautiful doors and tiles, and cobble streets. We rode passed the beautiful Plaza of Commerce which was once the royal residence but is now a mix of governmental and retail spaces. At the top of Barrio Alto we got a gorgeous view of the Castle, the Teju River, the Cristo Rei statue (reminiscent of the one in Rio de Janeiro), the “golden gate bridge,” and Lisbon spread before us. The city was rebuilt from ashes and rubble after the devastating 1755 earthquake, tsunami, and fire. When people were rebuilding, they looked around for materials and found ones readily available in the Sao Jorge castle rubble, so many buildings contain stones from it, and there are signs of this everywhere.

Some of the districts are very grid-like with buildings that look like the military barracks of the time; this is because the rebuilding was planned by a man who had been a military commander. They are still beautiful and Lisbon is a beautiful and colorful city. We finished our tour with a peek onto “Pink Street” which is literally painted pink. This is a short street closed to traffic and packed with restaurants and clubs, filled with tables and chairs and people enjoying a drink and a meal. Lisbon is a busy city with tons of tourism. It is so picturesque with buildings of many colors and with colorful tiles reflecting its Moorish history, gorgeous mosaics on the ground in many places, lots of hills, a museum for everything, lots of buskers, tuk tuks, busses, taxis, trolleys, and funiculars crowding the streets. But amidst the chaos I saw lots of people looking out for each other, many times letting another ahead into the traffic to be polite with a smile and wave. Our TukTuk driver told us that it has gone from a city of 1.5 million to 3.5 million in just a few years. This means that housing costs have increased exponentially while salaries have not increased, so people are really struggling to live here. The owner of the guest house said much the same, and that many immigrants live on the edge of the city in substandard housing. This seems like a difficult situation and the general impression we got from people we spoke with was that the government is not doing much to relieve this issue. Tomorrow we have tickets for the Pena Palace (the colorful one) and the Moorish castle in Sinstra.