Our first adventure of the day was to the Lisbon Cathedral. The cathedral was built in 1150 and was rather simple inside. It did not have much of the detail and decoration of other cathedrals I have seen so far. I really liked the treasury though where they housed all of the golden and precious objects.
Just a short walk from the cathedral is Commerce Square. This square is the largest one in the city of Lisbon and is where the royal palace previously stood. The square is framed by large yellow buildings and an arch similar to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. In the middle there was a large monument with Greek gods and a man on horseback. There was someone dressed as a panda in the square and we kept trying to take photos of the massive panda without getting caught so we didn’t have to pay. Basically, we only succeeded at capturing the panda’s butt.
The walk along the waterfront led us to Time out Market. If it's one thing I love in Europe it is the markets! I have been to so many so far and I love the individual vendors selling a variety of foods. The portions are usually small too meaning you can try multiple different foods. Of course we had to start with our food adventure with pastel de natas. These ones were very good and comparable to the ones we had yesterday.
For lunch we munched on a few traditional Portuguese croquettes and bread that was topped with fish and onions. The bread seemed very similar to Italian bruschetta with a Portuguese flair.
We made a quick stop at the National Tile museum. The museum displays tons of the famous Portuguese azulejos which are the blue and white painted ceramic tiles. They are sold in nearly every tourist shop and antique shops that sell one from the 18th and 19th centuries as collectables. A fun fact about the azulejos is that they were actually imported from Seville in the 15th century. After visiting Seville, this makes a lot of sense as there are much more elaborate displays of the tiles there.
The Tile Museum was nothing great. It had a few nice displays of tile arrangements but was not too extensive. I liked the courtyard that was covered in the tiles but even that was pretty small. I think we saw more displays on tiles on the buildings on the streets of Lisbon than at the museum.
Everywhere we drive we keep seeing the signs for Saldanha and Alex shouts “Saldanha Saldanha Saldanha take picture”. So every Saldanha sign we see we have an obligatory picture of. We decided to finally trace where the Saldanha signs were leading to. There were many places called Saldanha but one of the big ones was the Saldanha Residence. I was picturing a massive palace or maybe hoping for one but the residence was actually a massive shopping mall. We didn’t really go into the shopping mall but sat in the food court for tea.
コメント