Day 6

Thursday, August 2

9:00am GMT - woke up a little while ago, slept pretty well considering the hardness of the bed. I must've turned the a/c too low because it was freezing. Oops! Found the hotel's wireless, even though it's kinda weak. It will do the job for a few days. We made it down to breakfast shortly before 10am. The breakfast room was bright and lively, with lots of the portuguese tiles. Really cute little room in fact. The breakfast however, not so cute. The coffee was fine but the OJ was bizarro. The food consisted of a couple cereals, nice crusty fresh portuguese rolls and butter, and a couple of weird-looking meats and cheeses. They also had tea and yogurt. Anyway I didn't imagine it would be an earth-shattering breakfast, and alas, it wasn't. lol.

10:30ish GMT - making our way out into the town to do a walking tour of a couple neighborhoods, I asked the guy at the hotel front desk how to get to the Elevador Gloria to get to the Barrio Alto neighborhood… well, it's closed. So we got a bit lost and finally found where it would have been and decided to walk up the hill anyway. NEVER AGAIN I SAY. Anyway we made it to the top only to find the first stop on the tour - a park with great views of the city below - CLOSED. :( But then we followed the tour through the Barrio Alto to the Sao Roque church (see photos - amazing stuff inside), into some shops and just really exploring the streets and Lisboan life. Happily the tour was almost all downhill from there. We made it down to another neighborhood, the Chiado, and found the main drag - the Rua Garrett. Lots of shops and cafes, with a vast square at one end and a shopping mall at the other. We went into the mall and checked out Portuguese mall stores and after walking around had some lunch in the food court. See the pictures for the great views of the castle from the food court and the BATHROOM. HAHA! Great stuff :p

3:00ish pm GMT - We decided to keep walking down towards the River Tejo and through the Baixa district - at the top of which is where our hotel is. It was hot - probably well over 30C (90+F), but the main street through the Baixa from the water up to near where we are staying is the Rua Augusta, which is pedestrian only and full of shade. Hooray!! We meandered, looked at restaurant menus, window-shopped, and made our way back to the hotel around 4pm for a rest. I took a shower and we just relaxed a bit til going out again.

5:45pm GMT - went out to find dinner. On our way back to the hotel, we discovered why the street our hotel is on is called the "eating alley" - we hadn't yet seen the entire thing and it really is filled with restaurants with patios, all of which have men outside who speak many languages trying to lure you into their establishments. So when we set out to pick one of these places to eat, we knew we had to be careful LOL. We were even given a few business cards, some were quite nice and just explained their menus and asked us where we were from, etc. And others were bizarre and down right pushy. I'm like, why would I want to eat at your establishment if you need to be a jerk to get me in the door? We walked down some of the streets in the Baixa that run parallel to the Rua Augusta we had walked earlier, looked in some shop windows, etc. Didn't really find a whole lot interesting, but we looked at some more menus.

We tried a local drink from a little counter selling the shots in plastic cups - it's apparently made from sour cherries, so I thought it might be good. It is called Ginjinha, and it is disgusting. Sorry, I can't really say much more than that. But it's not sour and it doesn't taste like cherries. And that's all I have to say.

6:45pm GMT - after continuing to wade through pushy waiters, one of which was particularly annoying, telling us something about Mr. Bean and practically shoving us into a table, we decided to go back to one of the places further down, closer to the river and a bit away from the real deluge of restaurants all with similar menus. We decided on one called Restaurante-Grill Vossamerce. The waiter outside remembered us, but was not pushy at all. I had grilled t-bone, which came with, what else, fries and rice, and also some lettuce and really delicious tomato. The steak was a little thin but really tasty and tender. I was stuffed. Yum.

8:45pm GMT - after sitting and chatting for a while we finally asked for the check and wandered back to the area around our hotel. We were looking for some kind of desserty thing, but it seems like most of the pastelerias are closed by the evening - I guess they don't have pastries for after-dinner dessert. We'll have to try one for a mid-afternoon snack or something I guess. Off to the side of the main square by our hotel we found a little gelado shop open til midnight so we got some and it was quite tasty.

10:30pm GMT - came back to the hotel to take a load off and do some laundry. Gee, so fun. The connection seems to be too weak to try to put up my pictures, so I'll have to try taking the laptop downstairs sometime tomorrow to get them up because there are some really nice ones :)