Back to Lisbon

When making our plans to travel to the United States, we discovered that not only did TAP (the Portuguese airline) have the best flights/prices, it gave us the option to spend up to five nights in Portugal for no additional cost either going to or returning from the US. Since we have enjoyed Lisbon so much on our two previous visits, we decided to take this opportunity to spend a further three nights in the city.

As usual, Lisbon did not disappoint. First, even after having been in Lisbon before, there were still things we had not done, including the National Tile Museum. Although this didn't sound that interesting to me, Shana wanted to go, and it was a relatively small museum so... In the end, it was  quite enjoyable (if a bit poorly organized). It included a lot of traditional tiles, which can be seen all over Portugal, but also some more modern takes on the genre, which we both particularly enjoyed. 

On our walk back from the Tile Museum, we walked through the city's old Alfama district and got a great look at one of the city's old public trams, which still run in this part of the city.

We also learned something that we had not known about Portugal: bull fighting used to be popular there. We learned this on our way to dinner our first night in the city when we got off the Metro and saw a really cool building that we had to check out. It turns out that the building is the former bull ring that has been turned into a multi-use space with restaurants, shops, etc. Notice the very Moorish look of the building -- the Moors ruled Portugal as well as Spain.

The other cultural thing we did in Lisbon was attend an exhibition by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei who now lives in rural Portugal. The exhibit and his methods of using his art to make political statements were extremely interesting. His use of traditional Chinese Zodiac symbols in various forms including kites were very cool:

The carpet that is below the kites is even more interesting: it was made from an imprint of the tracks made by a tank on a dirt track southwest of Beijing and are intended to recall the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Even more interesting to me were the works relating to refugees, which included a number of documentaries, and two HUGE replicas of the boats used by refugees fleeing various countries in North Africa and the Middle East for Europe. One was made of the same cheap rubber material that the boats are made of, but Ai used that material to make both the boat, and the anonymous people on board (oh, by the way, the boat is over 300 feet long!). Kind of creepy:

Finally, no trip to Lisbon would be complete without a wine tasting with Adriana at our favorite place in the city, Lisbon Winery. Unfortunately, Adriana and her partner shut down their location early on in the pandemic to save from having to pay rent while being unable to open. Fortunately, although they have not identified a new location yet, they still do tastings at various restaurants around the city. Our tasting was in a downstairs room with one other couple, and included a tasting of three olive oils, lots of cheese and meat, and of course wine.

The other couple who joined us at the tasting were Canadian (so, of course, we liked them), but it turned out that he is not only a chef, but was the winner of Top Chef Canada 2019! In fact, he calls himself the Competition Chef as he won the last three cooking competitions he entered. Hopefully, we will get a chance to have him cook for us one day, although they live in a small town on Victoria Island, which is a four hour drive from Victoria! We will see.

As you can see, it was a full three days in Lisbon, but we felt it was a good reintroduction to Europe after more than three weeks in the US.

Hasta pronto,

Jeff and Shana