We arrived in Lisbon by train from Porto and that part of the journey was very easy. The tricky part was getting from the train station to our Airbnb. I discovered that Uber was the fastest and easiest method of transport. This was our first Uber experience and it worked pretty well (the competition is pretty fierce so drivers want to please). Our Airbnb host was an elderly lady who lived in the apartment next door. She was by far the most talkative and informative host we’ve had! We were grateful for the lunch she left for us because we were very hungry at that point.

Our first destination was the Belém district. We needed to pick up our Lisboa cards at a kiosk there, which was not so easy to find and we quickly discovered that Lisbon is pretty spread out and not all that walkable. We finally found the cards and made good use of them for free bus fare for the rest of our stay. After seeing the sights in Belém (Belém Tower, Jerónimos Monastery and Padrão dos Descobrimentos), we headed to a lookout point closer to the city center to watch the sunset. Well, we missed the sunset and there was a big crowd at the lookout — it actually felt like a party. I had this weird sense of feeling old and out of place. I just wanted to get out of there, but that involved walking down narrow streets where people were in a party mood. It felt like late night, but it was only 9pm! We then had to wait a long time for a bus, which ended up being jammed packed. I had made a late dinner reservation in the Airbnb neighborhood and the restaurant was great, so the day ended on a happy note.

Our scheduled walking tour was cancelled on Sunday so we had a relaxing morning and some good food at the big indoor market along the river. Time Out in the Mercado da Ribeira consists of food booths from some of the best restaurants in Lisbon. There was a similar market in Copenhagen, but it was closed for renovations while we were there. We got our first look of the city center of Lisbon when we walked to the Rossio train station. We spent the rest of the day in Sintra, which I’ll write about in a separate post.

On our last day in Lisbon, we grabbed a quick breakfast at this really cute French cafe down the street, checked out of the bnb and took the bus to the train station to store our luggage. We joined a walking tour of Alfama that was guided by a young woman from Italy. There were a lot of breaks on this tour — twice for a shot of the local liquors and twice for scenic overlooks of the city. Alfama is the oldest part of the city that survived the great earthquake of 1755. The architecture isn’t all that interesting to me, but it did have some beautiful tile work and a different feel from the rest of Lisbon.

We can’t really appreciate a world capital without seeing some art (that’s because we like art, I suppose). I chose the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum because it was a personal collection and quite extensive. It’s actually pretty amazing and mind blowing that everything was acquired by Gulbenkian. We took a stroll through the Edward VII park before taking the metro back to the center. We had enough time to see the Carmo Convent and Santa Justa lift before we had to to catch our flight to Madrid.