We took an overnight train from Madrid to Lisbon. Everyone should take an overnight hotel train at least once. It is quite the experience. We paid for a first class cabin with a shower and bathroom in the cabin. You get access to the first class lounge if you are on the hotel train so we hung out there for a few hours before we departed. They feed you a full four-course dinner with wine although you don’t board the train until 10:30 PM. Your personal steward takes care of your needs including making up your beds and waking you up for your three-course breakfast.
The train station in Lisbon is right off the coast. The view is beautiful when you walk out of the station. We stayed at the best hotel of our trip in Lisbon –Hotel Olissippo Castelo. The room was large, clean and inexpensive. They even give you a bottle of good port upon arrival and all for 90 euros. The only problem was this was the first hotel without Internet access but in all of the tourist centers you can get access pretty cheaply.
Saturday we took a cab to Rossio Square and walked around in this area back towards our hotel. Lisbon is beautiful. There are a lot of architectural details on the buildings, sidewalks, and streets. Most of the city was rebuilt in the mid 1700’s after an earthquake. There buildings are worn looking but have tiled fronts and terracotta roofs. I took a lot of pictures of the tile. Lisbon is also relatively inexpensive. Cabs were cheap; there are a lot of small restaurants called churracarrias that serve great inexpensive meals. Lisbon is built into a hillside. There is a lot of uphill walking. There are all of these stairways that you use to go form street to street. Since the streets are narrow and have two way traffic and parking on both sides (and sometimes a streetcar) even walking downhill was quite the adventure. We rode the streetcar #28 around the scenic loop and it is an excellent introduction to the tourist areas.
Sunday is a great day to go to the museums. Most are free. We took a taxi to The Belém District and started with the Coach Museum. It was really interesting. Queen Isabella could see the advent of the car and had all of the horse drawn carriages spruced up and stored here. I’ll take our Camry over the most ornate coach any day. I guess being a princess is not all it is cracked up to be. Then we went to the Monastery of Jerónimos and saw the tomb of Vasco de Gama and the beautiful cloisters. There were Boy and Girl scouts there selling 2006 calendars. In Portugal the Boys and girls are in the same troop together. Next we went to the Monument to the Discoverers and got a good view of the suspension bridge built by the same company that built the Golden Gate Bridge and the Jesus Statue like the one in Rio de Janeiro Brazil.
The light rail took us back down town and we went to take one of the funicular trams up to the top of the hillside and followed the Rick Steves walk back down to the port. This was a beautiful, friendly city. It would be my first choice to introduce kids to Europe. You could wander for days. It felt like Venice with all of the narrow passageways except it is laid out on a grid. (In Venice I felt lost the entire time we were there.) We had dinner at Nossa Churrascaria and had the best grilled chicken I had ever tasted. It was near our hotel and the Castelo de São Jorge.
We used Rick Steve's Spain and Portugal 2004 and Timeout Lisbon
Lisbon Pictures - http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/shevvi/album?.dir=/22bb&.src=ph&.tok=ph8pR1DBW6XXv309
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