Lisbon Day 1

I made it to my Lisbon hotel which is in the Chiado neighborhood near the water and the nightlife. I’ve read that this neighborhood used to be a little beat up, but with the benefit of investment and city backing, it now has some very upscale places that attracts our kind of people. This seems to be a recurring theme in many Lisbon neighborhoods, which makes me think that at some point recently a lot of Lisbon was pretty beat up.

I had lunch here, which is a huge market with about 25 different stalls with food prepared by area chefs who were invited to participate in the project.











Then off to a walk along the river and the downtown. . .












. . .

which is full of these trams from the 1930’s. On paper, they actually play a role in the city’s public transportation infrastructure. But from what I could see, they mostly carry tourists with selfie sticks in big loops around the city.











They are pretty charming though, and it beats walking up the hills.

Speaking of which, Lisbon is all hills. I haven’t found a single level street yet. Which makes all the views pretty unusual, because wherever you are, you always see buildings above you and below you.












And rather than make people walk up and down the streets all the time, why not create a giant outdoor elevator where they can just go straight up and down. That’s what this is (the Santa Justa lift), which was built by one of Gustave Eiffel’s students after he completed the Eiffel Tower (but unlike the Eiffel Tower, the Santa Justa lift, you know, actually does something useful). When it was first built, they had a huge container under the cabin that they would fill with water and the weight made it go down. They’d drain the water to make it go up. This was 1902, when I’m pretty sure western civilization was farther along than that, but who am I to judge?

And finally, if you were wondering how sad clown conventions happen, I now know. It starts as a bachelorette party where everyone dresses up as clowns, they start drinking in the morning, and then they walk around town and continue drinking in 90+ degree heat. And by 2 o’clock or so it deteriorates into a low-energy collection of sad, tired clowns with headaches. That is exactly what happened here.