Tuesday in Lisbon

Teesha had told us a journalling idea the day before, to write down 10 words at the end of a day to help you remember the highlights of what you did that day.  I've included my list from the Tuesday we experienced two weeks ago in Portugal throughout the text of this blog.

We were out the door by 8 a.m. to walk to the train station to (1) take the train into (2) Lisbon. 

Once we arrived in Lisbon, we jumped in taxis and headed to this (3) flea market, held under the shadow of a church dome:

It was not the best flea market I have ever been to, lots more used clothing and current junk than vintage or antique items and some vendors who seemed disgusted with the fact that I couldn't speak Portuguese enough to barter with them, but nevertheless there were some amazing finds to be had. I know because I found one of them, a plastic bag filled with old passports, identity cards, school report cards and the like.  It seemed an expensive purchase for 22 euros (approx $30 Cdn/US) but when I asked if I could have just one of the passports (to do a passport journal that Teesha showed us how to make), he wanted to charge me 5 euros for just the one item. Suddenly the bag full of ephemera, including 3 passports, 18 slides, some old stamps, a couple of dozen old B&W photographs and twenty or so little ID booklets seemed quite reasonable in price, so of course I had to get it!  (and later shared some of the contents with my classmates).

After the flea market and a quick bathroom visit, we started walking through various streets and alleyways of Lisbon.  Lots of uphill and down, cobblestones underfoot. 

notice the woman on the left, hanging out her window to watch us pass by
after we asked her for directions

I love this photo I took of Maxine standing in the middle of a street taking a picture of an approaching trolley car - she looks so determined, it makes me smile every time I see it!

Remember those mosaic tiles I told you about yesterday? There were plenty of examples on various buildings we saw on our travels that day:

Delinquent that I am,
I tried to pry a piece of tile off this building but to no avail

Lots of decorations left over from a weekend celebration of the sardine festival:

That's right, I said sardine festival.  Here's the poster to prove it:

After a few minutes to enjoy this scenic lookout over Lisbon - here is the fab four - me, Taylor, Laurie and Linda:

being photographed by (4) the newly christened "Danjah" (formerly known as Jane) Davenport:

- we next visited the Museum of Portuguese Decorative Arts, which gave us the opportunity to see artisans doing woodworking, carving, book binding, metalsmithing and (5) tassle and ribbon making. It was quite fascinating and again, stunning to see how labour intensive all of these skills are.

After walking a few more blocks through more narrow, cobblestoned streets, we arrived at the restaurant where we had lunch, located within a circus school. We had a table on the second floor, overlooking the harbour.  By this time, it was mid afternoon and we were all hungry, hot and tired but the (6) to-die-for ravioli soon made me feel much better!

We took taxis back to the studio in Estoril in time for a late afternoon 3 hour session in the studio with Teesha and Tracy, where we were joined by (7) Morag - our Scottish classmate, who had just arrived from London after being unavoidably detained.  Afterwards, we had a delicious dinner at the restaurant next door where we sampled the famous Portuguese (8) bacalhau (codfish) dish for the first time and during which (9) Linda spilled beer all over me, which gave us an excuse to do laundry in the (10) cute little washing machine in our kitchen when we got home that night!

Which led to the case of the missing black pants when the newly washed capris I had hung out on the line to dry just outside the second storey window shown on the left in the above photo mysteriously "disappeared" the next day (not to worry, I did eventually find them - they had blown off the line in the wind!)...ah yes, we did have adventures in Portugal!!