Most of the day in Mafra

We'd thought about what else we wanted to do with our Lisboa card, and we ended up settling on going to see the Palace of Mafra. It seemed pretty straighforward; we make our way to a bus station named Campo Grande and from there catch a bus up to Mafra, wander around for a while and then come back to the city for more sightseeing.

I'd checked the route we needed to take the night before - get on a metro on the green line at the station near our place and take that to Campo Grande to get the bus. But of course when I re-checked CityMapper before we left I found we couldn't take that, because there were problems with the green line.

Sigh.

Thankfully, it wasn't too difficult to map out an alternative: we'd take a bus to a different metro stop and go to Campo Grande from there. We had just about made it to the stop when the bus came around the corner and we dashed to get it. The doors had closed but we waved at the driver who (somewhat more reluctantly then I felt was reasonable) opened them and let us on. 

I was already annoyed at having to change plans; the driver acting like a dick only made it worse. However, I was not yet at the angriest I was going to get that day.

After getting off the metro at Campo Grande, we got a bit lost but eventually found our way to the bus station and the stop for the bus we needed. We'd looked into it and we were fairly sure the Lisboa card covered the bus trip to Mafra - the doubt was because we didn't find anything that explicitly stated that. But all the material did say that all Carris buses (the Lisbon public transport company) were included. This being another Carris bus, then, by rights it should be included.

Nope. We tried our cards and the driver told us we had to buy tickets, which were €4.50 each. Not expensive as such, but when you make plans based on having a card that means you don't need to pay extra for things you get entry to with that card, it's a bit frustrating; to be honest, had we known it was going to include that cost (and the same amount to get back later in the day) we may have chosen to do something else. But we were there, and we just bought the tickets and got on the bus.

40 minutes later, we got of the bus at Mafra. Most of the other passengers didn't; if I remember correctly, the same bus goes further out from Lisbon to a popular beach, and most of them looked like they were far more likely to spend a day at the beach than they were wandering around a palace.

After going into the wrong section and finding out where the right section was, we went in to get tickets. For some reason I still can't comprehend, the woman behind the desk seemed to be what can only be described as pretending she didn't know what the Lisboa card was.

After the annoyance caused by the problems with misinformation/lack of information the previous day, plus what had already occurred earlier in the morning, I got so infuriated that I had to walk away before I called the miserable lying cow a lot of words far less polite than 'miserable lying cow' - even if she may not have had enough English to fully grasp what I was saying. Still, I'm pretty sure the tone would have conveyed the meaning.

Fortunately for everyone, after Rochelle opened her app and showed her that the Palácio de Mafra was indeed on the list of places you got free entry to and she very begrudgingly printed us out some tickets.

It had pretty much ruined my morning, though, and I can't imagine that I enjoyed walking around there anywhere near as much as I would have had they just given us the tickets like we were supposed to. I understand these cards are maybe not quite a scam per se, and that it's set up for you to have to do a lot of work to 'break even' on the cost relative to the money you save on tickets and transport costs - but for someone to be a blatantly dishonest as this woman in the hope that maybe we'd give in and pay the six measly fucking Euros the tickets to the place cost is just ridiculous.

Anyway, we were inside. This is what it looks like on the outside.

A rather grisly scene.

I liked the pattern on this chest of drawers, even though it probably has a much fancier name than that.

A surprisingly large bed. I've been in more than a few palaces/grand homes from the period, and it always seemed odd that the bed were as small as they were.

This was the antler room. It's even more ghastly than it looks.

There are antlers everywhere.

A very nice, um, I want to say credenza?

A model of the palace. We could only go into about a third of it, if that.

It has a huge library, which is awesome.

Missed this boar's head on our first trip through the antler room.

A quick look at the chapel; there was a wedding happening.

And then we were done. We went for a walk through the park next door. It was pleasant, but not especially photogenic.

We decided we'd have lunch somewhere nearby, and found a place that had traditional food. Food was good - we had some of the Portuguese equivalent of fried polenta, and a pork dish that had a tomato-based sauce, and was topped with egg and pickles; it was pretty good. But then we struggled to get out of there - first getting them to bring us the bill, and then even longer for them to bring the card machine so we could pay.

At first this was just annoying, but then we realised it meant that we'd missed the bus we should have caught back to the city and there wouldn't be another for nearly an hour. And there wasn't much else to do, so we just sat and waited. Not the most satisfying visit, I have to say.

After getting back to the city, we made our way to the National Pantheon.

You could go outside on the top. Views are impressive.

Done with that, we made our way back home. This is an interesting looking building.

The funicular line.

And a close-up of the funicular. We would have ridden it, but it wasn't leaving for another ten minutes - and this was the downhill part; we could go much faster ourselves.

We'd gotten a recommendation for a place from our tour guide - but of course we got there and found it wasn't open while we were there. But we ended up at another place not far away and ordered grilled cuttlefish and more cod. No picture of the cod, but this was the cuttlefish. Not the most attractive dish, but it was tasty, even if there was a bit too much of it.

And that was that.