Jamiewrites: Wandering Lisbon some more

One place we'd decided to try one of the local tourist card deals was Lisbon. These can be a bit of a waste of money, but if you're efficient and organised, they can be worth it; we put ours to good use in Vienna in 2019. We'd picked ours up the previous afternoon after we checked they don't activate until you first use them - so this saved us a trip back to the tourist centre that we'd just happened to walk past.

Today we put ours to work. The first thing on the list was Belém Tower, which looks like this:

Using our newly-acquired card we jumped on a tram to get there. But of course there were some roadworks or maintenance going on and we had to get off a couple of stops earlier and walk the rest of the way.

If you go back to the first pic you'll see a line-up; we had to join that line. They somewhat sensibly control the number of people who can be in there at the one time - I say 'somewhat' because that number is way lower than it should be. This, of course, means you have to wait quite a while to get in, even if there aren't many people in front of you.

Did I mention that Lisbon was experiencing an unseasonal heatwave? Because it was. This will probably be mentioned again.

We got to the front of the line and showed our cards - because that's what the woman at the tourism office said we could do. Which of course was wrong (for here at least; more on that later) - apparently we should have gotten a printed ticket from the box office about five minutes walk away. But he decided to just wave us through, luckily.

We made our way inside. The first thing we saw: wee cannon.

I'm not entirely sure 'groin-vaulted' isn't some kind of hilarious mistranslation from Portuguese.

And then we were done with the tower. The guide said you should allow for 1-2 hours there, but that's nonsense; we were there maybe 30 minutes, and that was leisurely. Perhaps that's meant to include the time you spend standing around in the line waiting to go in.

Saw this question mark door while wandering around the streets.

More wandering. The tower, from a distance.

Our next destination was Jerónimos Monastery, but we had to have lunch first. And get our tickets - or not, as the case may be; more on that later.

This isn't the monastery but another museum that we didn't go into. But it looks interesting.

There was a horse-and-cart clip-clopping around, which isn't that exciting in and of itself, until I saw that it had a Clydesdale (or another kind of hairy-footed horse; the Clydesdale is the one I most associate with that feature) pulling it. I haven't seen one of those (breed aside) for years.

Rochelle had become obsessed with the Portuguese dish, the Francesinha, and wanted to have one while we were here. She found that a nearby place made them, so we had to go there. It's a bit like a croque-monsieur (I had one of those on my 2016 trip, in Versailles of all places) but with a tomato and beer sauce.

This is what it looks like:

It was pretty good.

Now, about that monastery. After what happened at the tower - we only got let in because the gate person let us; we were supposed to have gotten printed tickets after showing our Lisboa passes. So, we asked this same person if we needed to do that at the monastery, and he said yes and we believed him.

This cost us quite some time, as when we finally got to the one person who was operating the ticket machine (a remarkably stupid decision by whoever makes such decisions) we were told we just need to show it at the monastery entrance, after which we'd validate it on the machine that's there for that purpose.

Argh. This was getting frustrating for me, since I despise dealing with organisations that aren't good at communicating instructions for things like this. All any of these places needed was a simple sign saying where you go with the Lisboa card, or a page in the guide you get to download when you buy the ticket. Would save so much time and energy.

Anyway, we got inside to look around.

Obligatory picture of weird religious art.

It's very pretty.

The ceiling had amazing attention to detail in the stonework.

We moved from the monastery to the church next door. It has a creepy Christ-in-a-box.

The tomb of Vasco da Gama is there.

The smallest pipe organ I think I've seen.

We were told on the walking tour that the Portuguese started putting elephants in things at some point, to illustrate their business interests (for want of a better word) in India and Africa.

Outside the church we found this.

And then stopped for coffee, tarts and capilé.

Statue of Afonso de Albuquerque. Nothing to do with the city in New Mexico, or making right turns there.

A die sculpture outside the National Coach Museum. I checked; they got the number of spots right, i.e. the sum of the opposite sides always equals seven.

Inside the Coach Museum. The name is apt; it's full of coaches.

Some are just ridiculously over the top. But that's European royalty for you.

There were way more coaches, but they weren't interesting enough to take pictures of. There was also some art, which was.

There was an interesting display of portraits of all the Portuguese monarchs over the centuries. I forgot to note that artist's name, though.

Oh, they also had sedan chairs, and there was a replica you could try and lift. It was heavy; I can't imagine lugging someone up and down the hills in Lisbon, even for a few minutes.

We caught a train and a bus back to the city. We were supposed to catch a bus and another bus, but the first bus was full and didn't stop at the bus stop. It took us ages to catch the bus we needed after we got off the train; one that was scheduled just didn't appear. But we got one eventually and went off to the next thing - a wine tasting.

On the way to see a funicular.

At the wine tasting. It was very interesting; Portuguese wine is way more diverse than I expected. Our host, Andre, was excellent. He'd lived in WA for a few years, so he was familiar with Australians. There was only us and two German women, but we ended up sticking around for a while and chatting, mostly about travel.