Alfama and Belém

We set out this morning to do a little souvenir shopping and get to the Alfama district. After some shopping, we grabbed an Uber to get up the hill; we stopped first at the Castello de São Jorge. Due to the long lines and the fact that Rick Steves says it’s not much to see, we opted to skip going inside and started our walking tour through Alfama. 

The rooftops of Alfama

It didn’t take that long and soon we had wandered through the very narrow “streets” — they averaged 5 - 10 feet wide. Alfama was spared in the Earthquake/tsunami/fire of 1755 … so it is much different than the rest of the city, very Old World. It was interesting to walk through such an old area. But since there was less to see than we expected, we grabbed another Uber to Belém, about fives miles from Lisbon proper, towards the Atlantic. 

Belém is right on the waterfront and has a couple monuments to see … and is home to the original pastais de nata. We opted to have a quick lunch on the waterfront. The ocean breeze was almost too cold, but better than the heat we’ve had the last two days. 

We took the mandatory photos of the monuments and strolled along the waterfront for a while.

We walked past a huge monastery where Vasco de Gama is buried.  Other than his tomb, we didn’t think going in there was anything worth seeing for the wait in line. We did take some pics outside. 

We went next door to the bakery that sells the pastry. So original are these in fact, they don’t call them pastais de nata … they call them pastais de Belém. They were pretty good and we could tell their recipe was slightly different than what we’ve had. There were probably a couple hundred people either in line to buy them to-go or seated inside their multi-room dine in area. We had our pastais and an espresso sitting down amongst the throngs of others. 

It was then a short walk to the train station to grab a ride back to our neighborhood. As luck would have it, we passed by the Palacio de Belém (the Belém presidential palace — the residence of Portugal’s president) just in time for a changing of the guard. 

We made it back to our hotel room by 4:30 for our siesta (no, we don’t hear people talk about siesta like in Spain — but we siesta). 

We don’t think we mentioned it last night, but our restaurant choice was actually the second choice we had. We wanted to go to another that Rick Steves recommends. But when we arrived at that restaurant, there was a line a mile long. We didn’t want to wait last night in order to try to get a table. We went over there for a much earlier dinner tonight. We got there just after 6 o’clock (that’s early dining for the Portuguese but not so for many tourists) and we probably got the last table before the line started to form. It was excellent of course. And the whole dinner cost us about $40, including our beers.

By the way, dinner “included a show” … as did last night but we forgot to mention it. Street performers often come by and perform for diners … and ask for donations of course. We gave them a few Euros. 

After 7 o’clock in the evening is definitely our favorite time of the day. The sun is just setting, yet there is some light for a couple more hours in the summertime. And then, of course, after dark all the lights come on. After dinner, we decided to take advantage of this awesome time of day, and sit at the water line below the Praça de Comercial (Commercial Plaza - the hub of shipping commerce in the old days). 

While we were sitting at the waterline, watching pigeons eat something from the sand, where the water is crashing, Jim realized he’s very much like a pigeon, and like them just may survive a nuclear war or other apocalypse … He will also eat almost anything.

We’ve turned in quite early tonight in the hopes of going to sleep earlier. Tomorrow we head to Sintra fairly early in the morning to try to beat the crowds. It’s about 30 miles away.