We arrived in Lisbon at 7:15 AM on Sunday. Man is this place dead at that hour! We had a lot of time to kill before checking in to our place in Alfama, so we took our time and figured out the metro system. Seems fairly straight forward.
One thing to note is there are a LOT of ATM machines, but the bulk of them only take credit cards and not your regular bank card. If you want to use your credit card you need to have a PIN #. I don’t recall ever getting a PIN for a credit card. Took us awhile but we finally found an ATM attached to a bank that accepted our bank card.
Another thing to note is Alafama is an incredibly f&%$ed up area to navigate, particularly when you are walking with wheeled luggage! If you don’t have your map app handy on your phone, forget about finding anything until you have been here a few days! The attached photo is the view from our place….I think Lisbon was having fleet week this weekend.
Our first day was mired with jetlag and rain. The rain was light while we were out on our initial exploration, but the jetlag hit hard while we were eating a light lunch (the rain hit harder later). Two hours of napping and we were good to go! Taking naps….man…truly getting old!
We met up for dinner with Paul Fridrich and Tim Bruns (our new friend we met in Maui recently) who were in Lisbon for their last day before heading to Porto. Dinner was at Doca Peixe, an excellent seafood place right under the 25 de Abril bridge (which looks a lot like the Golden Gate Bridge). Our Uber driver was confused and simply took us to the docks…..doca means dock….oops! Apparently we had to make sure he understood it was supposed to be a restaurant!
If was pouring down rain, yet we were out on an enclosed terrace with space heaters. All of the food was excellent, particularly the fresh fish! We had an excellent Portugese white wine that Paul ordered from the Douro region. The wine reminded me a lot of Vermentino. I’m going to like this country!