The First Real Day in Lisbon

We arrived in Lisbon on a Sunday evening to some pretty spectacular weather. It was evening with cool breezes. We didn’t realize Lisbon had so much elevation change in the city between neighborhoods. That was evident on the Uber ride from the airport. Amazing slopes of both paved and cobblestone streets, the latter becoming crazy narrow as you enter older neighborhoods.

Turns out, our AirBNB is on a narrow, one-way street that cars can enter only from a side street among many other small, narrow side streets. Thank goodness for just two bags as we were dropped at one end that blocks the cars and needed to walk in. Not a big deal at all. We were met by our landlord, a nice French man who lives upstairs and showed us around the place. Given it is all of maybe 400 square feet, it was a quick tour.

We are on the ground floor with large, operable windows in front and high, upper windows in the bedroom, kitchen, and bath. It is actually really impressive this place has all it needs in a compact layout. The windows in the back of our flat open to a courtyard. While we don’t have access, and I’m not sure who does or cares, as it is sort of unkempt, it means breezes flow in and it is relatively quiet.  There are some fruit trees and tall bushes back there that host some spectacular songbirds who wake us up quite beautifully in the morning.

Bairro Alto

Very, very clean but its best feature is its location. Bairro Alto is among the older neighborhoods in Lisbon and has lots of cafes, shops, and bars tucked into a maze of narrow streets. Some of the sidewalks are at best one person wide.

Funny to learn that Bairro Alto is the youngster among the older, historic neighborhoods and was actually a planned district with a grid-like layout of streets. Thinking of it as planned seemed a stretch until we got lost in the Alfama neighborhood, which was a lot of fun actually. (More on that to come.) I looked up Bairro Alto and it was laid out in 1513, the same year that Ponce De Leon claimed what we know as Florida for Spain!

We were both a bit hungry and I guess a bit wired, so we dropped our bags and walked just a little around the ‘hood.  Only a few blocks away was a Tapas place with outside seating that was perfect. A bottle of Portuguese wine and some great food made that first night fantastic.

Our first full day was just about exploring. The first order of business was also to get some groceries as we do expect to eat in a good bit. We trekked south to a natural food store for some minimal items of produce and sundries. Depositing those back at our place, we headed north as we wanted to see the Avenida de Liberdade (Avenue of Liberty).

Avenida da Liberdade

From what we read and saw in pictures, it is one of the major arteries in Lisbon with some good views. We knew it was a tree-lined boulevard. What we didn’t know was that it has the highest concentration of luxury brands on one street in Europe. Those of you that know us well will laugh to read that what we were most excited about was the beautiful mosaic walks shaded by huge trees with benches and sidewalk cafes. 

Yes, above you can see Versace next to Bulgari, and next to Bulgari is Cartier on the corner.

The architecture is such eye candy. There is a huge mix of old and new, and by ‘new’ you will find deco-inspired to mid-century to very recent. The picture below shows one with a cool, exoskeleton facade that to me screams 1960s next to a much older building. What you can’t see, sadly, is the wall of the more modern building has a full living wall of greenery. There are even more modern sculptures along with a great many statues as one might expect.

Practicality – Groceries & Schedule

Stumbling upon an Aldi, we found the prices were amazing and grabbed some more groceries.  It is worth mentioning that Bairro Alto means ‘upper neighborhood’.  To get to the Avenida da Liberdade you descend down steeply sloped streets and (I’ve now counted) 126 steps in two groups of staircases. What goes down must go up in Lisbon. Toting a few bags of groceries up is great exercise.

My work schedule is 11:00am – 5:00pm Eastern time and I’m maintaining that here. Trev knocks out a little bit when we wake up but then we have the bulk of the day to explore.  I’m writing this after we’ve been here through a full week of work and can say we are settling into a good routine. After our wandering, we seem to arrive back at our rental between 2:00 and 3:00 Lisbon time to shower and nap before starting work at 4:00. So far, so good, and that also means when the workday is over at 10:00 we can head out for a late bite to eat. 

Last thing I’ll mention before wrapping this up is that we’ve found it a great walking city.  We both like to wander and get a little lost. It is in those moments you can really stumble into surprising places you didn’t know to look for. We feel safer here than we did in Portland, Oregon!

Everyone is friendly, there are lots of people/tourists everywhere, and English is understood in most places. And not in an ‘understood-but-we-hate-you-for-not-speaking-our-native-tongue’ kind of way. People in shops and restaurants just speak it. We are off and running.