gota do vouga: januari 2019

Mine tips about traveling in Lisbon.

I have been many times in Lisbon and find it easy to travel around the city and visit my favorite spots. The subway (Metro) works fine, buses and trams do it too. If you wish to visit the coast line all the way to Cascais or Sintra take the trains for those destinations from some of the stations they pass by.

1. Buying subway tickets

As soon as you get out the airport exit doors, turn right and walk until you see a Metro sign.

You will see the tickets machines lined up to one of the walls. Sometimes there's a queue line, please respect that.

First you have to buy the subway card and then you have to fill it with tickets. Chose the kind of tickets that suits you best (one travel, a full day, week, and so on). There are several zones too, check them here.

The subway card expires only after one year from the day you buy it, so save it! Maybe you can givit away to someone else traveling to Lisbon. Or, maybe you have an excuse to travel to Lisbon soon again :-)

2. Mosteiro dos Jerónimos

So... One of the main turist attractions in Lisbon is the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos. The tickets queue is usually painful to watch, specially on hot Summer days. But what many do not know is that right beside the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos you can find the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, there you can buy a "two in one" ticket and visit both places and there is almost never a queue there. Actually the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia is an hidden gem in Lisbon with a smal but wonderful permanent exposition on egyptian, roman, celt and other culture's artifacts. Totally worth a visit before you take the great quest that is visiting the enormous Mosteiro dos Jerónimos.

Mosteiro dos Jerónimos' queue on Summer

Museu Nacional de Arqueologia - practically no queu

3. Chose your cup of tea but indulge yourself time for surprises

There are loads of thing you can do, see, eat and experience in Lisbon. Many may be fun for you and many may not be quite your cup of tea... Do your homework, chose carefully what you want to see and do, most important if you only have a few days to visit the city. For example I almost never go to Bairro Alto, the music and ambience there may be loved by many, but it is just not my thing, so I chose to spend more time in other places, for example the Museu de Arte Antiga. Search for your interests but leave some time for surprises. Ask a local about their favorite spot in the city and visit it and it may be a really nice surprise that you can't find in a travel guide. :-)

I have not done near of what my ambitions for this blog were initially. Then my focus went a totally different road when I was faced with my cervical cancer diagnostic late August. I really wanted to blog about that but not here. Oh no! This blog is about the things I love to do in life and the cancer did not deserve to take that spot here. So I created it's own blog: https://mycervicaljourney.blogspot.com

Now I feel I really want to go back at publishing here about the things I love and love to do. If you are reading this don't take it personally, but I really do not care if someone is reading my blog or not. For me it is just a lot of fun writing and presenting the things I love to do: traveling, DYI and various other subjects.

I have been taking pictures of subjects to write here since 2016!!! So I will begin by doing just that!

I take at least a couple of trips to Portugal per year to visit my family and to see more of my country. On 2016 we ended our trip to Portugal by staying a couple of days in Lisbon as we sometimes do.
I try to see something new and go to some of my favorite places. On 2016 we:

* Meet my good friends Ana and Gonçalo and their son
* Went back to the Oceanário
* Visited the Archeology Museum (love it!)
* Went for walks at Belém because the tower was being reconstructed
* Took walks on the Expo 98's park, the kids loved the flags.
* We stayed at an hotel that had a pool on the roof on the tenth floor or something (I hated it everyone else loved it)

Lisbon is not that hard to navigate. The subway system works fine and you can get around even when there are tourists everywhere. On that occasion Monsieur Hollande, the formal president of France was visiting Lisbon in hot July when we had loads tourists, Portugal had just won the European Championship of football (the real one not the kind that is played with your hands, ehehehe)... and even then, when streets where closed to traffic and not even the buss could drive their normal route and armed forces (due to terrorist threat) were all over Belém armed to their teeth, even then we managed to walk a bit and take the train and subway back to the hotel. So, there was order in chaos.

I will soon be giving some practical advices on how to "navigate" in Lisbon.

Here are some pictures from our trip to Lisbon 2016: