To assist the Lisboneiros in getting around their topographically inconvenient city a number of facilities have been put in place. Most of those facilities are called “steps” but from time to time there is something a little more imaginative such as the H&M store where you enter at one level, go down a few sets of escalators and emerge onto a different street. This also gives you a legitimate reason for going into an H&M store.
Even better though are the canary yellow funiculars that rattle their way up a few of the steepest hills. These charming little boxes on rails look as though they were built in about 1374 but are probably a little younger than that. We took the Gloria funicular on our orientation walk. With a grinding rattle or possibly a rattling grind our bright yellow box lurched slowly (but considerably faster than any of us could have walked) to the top. At the top we had lunch regaled by a street performer playing the theme tune from Game of Thrones while we looked over the city.
Funiculars are cute but they’re hardly a mass transit system. For that we need to flip to the second of Lisbon’s rattly public transport options; trams. Lisbon has gorgeous old, rattly trams which lurch through the streets carrying the Lisboates about their business. Fairness forces me to concede that Lisbon also has gleaming new, much larger trams that whisk people hither and yon. The much larger trams glide down the main roads of Lisbon which tend to be built on the flatter bits leaving their geriatric colleagues to struggle gamely up hillsides and around tight corners to bring public transport to people who don’t live on a main road. Lisbon also has buses, trains and a metro system but you know, whatever.
I caught a gleaming new tram to the Time Out Market which is apparently a draw card, I don’t know why unless you have an unreasonable fetish for food courts. It would be useful if you were hungry and had inexplicably missed the literally hundreds of restaurants, cafes, pastry shops and supermarkets with which Lisbon is adorned otherwise I fail to see the point.
Having exhausted the amusement value of Time Out in approximately two minutes I then caught a cute rattly tram to my actual destination. Or more accurately I didn’t. My destination was the Maritime Museum in Belém. The big sexy trams went there but the small rattly ones turned off and climbed a hill and wandered through somewhat lower rent territory. I caught the small rattly tram anyway because I wanted to catch a small rattly tram. I hopped off at the last point where it was convenient to walk down to the main road and pick up a big gleaming tram to the Jerónimos Monastery. The monastery is a huge, impressive building and the Maritime Museum occupies a small part on the left if you have just alighted from your big sexy tram and are staring in awe at the Monastery. If you can’t see the Monastery then you have got turned around and are looking at the Monastery’s gardens which occupy the piece of ground between the road and the Tagus River.
The museum was quite interesting being part a history of Portugal’s great age of discovery when various Portuguese got into ships and sailed out into the Atlantic. In the words of the caption at the museum “establishing contact and trade with distant peoples.” They could have added “establishing trade in distant peoples” but that might have been a little too close to the bone for a museum dedicated to Portuguese achievements. There were also displays on struggles in the colonies without quite explaining how said colonies were acquired.
The rest of the museum consisted of models of ships used by the Portuguese at various stages of their history up until the present day. Plus there were some royal barges and seaplanes largely I suspect because they couldn’t find a more appropriate museum to put them in.
I really enjoyed Lisbon and couldn’t happily have spent more time there but I didn’t. Instead we hopped on a bus for Porto.
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