We took 2 walking tours today (for a total of nine hours) - you would think that I would be losing weight with all the walking, but maybe part of the problem is that our second tour today (5 hours) was a Gourmet Food Walking Tour - oh well, as they say, when in Portugal do as the Portuguese!
We started out at 10 am with the Original Walking tour given by Inside Lisbon and our guide Sofia. This was a general walking tour of the 3 main Lisbon areas: Baixa, Bairro Alto/Chiado and Alfama and lasted about 4 hours (cost was 11 Euros each). We learned about the history and culture and saw many of the sights. We have discovered that we love these walking tours and Sofia was excellent.
After the tour, we took the tram back up to Castelo Sao Jorge (St. George's Castle) and saw the castle and grounds. It is really an old archaeological site as opposed to "working" castle, but the views were amazing. We wandered down through Alfama (the Old Town) back to Rossio Square.
At 4:30 pm we started the Gourmet Food Walking Tour with Paulo and Marta. This tour was amazing, not for the food and drinks (which were very good) but for the information provided by Paulo with respect to food, culture and history. It was extremely interesting to note that many of the world's food institutions started in Portugal but have been adopted by other countries as their own - tea in England, tempura in Japan, vindaloo in India and many others. Many of these food cultures were "transferred" to other areas many centuries ago as it was a requirement that Portuguese sailors as they went to foreign lands we required to marry local women and assimilate into their cultures to make trading with them easier - many of the low level sailors stayed in those countries. During the tour, we got to try port, cheese and marmalade (a quince based jelly not orange), coffee and custard tart, ginginha (cherry liquer), codfish cake and beer and finally, red wine, cheese, pork, chorizo, seafood salad and bread.
Amazing day. We are exhausted - we are going to slow down one of these days!
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| Alfama |
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| View from Castelo Sao Jorge (St. George's Castle) |
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| Castelo Sao Jorge |
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| From the Castle |
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| Tram |
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