Wednesday, 22nd

Another ‘stoke up for the day’ breakfast and then off on our ‘culture-vulture’ day. The plan being to do the Museum of Modern Art and the Gulbenkien Museum. We passed a huge El Cortes Ingles and Lynne pronounced that we had to go in on the way back!

First stop the modern art gallery. Whilst the exhibition itself was pretentious we enjoyed a lot of the pieces that had been contributed. We bought combined tickets for both museums and the Darwin Exhibition.

We then walked through the park that the two museums are in. Lots of photo opportunities of flowers, other plants and ducklings. Sarah Houlton had told Lynne this was a must do.

The Gulbenkien was impressive but a lot of the stuff was not to my taste, but I loved the two Turners and the Renoir portrait of Claude Monet’s wife.

We shared a smoked salmon salad while our feet settled down from throbbing, taking extra time over our tea. We also agreed to give Charles Darwin a miss. This went further by deciding to give Sintra a miss too and get all day tickets for the City Line buses. A hop-on hop-off sightseeing bus service that circles Lisbon taking you between the major sight seeing places for one price.

So we wandered back through the park, with more photo opportunites. Then went into El Cortes Ingles and had an good oggle at the loads and loads of high priced fountain pens from the likes of Mont Blanc and Cross. We also each bought an 8GB Kingston Memory Stick for just ‘‚¬22. Vowing never to be without a pen drive again after Monday. Lynne has another good day hewing at the seam of life. 🙂

Rather than go back to the hotel we found a cafe on the main drag behind the hotel and had our apperatifs sat outside on the street watching the locals go by. Very relaxing before going to get dinner and cheaper than the hotel bar.