We slept in until around 8am and ate our new groceries for breakfast before heading out to look for a place to buy a couple of Viva Viagem metro cards. We asked at the magazine kiosk on the corner. The older proprietors didn’t speak English, but let us know that the lottery ticket shop was the place to go. The proprietor there was great, suggesting we fund the card with money not trips, which makes it usable on trains, buses and the metro.
Today we planned to check out the Parque das Nações and Marvila neighborhoods. Parque das Nações, (which means Park of Nations), is also called Expo. It was the site of the 1998 world exposition and is very modern.
We took the metro from nearby São Sebastião to Moscavide and walked to the Caterina Rainha statue (a revered saint and medieval queen) close to the end of the Vasco da Gama bridge.
The tide was out and on the mudflats were approx. 60 flamingos! There were also gulls searching the mud too, alongside some large sandpipers with long bills and reddish necks. Way out in the wide river, which must be shallow, were people, maybe in wet suits, wading and pushing something. Were they clamming or collecting mussels?
We walked along the riverside park’s bike path to the Vasco da Gama tower, connected to a fancy hotel. We looked at the menu, which was exorbitant, and moved on. The place had a James Bond villain vibe of high finance and intrigue. Overactive imagination!
We had a shrimp, kale and rosemary pizza for lunch at a place called Origin (which called itself a mozzarella bar 🙄).
There’s a Vasco da Gama shopping mall too. Pam looked there for more fragrance-free detergent options and took photos of a couple of candidates for future reference. Continente (one of the supermarket chains) in that mall had more choices than the previous stores.
We were getting tired but continued walking through the Expo grounds checking out the public sculpture along the way, including beautiful tiled cone fountains, and another huge plastic recycling statue of a cat. These animal sculptures are in every city we’ve visited.
A little further along we arrived at the Oceanário de Lisboa. We got lemonade and cans of water at the Aquarium’s café (which made a point of no plastic). The no-sugar lemonade tasted good diluted with the water because Pam was super thirsty. She refilled her bottle with what she didn’t finish. The lemon water lasted for several days as it got more and more diluted. We’ll save a visit inside for when we live here!
We never managed to get to Marvila for a neighborhood walkabout. It’s a smaller neighborhood a little further south away from the river. We’ve read that it has a lot of parks, but limited metro access. We tried to take the train there from Oriente station in Parque de Naçoes. Although Marvila was on the train line, Google said to get off at the stop before. We thought we knew better, but Google was right – the train we were on didn’t stop at the Marvila station and went on to Areeiro. So, we walked downhill on the main street there to the Alameda metro station, got on the green line, to the red line, so back to São Sebastião, the nearest metro to our apartment.