Pam walked a block to the Gulbenkian gardens to birdwatch before breakfast.
Today we wanted to visit Monsanto Park, a huge park to the north of Lisboa, but still served by city buses. So, we decided to test it out and take the bus into the wilderness. It was actually easy. We took the bus to Campolide, then another bus to the park. Google directions are pretty good, even showing when the next bus should come. The only trick was knowing where to get off, because you need to press the Stop button before you get to the actual stop, or the bus won’t stop there.
There was a nice hiking loop from the traffic circle near the highway that bisects the park. There were views through the trees all the way to the Atlantic.
The drought has made the park brittle-dry. A lot of smaller plants and underbrush were brown. There were only a few birds — not the season or right time of day. The second half of our walk was a fitness trail with unusual exercises.
We found the bus stop across a bridge on the other side of the highway and waited 20 minutes to take the first bus that came. We changed buses and got back to our apartment.
Our next project was to meet up with Graciosa from Savvy Cat Realty in the Alvalade neighborhood. We took a bus from the stop across from our building, but it turned out to be in the wrong direction. The stop we should have waited at was on a parallel street (pay attention to the end-of-line name as well as the bus number!).
We walked around Alvalade and met Graciosa at a health food restaurant called The Therapist. We had a long chat about Alvalade, her neighborhood, as well as details about other places. Alvalade is a lovely, planned neighborhood with small gardens and balconies, great stores and restaurants, but mostly smaller apartments. Airplane noise was surprisingly not bad considering how close to the Lisbon airport it is. She told us about the Benfica mall, which has great shopping and cheaper groceries. Alvalade’s farmers’ market is where the Prime Minister shops.
For dinner, we decided to try out a small Armenian restaurant, Ararate, near our apartment. It turned out to be quite good!
