Once again, I am not. When it is daylight, middle-age men pull out pairs of sunglasses and try to sell them to me. At night, these guys switch to drugs. Once again, they are persistant, but yelling at them seems to do the trick.
Yesterday was another busy day. I visited a Monestary, which was beautiful and interesting. I bought a combination ticket to 5 or so different attractions. One of these is a archeological museum. Since I had the ticket, I figured I would check that out-it was sort of boring.
After that, I went on enjoyed a pastel from a shop called Pastel de Belen or something like that. Pastels are a treat in Lisbon-they are a cake with a creamy filling-sort of like a miniture pie. It was good, but I am just not the discriminating. I waited in a long line for it just to say I tried one. I am the type who can have a sweet from a supermarket or pie shop and it just doesn't matter (much). Working with many from Miami of Cuban descent, I have often had pastellitos, which look similar, and taste (suspiciously) similar.
My ticket on the hop-on hop-off bus was still good, so I got back on the bus, and went back to the central park of the city looking for a guidebook. Believe it or not, I didn't bring a guidebook which was sort of silly, but figured I would buy one when I got here. It took all afternoon and I found one-I am discriminating-I need the right one- (only to lose it later on another hop-on hop-off bus). The real silly thing is that back in the UK there are plenty of used book stores and thrift shops with huge book sections where I could have surely bought one for a good price. I then took another hop-on hop-off bus to the new part of town, where an exposition called Lisbon 1998 was held. Here I found a huge kids expo of some kind. They had free samples of bread of some type of butter and chocolate milk (who goes to Portugal and gets free food), and had a picture taken with some weird looking charachter, and I took a cable car across a section of the river, and walked around. Later, I got back on the bus, and got off near downtown and found a large huge book fair held in a park in Lisbon (I like book fairs, even if barely 1% of the books is in a language I could understand). By the way, I found out what the Portugese REALLY eat- it isn't sardines-it is hamburgers, pork, gyros, and bagles with smoke salmon (I had the last one). That is all the food they we're selling at the book fair.
I walked back slowly to the hotel, through city blocks as it was now evening. I stopped off for my last food item, A Gelato at a shop with a really long line. I just assumed that with a long line it would be good, and it was-but like the pastel's-all gelato is good.
