I'm going to split up my spring break trip into 3 parts because otherwise the blog would be incredibly long and I want to be thorough in the things I write, for both my adoring blog fans and myself.
We began our spring break adventure flying from Brussels to Lisbon on Friday morning, arriving in Lisbon in the early evening. We took a cab to our airbnb apartment which was right in the middle of the pretty part of town. Our host was actually from New York, and she was a very artsy-looking lady who kept a lot of unique paintings around the flat, all of which depicted boobs in one way or another.
The following morning, we began by wandering around the weekly Lisbon flea market. It contained a healthy mixture of people selling cool things they created and other people selling all the random trash they wanted to get rid of. We had brunch outside a nice little cafe, then walked to the Castelo de Sao Jorge. The castle was pretty cool, offering really nice views of the city and semi-wild peacocks and stray cats. Next, we walked down to the main plaza of Lisbon and observed all the people-tourists, beggars, guitar players, weird guys feeding the seagulls. Also, it was here that I believe I began to develop the sunburn I maintained for the rest of the week. We walked around a bit more and drank some tasty sangria before heading towards the aquarium in the more corporate end of the city. The aquarium had a "one ocean" theme, so it was basically a ring with one giant tank in the middle, with smaller tanks on the sides. I enjoyed the aquarium, but I would've liked it more if there weren't so many kids running around....damn youths. After the seeing the fish, we explored the city some more, happening upon a 50+ person dance circle outside the mall, very cultural. We then got some dinner and wrapped up the day.
Sunday began with a trip to the Jeronimos Monastery, a beautiful monastery very near to the coast. Its prime location and pretty architecture made me seriously consider becoming a monk, but using good judgement I decided against it. We ate lunch at a nice little restaurant with a super friendly waiter and then continued our day at the Berardo Collection Museum. I will go into some more details of this modern art museum because it was quite an experience. The Berardo Collection is actually a private collection, and the museum was completely free. We started with the top floor, which was typical contemporary art pieces spanning several decades. The real fun began on the bottom floor. One of the museum's most highly-advertised pieces was an exhibit called "The Clock." "The Clock" is a 24 hour movie being played on loop in a dark theater with comfy Ikea couches. I began watching "The Clock," and saw that it is actually short segments of many, many movies put together where the scene from the movie features a picture of a watch or a character talking about the time. The cool part, though, is that when the real time is 3:06 in the afternoon, "The Clock" will be playing movie scenes where the characters are talking about 3:06 in the afternoon. It took a little while for me to realize this, but once I did it was mesmerizing to watch the exhibit. I can't imagine the amount of time it took for the artist to compile all the hundreds, even thousands of movie scenes into one 24 hour video, but the result was most definitely very cool to see.
The next most interesting part of the Berardo Collection was a kind of art called "traumatic realism." There were about seven or eight different pieces in this room, all of which were highly disturbing. Lots of images of hanging/nooses, a weird looped video of a naked old woman rolling around on the floor, and this incredibly strange piece with a video-projected head that cussed at and insulted you. To be honest, I had not been so fundamentally disturbed in a very long time until I entered the traumatic realism room, so I guess the artists accomplished what they were going for. It was certainly an experience I won't forget.
With our emotions thoroughly rattled by the cussing artwork, we headed out of the museum to see more Lisbon things. We stopped by the massive Monument to the Discoveries and took an elevator to the top to get a pretty nice view of Lisbon and the Atlantic Ocean. We walked further down the coast to the Belem Tower and unfortunately did not enter the tower but rather enjoyed the view from the outside. Next we waited in line at a famous bakery to eat a famous pastry that I can't remember the name of, but it was basically a sweet, cheesy mini-quiche pie. We ended our trip to Lisbon by returning to our apartment in one of Lisbon's adorable old trams.
I had a fantastic time in Lisbon, and I have to say that it is probably the most beautiful city I have seen in Europe so far. The food was kind of expensive, but for the most part it was worth it. I have every intention of returning to Portugal one day to see the rest of the country.
I think the pastry was Pasteis de Belem.
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