Museum Hopper

One of the few tickets we bought in advance for this trip was for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao .  What a beauty.  A piece of art in of itself. Let me start with the outside, which has a number of statues and the building itself.  As we walked up to the building, we were greeted by the terrier of flowers.  It was fairly stunning at five floors high.  When you get up close, how the flowers and colors come together. I saw her sibling in Tokyo in Roppongi Tower Getting into the museum, it was the smoothest entrance we had been in.  They have plenty of workers there handing out the headsets and checking tickets.  We got there as it was opening and headed immediately up to the top.   The Jenny Holzer: Thing Indescrible exhibit was/is hard to forget.  I am not sure how much I would consider it art though.  It was thought provoking and we did spend some serious time thinking about it.  The scale of some of her work was stunning.  I can only imagine the impact that they would h

After Castelo de San Jorge, we started walking down the hill.  We bopped into the Se Cathedral in Lisbon.  It had survived so many earthquakes and fires. This church is adjacent to where St. Anthony was born and grew up.     This was a quick nice stop to escape the heat in the day.  It is beautiful.   Time in cathedral: ~30 minutes Times visited: 1 Overall: B+

On day 2 in Lisbon, we headed up (literally up the hill) to the Castelo de San Jorge .   We were maybe going to take the trolley up the hill, but there was a queue of ~1.5 hrs.  After our experience the day earlier, I was definitely not doing that again.  We found an escalator that took us about six flights and then we walked....up. We should have bought tickets in advance.  We ended up waiting in line for tickets for about 15 minutes.  That being said, once we were inside, it did not seem very crowded or busy (other than the women's bathroom line -- more about that later). The view from the Castelo is really pretty.  It is a great view of the city and the Castelo itself is iconic in the skyline of Lisbon. I was underwhelmed by the museum -- it was a lot of pottery fragments.  I did like the few plates, pots that seemed more complete.  The influence of the Moors is very prevalent/obvious in the tile. We enjoyed look at t the walls, and learning more about what the

After our visit to the Jeronimos Monastery , we walked over to the Belem Tower , a former watch tower and welcoming point to Lisbon from the Atlantic. We waited in line to get in about 30 minutes.  You could get in a shorter line if you had bought the Lisbon card .  From what we could tell, it was not worth it for us.  Unfortunately, that was the only way though to pre-buy tickets to Belem, so we ended up having to wait in line.   This was another monument that also was recommended to visit close to dusk.  I bet the light into the tower is quite pretty coming in from the east side.   We headed in and up to the first level first.  Again, it was so nice to be outside after the flight.  View of the tower from the first floor We really were impressed by the stair system in the tower!  It beeps and has colors indicating if you can go up or down at a certain time.  There is a timer as well.  It is brilliant and solves so many of the problems in old tower buildings.

Our first visit in Lisbon was to the  Jerónimos Monastery .  We had a few missteps on our way there -- it took way longer than it should have!  What a beautiful spot for our first stop (and after a "no sleep" flight there).   We did not end up going to the paid section since the queue was long.   The architecture of the building is beautiful with such intricate details.  The scale of the building is long and substantial.   The inside of the church was beautiful.  Our guide book recommended visiting in mid-afternoon, but unfortunately everything seemed to have that recommendation!   The magnificent ceilings and stained glass were rather stunning.  It was busy inside but we were able to see everything we wanted. What a stunning first stop. Times visited: 1 Time in monastery: 1 hr Overall: A-