Visiting Lisbon, Portugal/Carlos Pueblo

 Visiting Lisbon, Portugal/Carlos Pueblo

The cruise ship sailed through the night after Ponta Delagada to Lisbon, the Capital City of Portugal. As always, my visit of this famous capital city was brief and meaningful. It is my way of the travel, I have a comfortable mobile room to stay, many meals to eat in fancy restaurants, and the transportation has been always taking care of as well. I made up my mind from the deck over see the port city view, from a huge red building up to a huge white church on the back and coming down to the street with many yellowing building and that's it.

After the dock, there were several pink blossom of magnolia trees. I had followed this flower from New York City to New Haven, Yale campus, and now here in Lisbon, what a lovely spring it was. The huge red building is the rail road station in and out of the capital and is also a huge hotel. I could see passengers carrying luggage in and out of the station. I don't have to check on the station screen and the hotel price for my needs. I just carried my camera and walked toward my second destination, the white church on a small hill.

I could see the old part of the city, might be more than a thousand years old. I could see the street and building were both not up to date. Portuguese navy used to pass a straight between China and Taiwan called the Formosan straight back to the 16th Century. Portuguese called Taiwan Il Formosa, the beautiful island. At that time, Lisbon was very popular in the world and Portugal ruled many places, Congo in Africa, Brazil in South America, Macau near Hong Kong, Goa near India, etc. What I saw on that morning was a deteriorated empire of the past. I took a big rose bush climbed over a concrete fence with full blooming. I managed to hike up the hill to the white church.

It is a Catholic Cathedral with a very attractive structure. I saw some tourists taking pictures and some hire vehicles carrying tourists making a stop in and out. I believed that was taken a while to complete such church. I could see my cruise ship from the church ground facing to the harbor vice versa.

It was a little bit down hill to an old small city center with people were taking their breakfast outside. I could see the aromatic fragrant of sausage and coffee. On the other end, there were several wine testing stands circling with passengers. It costed 2 Euro for a small shot glass of wine. I was shy away when I saw people gave that coins to the old woman. I am a non-drinker functionally yet I don't like to waste gift wine bottles from the Cruise and free drinks on the latitude parties.

I did chat briefly with a Portuguese Army about how big of their army. This young soldier replied not big enough. I was outside of their camp building with some of their family visitors. I also visited a cork souvenir shop. The cork is for the cap of the wine bottle and the Portuguese cork is very famous in the world.