March 2024. Lisbon.
The Star hotel at Lisbon Airport gave us our only breakfast of the week;
the Portuguese really don’t do bacon, or filter coffee, but they do do patries.
We took the metro to Oriente, helped by incredibly friendly staff who patiently us how to buy tickets (£1.60 a journey).
and their stations are some of the most gorgeous since St Petersburg, which I may never visit again.
I only have two recollections of our previous Lisbon trip; my father-in-law being shocked at being charged a tenner a glass of port in the posh hotel we’d booked for us (WARNING : NEVER go on holiday with your in-laws), and a trip to the 1998 EXPO site east of centre.
Oriente station was built for Lisbon’s Expo, and they’ve been left with a gothic piece of architecture with rail and bus links to our next two destinations.
And some weirdness in the Park of Nations.
We dawdled an hour at the EXPO site, admiring the Gormley art (top left), and something that looked like an offcut from “B of the Bang”,
the Iberian Lynx,
and of course Gil, the official mascot.
I’ve no idea if EXPO has died a death. The last one was in Kazakhstan 7 years ago.
Sadly, the flags of the nations have been left to decay these last 25 years, perhaps symbolically, and it’s left to the glitzy shopping centre at Oriente to provide the modernity.
But there’s no craft beer. Bar a can of Sagres in the McDonalds.
retiredmartin 