Lisbon Day 2

10-21-2009

Michele and I had stayed inside the big cities except for when we were in Villanueva with Caroline, so we decided to take a day trip on this day. Our choices were Mafra and Sintra. We chose Mafra because the bus to Mafra was just outside the metro station. We weren't sure where we would need to catch the bus to Sintra. We finally found one of the green busses we were looking for. We asked a driver if we were at the stop, but we were actually in the area where busses parked when not in use. He gave us directions to the actual stop in English. His English wasn't great, but it was understandable and enough to get us where we needed to go. This illustrates another way Lisboa was more accessible to Americans than just the food. English is more often understood and spoken here than in Spain.

It took about an hour and a half to get to Mafra on the bus. One thing I saw along the way that I'm curious about was the three bladed wind turbines. I wonder how much power those put out when they're spinning at 20 RPM. I looked around online a bit, but couldn't come up with anything conclusive.

Mafra is the site of a hunting palace for King Juan the something. (I looked it up online and it's Juan V.) I don't have access to my vacation photos since I'm typing this up at Panera, so I'll just link to its wiki page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafra_National_Palace



We went through the church incorporated into the palace before lunch. It was modeled off St. Peter's in Rome. It wasn't as big as the old gothic cathederal or the Sagrada Familia, but it was still very impressive. I'd say it was on par with the gothic cathederal despite the size difference. The Sagrada Familia is so unique, that it's hard to compare anything else to it, and it's still under construction. There were six different organs, and forty plus statues, any of which could have been on displayh as the centerpiece of the art museum we had seen the day before.

We were hungry, so we got lunch before we saw the paid portion of the tour. We picked a little caffe and got the local burger offering. It's a little unusual in that it doesn't come with a bun, but is instead topped with a sunny side up egg. Despite being odd, it's actually a tasty combination. I got a 375 of wine with my meal, so I was feeling pretty mellow by the end of lunch. The caffe worker's (owner's) daughter played behind the counter while we ate. She would hide if Michele or I smiled or waved at her, but by the end of the meal I caught her watching us from behind the counter. She was very cute and looked to be about four.



We toured the palace, which was the complete opposite of the castle we had seen the day before. Somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 man years of effort went into the construction of this palace. The effort was financed by gold returned to Portugal from Brazil. My notes say that the pictures provide a better picture of royal comfort than I can describe, so I guess I will need to attach a few to this blog post when I get home.



The game room had an immense pocket billiard table, it had to have been at least a 6x12 foot table, but it could have been 7x14, 8x16 or maybe even larger. Apparantly, side pockets had not been added to the table yet, so everything would need to be shot into the corners. That would make any game played on that table difficult beyond belief.

Another oddity was the trophy room. I have never seen so many antlers in one place. The legs and backs of every chair were made of antlers. The legs of every table were made of antlers. All the wall decorations consisted of antlers.



My favorite part of the castle was the library. The had 40,000 books, which is a vast store of knowledge in the 18th century. The monks who did the book binding kept bats in the library to hold down the population of book eating insects. There was even what looked to be an early copy of Newton's Principia Mathmatica on display.

When we took the bus back to Lisboa, I'm not sure what the posted time was for our stop, but it seemed like we waited at least half an hour more than we should have. This had been a good day for a side trip. It had been drizzling most of the day, but we spent most of the time we would have otherwise been getting rained on indoors or on the bus.

After we got back to town, we found the bus station to get tickets for the bus ride back to Madrid. We had to follow the red line all the way to the last stop to get to the bus station. It was confusing to find the right ticket stand to buy tickets. We ended up having to ask someone where was obviously not the one we needed to buy tickets from where to go. We used most of our remaining Euros for the tickets and the rest for dinner. The woman who sold us the tickets spoke very litte English, but she was able to tell us where to wait for the bus. The bus didn't leave until 9:45, so we were a little worried about how to spend our last day in Lisbon since we were going to have to check out of the hotel in the morning.