Saturday, Oct 5th, Lisbon, Portugal

Greetings!

Don't come to Lisbon's popular southside neighborhoods if you're not prepared to walk the hills.  The streets are too narrow to drive easily, and they are filled with busses, taxis, and residents who have gated off many of the high streets for their parking.

If you haven't discovered yet, we like old buildings.  And they tend to be on the tops of hills.  Sometimes, they are clustered together, so we get a break, but Lisbon seems to have plenty of hilly old churches, fortresses, monasteries, and other architecturally-significant structures spaced high up.  We're thinking of adding taxis to our toolkit.

Those of us who love in the San Francisco Bay Area are more aware of earthquakes than most Americans.  We're waiting for the big one, with vivid memories of the power of our 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire.  Lisbon had an even larger earthquake in 1755 that leveled buildings as far away as Morocco and France.  We visited one in town today that has become a center for the study of architecture and the history of Portugal.

To see all of the photos taken today, click on: Saturday, Oct 5th, Lisbon, Portugal.