A Travel Blog
North of the Rossio train station along the beautiful tree-lined Avenida da Liberdade there’s a small funicular that connects to the Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara on the hill above.
There are a number of such funiculars around Lisbon, but many are currently closed or under repair. This one was originally built in 1885 and electrified in 1914.
On our first day here we picked up some basics for the house so we could have breakfast the next day. At the local Pingo Doce grocery store we were immediately struck by the numerous pumpkin-related products, including Abóbora com Noz (Pumpkin Jam with Walnuts).
Josie did this little watercolor of the jar we bought, which we’ve been enjoying most mornings ever since.
We left the historic Alfama and Baixa areas and took the ludicrously crowded Tram 15E along the riverfront out to the Alcântara neighbourhood. There, at the foot of the Ponte (Bridge) 25 de Abril, we visited two of the more recent additions to the Lisbon map.
The LX Factory reminded us a lot of Toronto’s Distillery District. In 2008 an abandoned 1840’s textile factory was converted into artist studios, cafés, shops and market stalls.
We visited Kajitsu for the second time. It’s a very minimalist and meticulous vegan Japanese restaurant on East 39th near Park Avenue. We sat at the chefs’ counter had the multi-course “Kaze” seasonal menu, made with ingredients that are at their peak in the summer.
We headed to the Upper East Side to see the Met Breuer‘s “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” exhibition, which featured unfinished works by numerous artists including Paul Cezanne, Lucian Freud and Van Eyck.
These unfinished artworks were interesting because you could get a glimpse of the process the artists used as they worked. This Picasso painting is just pencil lines, with some sections filled in with paint and the rest left as raw canvas.
London is such a vast city that even a full week spent exploring as tourists meant we barely scraped the surface of a few neighbourhoods.
In between all the other major landmarks, museums, pubs and restaurants we visited and blogged about, we also came across other things that caught our interest. Here’s a random compilation.
Our time in London was suddenly running short, but conveniently many of the remaining essential London sites we wanted to see were quite close together.
Our first stop on the Westminster side of the river was Downing Street. Due to understandable security concerns, the street is gated from Whitehall and heavily guarded. The Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing is barely visible through the bars.
Nearby, we saw some democracy in action, in the form of a loud protest on Whitehall.
It was a stereotypically grey English morning when we headed down to the River Thames at Bankside, not far from our hotel. We descended to Bankside Pier at river level where we purchased tickets for the Thame’s Clipper boat service, which would take us a few miles southwest to the Millbank Pier.
Despite the risk of rain, it seemed a more scenic way to travel than taking the Tube, and it gave us a close-up view of one of the world’s most famous rivers in all its grey-green muddy glory.
On our way to London, we took advantage of the Icelandair stopover option, which lets you extend a short changeover at the Reykjavik airport into a stay of up to 7 days for no extra airfare. We took two full days, spending the first day in Reykjavik, then taking a Golden Circle bus tour on the second day.
Our overnight flight landed very early, so we dropped our bags at the hotel and headed out to explore drizzly Reykjavik in a haze of jetlag. Impossible to miss almost anywhere in the city is Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church in Iceland. It took 41 years to build, with construction starting in 1945 and ending in 1986.
It cost 900 ISK (about $9) to go up the tower in an elevator, where we were rewarded with photogenic views of otherwise low-rise Reykjavik.
This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
We stayed at Hotel East Houston (since renamed the Edge Hotel as of 2017) for the first time. This is the view of the hotel from the north side of Houston St. It’s very close to lots of trendy neighbourhoods, but still maintains a bit of grit through its proximity to the Lower East Side, Houston Street and the Bowery.
This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
The view up Elizabeth Street from our hotel room. We stayed at the Nolitan Hotel for the second trip in a row. It’s in Nolita (aka “North of Little Italy) and is pretty much on the boundary between SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy and the Lower East Side. It’s a great central point with good access to multiple subway lines.
This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
The Leadbelly on Orchard Street, a bar snacks and mixed drink joint on a somewhat deserted stretch of Chinatown. We enjoyed some excellent oysters at ludicrously cheap buck-a-shuck prices, which worked out well since the rest of their menu was on the expensive side.