September 5: Lisbon, Portugal

Lisbon was the port of call I have been looking forward to the most on this trip. I had seen and heard a lot about the cuisine of Portugal and I was eager to try some for myself. When we got off the ship and into our minibus the first place we went to was the Antigua Confeitaria de Belém where they are famous for their pastéis de Belém which is a kind of custard tart sprinkled with cinnamon and powdered sugar.

The tarts were like nothing I've had before. The texture was totally different from the egg tarts that you have for dim sum. They were extremely rich, yet at the same time they seemed very light and easy to eat. 

The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos is located next door to the bakery and is where the pastries were originally baked and sold. 

Inside the cathedral at the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos lay the tombs of Vasco da Gama and the poet Luís Camões. 

Vasco da Gama

Next we drove around central Lisbon for a while looking at some of the sites from the minibus. The Alfama neighborhood was cool because it's one of the older neighborhoods and many of the buildings are covered in hand-painted ceramic tiles. After spending about an hour driving around central Lisbon we headed out towards the towns of Sintra and Cascais. Originally I wasn't too excited about going to these resort towns, but they turned out to be really nice. Sintra is a small town about a half hour outside of Lisbon and is where Portuguese royals built the Palácio Nacional de Sintra to vacation. The town itself is a fun labyrinth of walking streets with restaurants, souvenir shops, and bakeries all over. It almost reminded me of a small easier to navigate Mykonos. While there I grabbed a snack of pastel de bacalhau, which were real tasty. 

After Sintra we drove to the westernmost point in Europe, the Cabo da Roca, where the wind was howling. We spent about fifteen minutes at the point before heading to Cascais for about a half an hour. Cascais is a small beach resort town and is or was the home to many international dignitaries, some of whom include the Prince of Monaco, the King of France/Count of Paris, King of Italy, King of Romania, King of Spain, King of Portugal/Count of Lisbon, and two dictators of Portugal. The town itself was very small and compared to some other resort towns that I've been to it didn't seem like anything special. Once our time was up in Cascais we had to drive back to Lisbon to catch the boat. Unfortunately I never got to try a full meal in Lisbon, but the pastéis de Belém and pastel de bacalhau I did have definitely made me want to come back to Portugal in the future.