We spent the first week of our trip in Lisbon, staying at the Holiday Inn Express Lisbon Liberdade, which we loved after we got them to move us into a room that wasn’t right above a loud and smokey restaurant. Portugal allows smoking in outdoor restaurant areas (and many other places, too), so you need to plan around the likelihood of being near a smoker if you want to eat outside.
Picking our hotel was a bigger challenge than we expected. Most people opt to stay in one of the older parts of Lisbon, like the Alfama district, which is closer to the river and many of the historic sites, museums and restaurants. But when we looked into their reviews, all the hotels we checked in the more touristy areas each had some significant negative reviews. Involving things like malfunctioning plumbing, odors, and lots of crowd noise. The hotels had good ratings, mind you. It’s just they had what a finance person would describe as “high betas”: mostly positive reviews, but with a non-trivial number of awful ones. Which is why we ultimately decided to stay further away from the touristy areas, in an IHG-owned hotel. We took comfort from the idea a major chain, because its properties couldn’t be kitschy, had to offer very good service1. And we were right.
Among other things, while the hotel’s associated restaurant did drive us out of our first room, it served a wonderful breakfast buffet. This one picture doesn’t do it justice. It offered multiple juices, eggs in many forms, bacon, sausage, cheeses, yogurt, fresh fruit, a huge variety of pastries (that’s a Portuguese coconut pastry in the picture), cereal, bread…and two of the highest-tech espresso machines I’ve ever seen. It was fun trying different espresso drinks and watching the machine prepare them!
The Lisbon Liberdade also ended up being close to several grocery stores and, more importantly, a metro stop. That’s important because Lisbon is so hilly you don’t want to walk long distances, and you can only buy extended transit passes (usable on the metro, buses, trams and ferries) at the metro stops.
Buying our first metro passes introduced us to another wonderful feature of Portugal, namely, it’s amazingly friendly and helpful residents. We were working our way through the menu system (fortunately it offered an English option) when a woman came up and immediately began helping us. She was shocked when I offered to let her use the machine first, since we were still learning it and most metro riders don’t leave themselves time to dawdle in the stations, and insisted on helping us instead. Her behavior towards foreigners was the norm throughout Lisbon and Porto.
We were both pretty wiped from the flight, so, other than buying some food for dinner in our room, we limited our first day to walking to a delightful little outdoor cafe in one of the numerous parks that dot Lisbon. It even offered live music! By the way, if I look a little spacey it’s because it was, body time, about 6:00 AM and I hadn’t slept on the plane. At least I managed to get us both in the frame on the first try!
Along the way to the cafe, we both noticed something interesting about the buildings we were passing. Many of them feature a lot of beautiful tile work — artistic tiles are a key part of Portugal’s history — but they also featured a lot of colors, mostly pastels. Which created a warm and beautiful environment.
On the way back to our hotel we ran across this little place. I took a picture of its sign to illustrate something else we found interesting about Portugal: they use English in a lot of places where you’d expect them to use Portuguese. I suspect this a result of ancient, and deep, ties between the UK and Portugal. There’s even a King Edward Park, named for the UK’s King Edward the VII after he visited Lisbon in the early 20th century.
Don’t be mislead by the Holiday Inn Express branding; at least in Portugal, a Holiday Inn Express is much higher-end than the same name hotels are in the US. ↩
