Lisbon, Portugal - The Tile Museum

Lisbon, Portugal - The Tile Museum

 

So, I already posted about the beautiful city of Lisbon, but here I am posting only about the Tile Museum. I have been to Spain before and visited The Alhambra. There were beautiful tiles there that I remembered so when I toured the Tile Museum I was thrilled! If you like tile, this is the place to go!

Tiles of all varieties,

styles,

dates

colors

 

 

Textures

 

histories 

 

 and shapes

 

 

  

 

Here I will not have much commentary. This is mostly so that you can "see what you can see".

Here is a beautiful cathedral that was attached to the Tile Museum. It is exquisite! There will be more details about this cathedral later. I need to do a little bit of research about it.

Just to note, I took pictures of the beautiful

Parkay and marble floors.

You may also want to check out the, what I would call, "stalls" where I would guess the cardinals sat during mass.

There were little "shadow box" style of glass front cabinets where various artifacts were stored. I would assume they were personal items or momentos of the various cardinals. Again, I have to do the research to find out the stories behind them but here are a few more pictures.

 

 

 

Magnificent, isn't it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

H10 Duque de Louie, Hotel in Lisbon, Portugal July 15-18, 2015

H10 Duque de Louie, Hotel in Lisbon, Portugal July 15-18, 2015

So, I ran out of room describing Lisbon so

I am making a separate post for this hotel.

H10 has only been open since March. I found them on a search engine and was very happy with my stay.

They paid great attention to detail and the prices

were very reasonable for what you got.

First of all, here is my room. Isn't it lovely?

It is almost a straight shoot to downtown where the town square is and walking down there, you pass the shopping district.

There is a breakfast that you can pay for and the food was wonderful.

I had risotto with mushrooms and parmesan cheese

and lime mousse with white chocolate

for dessert

 

I had room service the first night to try to get started on downloading my pictures to start getting caught up with my blog. It has taken me 2 weeks and I am almost done!

Here is a picture of the lobby, 

 and the dining room/restaurant manager.

I was also able to take pictures of the people

at the front desk.

I would definitely stay here again when coming back to Lisbon.

Lisbon, Portugal - The Tile Capital of the (my?) World, July 15 - 18, 2015

 Lisbon, Portugal - The Tile Capital of the (my?) World, July 15 - 18, homes,

So, I have been to Spain before, and more specifically, the Alhambra with the Moorish influence but I have to say, I saw a heck of a lot of tile here in Lisbon, but don't let me get ahead of myself.

To start out in Lisbon, I have been on a boat for 9 days and so my first afternoon and evening, I took it easy. Well, I had about 1,000 pictures to download and wanted to contact those people that I couldn't communicate with while I was on the cruise, so I took care of business. The next day I was ready to go.

I had a nice breakfast at my hotel H10 Duque de Louie, and walked over to the hop-on hop-off bus. We got just a couple of miles down the road, and a couple of get-off stops, and there was an accident right in front of us on a 2 lane road. One lane each direction. I could tell this was going to take a while and since I didn't really have time to waste, I decided to catch a taxi back to the town center and maybe take the on-off bus in the other direction.

Well, when I got to the town center, I walked around a little and saw some tuk-tuks. They are motorcycle steering with 2 wheels on the back to carry passengers. I asked one of the guys who ran a tuk-tuk, what the arrangement was as far as services and we struck up a deal and we were off. And, boy, was I glad that I did. The tuk-tuks, because they are small, can get in and out of everywhere, they can climb hills, they can go on narrow streets, and they can be easily parked.

 My driver was Cristiano. Cristiano is an engineering student and it is summer break so this is his summer job. He said he is really enjoying it and having fun.

First he drove me up to the top of the hill to see the view.

It is spectacular.

There were side streets everywhere that had streamers hanging over the middle of the street.

I asked Cristiano what that was. There was a special festival a little while back and the streamers are still up. He said that the streets are so packed during this festival that you can hardly move and people stay up most of the night partying.

As we moved on, we found an arts and crafts fair near the top of one hill.  Some of the proceeds were going to The Boy Scouts so I bought a couple of trinkets.

Then I noticed, in souvenir shop windows, that there were some kind of fish, some kind of chicken and swallows. So, there are 3 stories.

The fish represent sardines which I guess are very common here. It is common to have sardines on a sandwich.

The chicken story is about a man of royal blood who was going to be executed and he said, if the cock crows 3 times then I won't be executed. So, they didn't kill him.  The swallows, well, I didn't find out what they represented but a vendor told me that it is common to see several swallows hanging on a wall in homes around here.

Another interesting thing that I really like that they have here is lots of tile. It's everywhere!

It's on the outside of

In the parks, in the plazas. It is all over the place here. I love it!

I also love all the beautiful architecture that is found in cathedrals, government buildings and private homes and museums.

 

See the flag poles for the Expo that was here in 1998?

they still use trolley cars (I love that!)

 

There are several beautiful parks here, the tile museum, which I will cover in a separate blog, wall art, the Expo, tiled glass recycle bins and so much more that I'd like to share but I am out of room.

 

Lisbon was wonderful!