Our first Uber ride ever was at 4:00 am to SLO airport, driven by the co-owner of a Korean restaurant in Atascadero taking on an extra job to help his daughter pay for medical school.  Jan immediately learned it was the restaurant where our family friend Emma worked before going to University in Hawaii.

Also for the first time, we traveled Economy Plus rather than straight Economy. At 83 and 80, for the 24 hour flight we chose comfort over price.

While reading about Lisbon in preparation for the trip I studied the google map to learn the lay of the land and the location of the hotel we’d be staying in for nine days. But I couldnt get oriented.

We were drawn to the Lisboa 1908 by articles on the web praising it as an architectural masterpiece of Beaux Art/Art Nouveau style built for luxury apartments, later, along with its neighborhood, falling into decay and then reconstructed  in 2015 with artistic and architectural flair, a center of the district’s new revitalization.

Upon arrival, rattling our rollies across the mosaic of rock pavers we were thrilled by the variety of sights and sounds in the sunlight on the square facing the hotel’s grandiose exterior: tree shaded cafes, bubbling fountains, multicolored, multishaped tiled buildings, a bedraggled old palace, an excavation, a group of school kids on tour, a bunch of  guys just hanging around.

We were welcomed in good English by amiable staffers under the massive wall sculpture of a dragonfly assembled from trash and overlaid by spatters of paint that seemed to allude to the graffiti covering many of the city’s beautiful buildings.

The elevator ride to the room on the fourth floor extended the art gallery feel of the place, this time with a vertical mural revealed during the ride and keyed on the inside of the window.

The balcony on of the small room’s window gave out onto the  Avenida Largo and our first glimpse of Tram 28.

After unpacking and a nap, we roamed the plaza

During dinner at “Infame,” the hotel’s restaurant, the art gallery ambience was reinforced by assemblages on the walls alluding to episodes in Portuguese legend and to the past history of the building as a bordello.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2026 and is filed under Miscellaneous, Portugal 2026, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.