Dear Family, Friends, and Diary,
We had a bit of a plan today. After he ran some get-well duties in the morning, cousin Tim would meet us for lunch and "the best view in town". Before that, Marianne and I wanted to walk to at least one more of the many Lisbon museums. I think there are more museums and galleries than we have days, but that's OK. We'll do what we can.
We walked about a quarter-hour, past spring scenes, to the Medeiros e Almeida Museum. The museum building is in two parts. On the left is the grand late-19th Century house that was the home of the Antonio Medeiros e Almeida family. The family acquired the late-19th Century house in 1943 and lived there for 30 years. In the early 1970s, they moved out, built an addition to display their collections, and donated everything to the city of Lisbon.
Born into a prosperous Azorean family, Antonio Medeiros e Almeida expanded the family's fortunes with an early auto company, an airlines, and almost two dozen other successful companies. Along with business, his passion was collecting art and decorations and he spent his last years making sure others could enjoy all that he had collected. The museum does that, along with giving insight into a luxurious lifestyle of the Medeiros e Almeida family.
Of course there were hundreds of picture-worthy parts in our museum visit, but I will include only a fraction, some showing the family's living opulence and others a few collection pieces.
Family dinner setting.
Remember, left to right, outer to inner.
Game and music rooms.
Giant tapestry with precise detail.
A gallery constructed to house a specific painting collection.
The display of over 70 ornate fans was fascinating,
including an explanation of the intricate "language" of fan operation.
The collection of ornate clocks, finely-crafted pocket watches,
and palm-sized music boxes was equally impressive.
Our hour-long visit was too short, but we needed to walk back to LX51 and meet Tim. From there we took an Uber to the Amoreiras shopping center and a lunch stop at Honest Greens. The restaurant was a bit of a food factory, but good food, at a reasonable price, and featuring vegetables beyond French fries. Local food is often heavy on carbs, but light on veggies, so this was a welcome break.
The shopping center was more than an American shopping mall. First, it's huge, over 200 stores, 50 restaurants, and seven movie theaters spread over 45,000 square meters (almost a half-million square feet). Second, the collection of stores was far more varied than the routine parade of chain stores our mall back home are populated with.
And there was a biblical Easter display.
However, the highlight of our Amoreiras visit was not to shop, but to pay our 3 euros for a ride up to reputedly the "best view in Lisbon". And it was.
Panorama views don't really work in pictures.
You need to be there.
And that was it for our touring. Tim's covid-recovery was still keeping him limited and Marianne's who-knows-what had kicked in. It was time for afternoon rests. That's all OK, since we had covered a fair amount of our part of Lisbon.
Tuesday was, as usual, unplanned. We needed to make use of the sunny skies for the next two days because rain is on the horizon.
Stay tuned,
John and Marianne