For the past five days, Barbara, Nancy, Garett, and I have been living in Lisbon, a beautiful city on the coast of Portugal. It is an old city, the sort of old you can feel as you walk around. Many of the buildings are clothed in tiles.

On our first full day we visited Sintra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and also a lovely resort town. It has a straight-up child fantasy novel castle in it along with some Moorish fortifications. The Moors were here for roughly 500 years, providing to the Portuguese their love of tiles and of symmetry.

Check out this symmetry! Except for the foliage, this could be in Morocco.

And it looks like Prince Caspian could live here.

The Moorish fortifications were beautiful and high above the countryside.

While we were in Sintra, we took a tuk tuk. I guess I imagined my first tuk tuk would be in SE Asia; instead it was in a fancy town in Portugal. And the tuk tuk didn’t seem strictly street legal, to be honest. We feared a bit for our lives, but it was the just the right amount of fear–like the fear you get from a good roller coaster that doesn’t have seat belts.

You can see how Nancy and Barbara felt about it below. Garett and I felt we had a duty of care for them so we were kind of worried, but they took it in stride.

On Wednesday we went to the Monastery of Jerónimos, an exceedingly beautiful church and cloister in the middle of Lisbon. The central courtyard seems to provide the kind of refuge one imagines when thinking about taking the vows.

I know you can’t see it, but the church faces the sea.

Right across from the church is the Monument of the Explorers. In case you didn’t know, the Portuguese were the first super travelers; they had these amazing ships that could make it around the bottom of Africa and all the way to the East to get spices and other cargo. When I was in Singapore, they kept going on and on about the Portuguese. It wasn’t until the Dutch managed to capture one of their ships that the other countries started to catch up and could make the journey east. Here are Nancy and Barbara in front of the monument in a rare moment of sunshine. It looks clear in the picture, but it had been raining off and on all day. The mercurial weather of the Atlantic, I guess.

From the tiles right next to the Monument of the Explorers. You know how much I love fantasy creatures. Here there be dragons, etc.

Because it was raining, on our last day we took Tram 28–the tourist tram–around the the city and looked for one last time at all the beautiful buildings. Lisbon is less polished than Madrid, but it is certainly on the up-and-up. There was a ton of construction while we were there and I think that in 5 years, it’ll be just as modern (and just as expensive) as the bigger cities on the Iberian Peninsula. Here are Barbara and Nancy on the tram.

Also, double rainbow from the window of our building.

And elevator music!