After snoozing from about 6:30 last night until 7 this morning, we all woke up ready to try to salvage our time in Lisbon. But our morning started with discovering trails of ants in our bathroom. They weren’t very smart ants because we had food in our room… no where near the bathroom. But that’s where they all were, marching along the bathtub and sink. Yuck. I suppose it could have been much worse.
At breakfast (we ate upstairs in the breakfast room this time) we decided that since we were up so early ,there was time to go to the aquarium before having to check in at the cruise ship… especially if we take a cab. (Now that we’ve found that not every cabbie is out to rip us off. Although standing on that street hungry and pissed off, I didn’t care what it cost to get to the Hard Rock Cafe.)
We checked out of the hotel and left our luggage in their care, then we walked down the street to the trolley stop, which is next to the taxi stand. Bill stuck his head in one taxi and asked to go to the aquarium. And the driver just looked at him, sort of shrugged, and made zero effort to figure out where we wanted to go. I guess he was happier sitting there doing nothing than making a few Euros. Bill handed me the tourist map we’d gotten at the hotel and I got in the cab and tried. I showed him where we were trying to go and he said oceanariumo or something like that and I said yes, si, oui (to cover my bases) and we got in. It was a pretty far drive in the opposite direction than we’d been going the last two days. And it is in the new, modern section of town, which Bill liked. We now know he isn’t thrilled at going to places filled with old, crumbly buildings. How unfortunate, given that all our travels are in Europe right now.
In the center of the aquarium is a huge tank filled with all sorts of sea creatures like sharks and sting rays and some really ugly fish I’d never seen before. It was pretty cool. You could see it from different windows all through the building, so as you walk through and look at the other exhibits you can stop every so often to check out the different vantage points into the big tank. Kaitlyn was a lot more interested in the aquarium than I thought she would be. (And far more interested than she was in those coaches.) We saw penguins and sea otters and jelly fish and sea horses that look like seaweed and star fish and I think just about any fish you can think of. And the aquarium was just the right size… just about the time Kaitlyn was getting bored we were done. She picked out a tube of plastic sea creatures in the gift shop. She says now her dollies can play pet shop. It’ll be one weird pet shop. Outside we stopped to get a small lunch. We ate at a cafe right there, rather than risk finding one along our walk to where we could catch another taxi. (Lesson learned yesterday, thank you very much!)
Today has gone much better than yesterday or the day before. Bill is right. Planning is important when you travel.