Palm Beach International has an in-terminal art museum. Here’s a work regarding homophobia that is so pervasive and severe that the artwork “to discuss homophobia” was selected for display to several million travelers:
Our 8-year-old was seated next to a New Yorker on the flight to EWR:
Incompetence by United Airlines resulted in the inbound plane arriving at PBI one hour late. That put us right into prime Florida afternoon thunderstorm territory so there was an additional delay while lightning struck all around the airport and the ramp was closed. I bit my nails as the 2.5-hour plane change time in Newark, during which we’d have to take a bus from Terminal A to Terminal C, was eaten away.
Despite the time crunch at EWR, I managed to get a photo of an all-gender family restroom, the last so-labeled that we would likely see for three weeks:
The young, slender, apparently healthy, and righteous wore their masks in the EWR terminal and then while walking onto our EWR-LIS flight:
All of my nail-biting was pointless. The flight was showing on time when we rushed to the gate to find… no Boeing 787. Flightaware showed that the plane had landed two days earlier. Where was the plane? “They’re bringing it over from the hangar,” said a United employee. “I don’t know why they didn’t do it earlier.” After everyone was boarded we couldn’t close the door because the in-flight entertainment system wasn’t working properly. We departed more than two hours late and, thus, could have enjoyed a relaxed dinner if the delays hadn’t been piecemeal.
The Lisbon airport is so close to downtown that Uber Black is only about $30. More comfortable than a tuktuk anyway:
We stayed at the Altis Prime apartment hotel in Principe Real. This is walking distance from the tourist Baixa while quieter and more convenient for doing business. The hotel is around the corner from a synagogue so, literally within hours after we arrived, the kids got to see a Free Palestine march:
(Only about 50 out of Greater Lisbon’s 2.9 million residents chose to participate.)
After a bit of napping to recover from our United Basic Economy experience (Economy wouldn’t have been any better; by the time we booked there weren’t any decent clusters of four seats available and the premium seats were all sold out), we headed down to the Baixa (heart of downtown) and found a quiet pro-Ukraine gathering:
The next day we went to the natural history museum that is near our hotel and found this juxtaposition of an electron microscope up against a tile wall, which is an 800-year-old tradition in Portugal:
The museum is next to one of Lisbon’s three (at least) botanical gardens:
From the garden it is a quick walk to the Bairro Alto, a neighborhood just above the Baixa that is served by an elevator and a funicular:
I remembered the Time Out Market as being fun, but that was in September. In June it is mobbed to the point that there is nowhere to sit and also insufficiently air conditioned:
The obligatory panoramic:
Here’s the kind of thing that we’re getting from AI today:
I wonder if instead we could get robot stonework so that modern buildings could be ornate and beautiful:
A couple of the pedestrian-only streets of the Baixa. Note the elevator to the Bairro Alto in the background of one photo:
To be continued…