Author: TravellinPenguin

I like taking phone photos from a bus or train when travelling. I thought I’d share a few here.

Driving into Lisbon on our tour bus we noticed a very large exhibition happening in a park. Turns out that park is five minutes from our hotel and the exhibition is a book fair. There were tents and stalls set up everywhere surrounded by beautiful Jacaranda trees in full bloom. After our morning city tour and a tour through the monastery and eating the best cream tarts in the world three of us headed out to look at what it is all about. I might add it is 36 degrees C outside and feels hotter.

This book fair has been held for 89 consecutive years in Lisbon without fail. Thank goodness that most books are in Portuguese so I was not tempted to buy any. Most stalls featired new books but we did see a couple of places selling antiquarian books. Many educational resources also for school children. We spent close to an hour looking at everything but without much shade and too much cement ground cover the intense mid afternoon heat won out and we headed back to the hotel about 15 to 20 minutes away. It was certainly a fun experience. I enjoyed seeing the different covers on familiar titles. Here are the photos. The fair goes from mid May to mid June. One month of books!

As  expected this trip has been full on and not much time to post anything. Also very tired at end of today. We are at Coimbra, Portugal on the way to Lisbon. You will need to google it if inerested. Today we had free time from 12 :30 through the evening. I actually got to sleep 2 hours this afternoon so feel good enough to pop up a post.

We did a city tour this morning. There is an old (1700s) university here and we got to visitt the library. So fascinating. A couple of floors of very old books but no photos allowed on upper floor but could take some on the lower floor.

They have a first edition Shakespeare copy of Hamlet. The walls are 2 meters thick and to get rid of silverfish eating these old tomes they have a couple of openings in the wall to let in tiny bats that live here. I saw them flying around my hotel window last night. The bats fly into the library and eat the silverfish. All the old wooden tables are covered up nightly and a cleaner comes in each morning to clean up bat droppings. The library is still used by researchers and PhD students.

After that we walked around the touristy area of the city, heading down hill towards the river and back to our hotel. Here are a set of miscellaneous photos.