Ciao Readers!

We are back state-side and slowly adjusting to the 7 hour time difference after a 24-hour commute home (I love travel… traveling, not so much). I hope your new year has started off well.

Having recently shared my life-long affection for Puppets (see my Muppet post), it will be no surprise that when I stumbled upon the fact that Lisbon has a puppet museum, I knew we had to go! (In contrast, feel free to skip their largest art Museum, the Gulbenkian – if you’ve been to any other large/famous museum you’ve seen better.) The puppet museum is funky and dark (even their tickets, below, are cool and weird). There are puppets from throughout the ages – from early Thai shadow puppets, Vietnamese water puppets, lots of old European and traditional Portuguese puppets, and on through modern day stop-action animation figures (complete with mini props!). It seems that puppets were often used as an entertaining way to make subversive cultural or political statements, including during the latest fascist regime in Portugal (did you know they had a dictator until 1974?!). It was kinda surreal and creepy in there, but supercool (they even have a place you can put on your own puppet show). I felt in-the-know finding this off-the-grid site, seeing how it’s not even in travel guru Rick Steves’ Lisbon book.  Take a look…..

Next time we travel to the nearby town of Sintra to see its very eclectic Pena Palace….