portugal: leiria, batalha, alcobaca, tomar

from peniche i took another early morning bus to the city of leiria...(i've never quite figured out the correct pronunciation of the name..where is the accent supposed to be?)...i wasn't able to check into my hotel, but i was able to leave my bags while i went out for the day...
i had decided ahead of time to use the town as a base to see three UNESCO sights in the area...my first stop was a town called batalha...as lonely planet puts it, there is only one thing to see in this town, an OLD monastery...you can see it from where the bus drops you off, which is basically a streetside bus stop...

the outside is stunning, and totally worth the trip...the inside is rather boring, nothing i haven't seen in any of the gbillions of churches i've seen over the years...(do i sound really jaded?)...there is a small tomb of the unknown inside the church, which is guarded...i got to see the changing of the guards, which was nifty...it isn't a huge ceremony, but it was nice to see...
i tested lonely planet's assertion that there was nothing else to see in town by wandering around a bit...the book was right, there really wasn't anything else to see...

i had salad for lunch, yippee!! i realize this isn't something that needs to go in a blog, but i've already realized that there aren't a lot of vegetable options in portugal...there are vegetables, but not so much for budget travelers, if that makes any sense...
i took another bus to alcobaca, another town with a UNESCO monastery...the bus station isn't in sight distance of the monastery, i had to guess a couple times as to where i should walk...eventually, i found where i should go...(it helped that i had seen a couple postcards with pictures of the monastery, so at least i knew what i was looking for)...the best part of this monastery wasn't the outside, nor the inside, but rather being able to climb stairs in a few areas, which gave me different views of the inside and outside...i love stairs...(yes, i know that sounds wierd)...

i loved the refectory (where everyone ate) because of all the arches in the ceiling...this church was far plainer than batalha...i'm not sure how the UNESCO designation came, i suppose i could read the website to see where the value of this monastery comes from...it's not ugly, i just didn't think it was totally awesome...the monastery in alcobaca was far larger than the one in batalha...i don't know how many monks/nuns/whoeva lived in either during their heydays...nor do i know when those heydays were...(yes, i know i should look it up, i'm sure the two of you that are reading this really want to know)

the bus back to leiria was easy, just time consuming...
the next morning i wandered around leiria a bit while waiting to catch another bus...(portugal is a small country, bus rides aren't that long, though they don't always depart regularly)...to get to tomar, i had to take a bus to batalha, then connect to somewhere else, then catch one last bus...yes, i was confused...this last bus dropped me off in a different place from where i expected, thank goodness for maps:)...
the outside of this monastery is full of gardens, which are beautiful, and looked as though they were productive in addition to being beautiful...

i walked uphill to the monastery in tomar, which sits at the top of the hill overlooking the town...after the two monasteries i'd seen the previous day, i didn't have high hopes...but this monastery was awesome...i ended up wandering for hours...it's huge, even though it doesn't appear that way...every time i thought i'd seen everything, i found a new hallway, or walked around a new corner to see something new...WOW...at least four different cloisters, each very different...
tomar didn't have many places to buy postcards, it wasn't easy to find them...
there is a small platz in the middle of town, i loved it...fun to watch locals hang out...there are gardens near the monastery, i wandered through those while waiting for my bus to depart...the gardens are situated in such a way that they were cold...sitting in a little valley of sorts, so the cold sinks and stays there...i got too cold to hang out for long, so i found a bakery in which to warm up and kill more time...somehow or another i ended up talking to a woman from arizona who owns a house in town...how cool is that?

thankfully, the bus back to leiria was simple, and i only needed one bus...