A culture day in Lisbon

Lisboa is filled with culture! Who knew that they had a puppetry museum! I was filled with joy at this discovery. Rachel, Grandma and I took a taxi right to the museum and we found ourselves surrounded by puppets from all over the world! There were shadow puppets, water puppets, hand puppets, paper puppets, toy theatre puppets...you name it and it was in the museum. They were all beautiful! What was most enlightening for me was that there were so many Portuguese puppeteers. It just confirmed for me how much I am meant to be in the profession I am in! Puppeteering is in my blood. Grandma looked at me with a proud smile as I perused all of the puppets and took pictures. I know I am 27 nearly 28, but it is still so important to me to make my parents and grandparents proud of me. I know I will always persue my dreams, but when your loved ones take a genuine interest in what you are doing, it means the world.
There was a tour of children running through the museum looking at all the puppets. There is something about the relationship between a puppet and a child. Children are facinated with puppets. If I go into a room of 20 children and I bring out a puppet their eyes are immediately glued to the puppet. I started getting really excited for my next adventure to the puppetry festival in Holland where I will be performing with Spica. I oddly felt very much at home in this puppetry museum. I really felt like--myself.
Next we took another taxi over to the museum of modern art! We walked through this beautiful garden before finally finding the museum. It was like a mase surounded by gorgeous trees. It didn't even seem like we were in the middle of a city anymore. When we arrived we immediately went down stairs where they had a huge exhibit. Grandma pointed out a painting where there were two couples eating at dinner. We were trying to decided if in the painting they were disgusted with the check, or if they were looking at a theatre program and just looked bored. What is amazing about art, is that it is possible for it to be open to interpretation. I was impressed by Grandma's knowledge of art. Is there anything she doesn't know? :)
We went back, had a huge lunch and then called it a day. Well, minus our daily visit to the ice cream shop. They knew us by this point and we always arrived less than an hour before closing. Why they closed at 8:00PM we will never know, but we loved it. They had amazing tea, ice cream and cakes.
Later that night we were all extremely tired from our trip. It was definitely a banana grams night. I don't know who won that night, but I am sure whoever did shouted in a high pitched voice--I WIN!