Travel Review: Lisbon Aquarium

Greetings greetings from the summery paradise of Salvador Bahia. I have a bunch of material for quite a few travel reviews already, but lets take things one step at a time and start from the beginning.
On Easter Sunday my boyfriend and I took the red eye flight to Lisbon, where we had an eight and a half layover before getting on a flight to Salvador, Brazil. The Lisbon airport is a little small and doesn't have much to offer, my boyfriend's brother only lives an hour away from it and he just had a new baby, so why not have him come over and visit a little bit to pass the time? He arrived with a gorgeous two month old darling and his Spanish girlfriend, which made for an interesting language conundrum: I spoke to my boyfriend in Italian, he translated for his brother in Romanian, he translated to his girlfriend in Spanish. Phew! Anyway once we said hi all around my boyfriend's brother suggests: why not go to the Lisbon Aquarium to pass some time before your flight? Boy I love you already. Best layover idea ever!

We get the full ticket to see both the "temporary" exhibit and the "permanent" one, and I am extremely excited. There are TURTLES! We go straight up to the temporary exhibit which is the one that was supposed to be all about turtles. I saw one turtle. It was cool, it swam under my feet, but all in all the temporary exhibit was mostly information and very few actual animals to see. I was a little disappointed, so we moved on to the permanent portion of the aquarium.

This part was far, far better. It is very cleverly designed, revolving around one gigantic tank with a manta ray and some huge sharks, but I cannot say that you don't get some pretty awesome value for money. They have puffins! and OTTERS! having (relatively) recently been to the aquarium in Barcellona, it was fun to see some completely different animals from the ones that were chilling over there. Not to mention the funniest spaz of a puffin I've ever seen.

All in all I can't say that the aquarium in Lisbon is better than the one in Barcellona, I still think the latter wins out certain levels, but it definitely comes close to it. Also it is not too far away from the airport and right on the sea, so it makes for a lovely little walk and, as I said before, the best layover I have ever had in my life!