Alfama and Eye Solution

Jan 7th
Today has been mostly uneventful. Morgane and I visited the cathedral Sé and walked through Alfama again in an ill-advised attempt to see Sao Vincente de Fora and the National Pantheon. Both of these are closed on Mondays. After our lunch I was finally able to track down contact solution.
Europe has a bit of a pharmaceutical shopping anomaly: you can’t actually shop for things. You enter and ask for what you want because everything is behind counters. This is an obvious problem when you don’t speak the language because contact solution isn’t exactly a high priority translation phrase in guidebooks. Naturally I found the one person in Portugal that doesn’t speak any English or French at the first pharmacy we visited. After some sign language maneuvers I walked out with nothing but a tiny bottle of Visine. On my second visit to a pharmacy the clerk spoke English and informed me that you can only by contact solution in optometry shops. Luckily the closest one to our area was smack in the middle of a ritzy shopping area so I got to drop $15/12€ for contact solution I could have got at a grocery store in America for half the price.