Èvora.

Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos.

Made my way to Èvora, a sleepy little town just two hours away from Lisbon by bus (don't worry, there will be lots of time for biking yet), and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The place is very quiet, has a nice plaza downtown for coffee drinking/ice-cream eating and people watching. They sell some local crafts here, including, curiously, stuff made from cork. They seem to treat cork a bit like paper or leather, making purses, shoes, and even chair seats out of them. Very strange.

Anyway, other than the quaint little town one of Evora's claim to fame is the Capela dos Ossos, the Chapel of the Bones. Turns out three Franciscan monks built this chapel as a type of memento mori. The walls and ceiling are all made out of skulls and bones (see pictures here), and this rather macabre idea was all done in order to encourage the worshipper to think about life and death.

Blech. Death? How....boring. What's there to somberly ponder about anyway? I mean, once you're dead, there's not much left to think about, right? With you no longer having a brain and all?

As for me, I'd rather think about life sitting under the shade of a tree in the middle of a summer meadow somewhere, birds chirping and the wind blowing in my hair.