Shopping is a national pastime in Portugal, but, strangely, an indoors pastime. I hate the enormous, exhausting, artificially lit, themed shopping malls that mark the outskirts of the cities, full at all times except for when it's beach weather or when there are important football matches. Luckily, you never need to visit the malls if you're in Lisbon; as you can find anything you want within the city.

Rua do Carmo

Chiado is one part of the city that is always buzzing with people, and a great place for shopping. There are two main streets, Rua do Carmo and Rua Garrett, climbing from the Baixa up to Chiado where international chain stores and a small shopping mall, Armazéns do Chiado, can be found. But you've seen these shops before, as you've probably got most of them at home.

Rua Garrett

In between them there are smaller stores, from jewellers to textile shops, many of them still with original shop fronts, some with all the clutter of modern marketing vying for attention with 19th century decor. Oddly, most visitors stay on these two streets without straying off into the smaller, far less cluttered streets of Chiado. But that's where some real jewels of Chiado can be found.

In Rua Anchieta there is a very special place called A Vida Portuguesa: The Portuguese Life. At first, it seems that the dark 19th century shelves are filled with faux old-style packages, facsimiles of vintage products from Portugal. On closer inspection, though, they are the real things: real toothpaste, real tinned sardines, real schoolbooks, real soap, still in production. Designs idiosyncratic of Portugal and of the last century, creating a snapshot of Portuguese memories and culture and of Portuguese-ness.

Even I got all nostalgic, and I've only been in the country for ten years. The Portuguese are fiercely proud of their distant history, but because the Salazarist regime and the 1974 revolution are still warm in the memory of many Portuguese, you can't get them to talk too much about the last fifty or so years (not until they trust you, anyway). So to be able to see the objects together at A Vida Portuguesa is also like having a privileged glance into the Portuguese past that was not so long ago.

When I was in A Vida Portuguesa the other day, I was wandering around behind an elderly Portuguese couple, grinning coyly at each other, grinning at things they remembered from the old days and at things they had forgotten about. The Portuguese don't generally grin a lot, so this must be a good place.

A Vida Portuguesa, Rua Anchieta 11, Chiado.