Hospit-doll: A Nightmare-Fueled Photo Essay

After our Farewell Drinking Tour of Spain...

...Val, Donna and I hopped a teeny tiny plane...

...did a little bit of reading...

...and landed 60 short minutes later at everyone's favorite vacation destination: Lisbon, Portugal!

Home of some of the world's most stunning architecture...

...breathtaking views...

...and rich history...

...so of course, our first stop was the Hospital De Bonecas...

...AKA:  The Doll Hospital and Museum.

Our ticket to get in.  Seriously.

For those of you following closely, my intense, white-hot fear of dolls should come as no surprise.  The last Road Trip blog had a visit to a doll museum off an island in Finland, which was insanely upsetting--and my terror can be traced back to my very first road trip, when a certain doll and I got into a fight.  (A fight which, for the record, continues to this very day.)

But here in Lisbon, part of me thought that since the dolls were not in one piece, that maybe they'd be less frightening.

I was gravely mistaken.

The only thing scarier than dolls, as it turns out, is parts of dolls.

This place has been repairing dolls since 1830, and people from all over the world use their service.

Everyone there is super nice, but here's the thing...  

...they work with demon dolls, and it's fucking creepy. 

From floor...

...to ceiling...

...this place is where your childhood goes to murder you.  The first room you enter houses the dolls in various states of disrepair.  The patients, if you will:

Of course, in order to fix them...

...you'll need spare doll parts.

Lots of them.  

And the deeper into the hospital you go...

...the scarier it gets.

Like what happened to these things??

Seriously.

And once you exit the operating & recovery rooms...

...you end up where the repaired dolls live...

...and work...

...and kill themselves...

...presumably to get even more powerful in order to murder us all.  

I assume most of these are still here long after they are "fixed" because someone wised up enough to say: WE DON'T WANT THIS THING IN OUR HOUSE...

...THAT'S WHY WE TRIED TO KILL IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Had enough yet?

Well, too bad.  Take a look at some of the other horrors that await you inside of the Doll Hospital:

For the record, I did ask if these things came to life at night.  The nice woman who was guiding the tour laughed as though I was not being serious.  But the dolls heard it--it was my mistake to ask in front of them.  

And so the real reason we've been lagging on this blog isn't because we've been drunken messes... it's because it is really difficult to type with your arms and hand stuffed in a drawer somewhere.