We last left off at my journey to the airport for my flight to Lisbon. I had no problems and actually had the most pleasant flight of any on Air Lingus. I guess it pays to fly a legit airline? The nice Irish woman next to me offered me candy after we got on the plane, too...further proof that the Irish are some of the nicest people around. I was also really grateful for my Aussie friend, James that I met while getting off the plane. Neither of us spoke any Portuguese and we both needed to get to the city from the airport, so we tackled the bus together and chatted a bit. Always nice to have someone else with you. James got off a couple stops off before me, so then I was on my own until I could find Sadie. I made it to the general vicinity of the hostel, but then got very confused due to my poor navigation skills and couldn't figure out where the hostel was. I was texting Sadie to see if she was in the city yet and where she was so I could find her....and all of a sudden there I was...lost in Lisbon...in the rain...with a dead phone. Great. Fortunately, I walked back towards where I thought the hostel might be and found Sadie waiting outside the hostel! We walked inside and I was floored! The hostel (Living Lounge Hostel) was probably nicer than most of the hostels I have ever stayed in. The staff was incredibly nice/helpful and the location (in Chiado) was perfect. There's my ten second ad for them--they were great! By the way, our room was music themed and therefore had a working disco ball...cool, right? Sadie and I were both starving by the time we got there, so we ventured out to find a quick bite to eat. We ended up in a café a couple doors down where we had our first-time-in-this-country-don't-speak-the-language experience that was OH so familiar to me from Italy. One of the waiters spoke English, though, so we made it through. After lunch, we took the historic Tram 28 up through the windy hills and narrow streets of Lisbon towards the town. After we got off, we spent the entire rest of the day wandering back down towards our area of town taking pictures and stopping at various view points along the way. Lisbon is a beautiful city--one of the most beautiful I have ever seen--and I was awed by it. I was completely taken with the tiles that cover the facades of the majority of the buildings and couldn't stop commenting about how pretty they were. We stopped at the Sé, which is a cathedral from the middle ages. The cathedral itself was beautiful, but what was even more beautiful was the old cloister. After the Lisbon Earthquake in 1755, they were excavating to rebuild the cathedral and found a huge pit of roman ruins, so they rebuilt the cathedral right in front of the old cloister and you can go back to see the remains of it and the roman ruins. Sadie and I were not at all expecting to see roman ruins in this random cathedral, so we were really pleasantly surprised! Interesting note: while we were at the Sé, we saw both James and the German couple Sadie was sitting with on her train...random?? When we finally made it back to our hostel, we were both exhausted and hungry. Luckily, our hostel provided meals each night from their chef for 8 euros: soup, salad, main course, dessert, and wine! Doesn't get much cheaper. We made a reservation and then relaxed a bit. In Portugal, dinner is pretty late, so the hostel served it around 8 PM...not exactly the dinner time we were used to. When we finally got to dinner, we were starving and in a stupor from a) exhaustion and b) the amazing smells wafting up to our room from the kitchen. Our dinner was excellent and the company was even better. We ate with one of the hostel owners and this guy from Goa who works as a massage therapist at the hostel. We had a good chat about traveling, but by the end I was literally falling asleep at the table. Sadie and I had both been up since about 4 AM that morning and it was going on 11 or 12 PM...long day. We went back upstairs and I slept like a baby until the next morning.
The next day, Sadie and I took a day trip to Sintra, which is a small town near Lisbon. We started our morning with breakfast at the hostel, then we were off to the train station. I was pretty excited because I handled our entire ticket transaction in Portuguese. Small battles mean a lot when it comes to languages. When we got to Sintra, we took a bus up the mountain to the area where the Castelo dos Mouros and the Palácio de Pena are. The bus ride reminded me a bit of Kentucky with the hills, winding roads, and vegetation. Once we got there, Sadie and I spent forever just wandering around exploring the castle. There were incredible views of Sintra and surrounding cities, and the castle itself was built around the 10th century, so there was plenty of exploring to do at the castle itself. It was rebuilt a little in the 19th century by King Ferdinand II because he enjoyed painting there. It was obvious why! Ferdinand II actually spent his time in more luxury digs at the nearby Palácio de Pena. Completely gorgeous! I can't even describe how beautiful this palace was. Not only was the outside with all of the colors and arches amazing, but the inside was full of period furniture and so incredibly opulent. Pretty amazing. It was really interesting because Sadie and I encountered a lot of French tourists in Portugal...popular vacation destination I guess?? When we were through exploring the Palácio de Pena, we headed back down towards town to visit the Palácio Nacional de Sintra. We accidentally went to the gardens first, which weren't much of anything, but then we wandered over towards the correct entrance. Thankfully our European Student ID Cards get us in to a lot of monuments all over Europe for free or nearly so. It's a seriously valuable little card! After we wandered through the palace, we headed back home and had a bit of a rest. We were pretty exhausted from walking around all day. We had a late dinner at a sushi restaurant called Nood that was really good. It was around this point in my trip that I discovered the beauty of Lonely Planet guidebooks. They give great recommendations all around--from places to stay, places to eat, and things to see. They rarely led us astray! Sadie and I ended up sitting in the restaurant chatting for a good three hours. We wanted to go find a little wine bar somewhere to hang out for a bit before heading back to the hostel, but the one we tried was closed. Darn! We were fairly exhausted though, so it wasn't a big deal.
Our last day was even more packed with sightseeing. We made a quick tour of the Convento do Carmo, which is the home of two extremely well-intact Peruvian mummies. Sadie really want to see them after her Anthropology of Latin America last semester, and I have to admit they were really interesting, even kind of creepy. It would be weird if it weren't a little eerie, because Sadie was explaining to me about how the Peruvian Incas were tortured. After our quick stop there, we headed out towards Belém, which is on the far west side of Lisbon. The first thing we wanted to see was the Mosterio dos Jerónimos. The monastery was amazingly beautiful with huge gothic arches along the ceiling. There was quite a bit of gold plating, too, which is always pretty. It was very ornate. As Sadie and I were walking around, we spotted a couple tombs on either side of the church. We walked over towards one that a lot of people were huddled around. We looked at the sign next to it and read that it was Vasco de Gama's tomb. Woah. How often do you just walk up to Vasco de Gama's tomb?? Never! That was really cool. After the monastery, we stopped at a modern art museum that we thought had some Warhols. We spent a good hour there and no Warhols, but a lot of really interesting and downright weird exhibitions. There was a really prominent use of electronic media in most of them...sometimes cool...sometimes bizarre. After leaving, we walked down the Tejo River towards the Torre de Belém. Not only is it really sweet looking, but apparently it used to be a political prison for the Portuguese when Portugal was under the control of Spain. Historical value bonus! I loved walking around inside it because of the beautiful views of the Tejo and the Ponte de 25 Avril--a bridge that looks just like the Golden Gate. In fact, Lisbon is basically San Francisco. They are both hilly, colorful, have Golden Gate bridges, etc. I was constantly amazed by their similarities. After we finished our explore, we walked back along the river towards town to get lunch and Pastis de Belém. I'm not even sure how to begin describing the amazingness that is a Pastis de Belém. They are little pastry puff shells filled with a kind of warm ricey custard with powdered sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on top. Heaven! We caught out tram back towards Lisbon so we could get to the Castelo São Jorge. Well, getting to the castle was much less simple than it seemed. When our bus dropped us off in Rossio Square, I thought, "no problem...I can see the castle from here, so we just go up to the hill to get to it!" Wrong. We wandered up and down winding streets, marching up never-ending staircases and getting trapped by dead-ends. After pulling out Sadie's iPhone for GPS (those things really are handy!), we finally made it. The castle was really cool to wander around. We went up almost every single turret just to check everything out. How many times do you get to hang out in the place where Vasco de Gama was welcomed back to Portugal after his explorations?? The gods must have heard us when we said we were going to leave, because the skies opened up and it started pouring. Just our luck. Not only were we not really appropriately attired for the rain, but we were exhausted and semi-lost...long walk home. We decided to eat dinner again at the hostel to avoid the rain. We ended up sitting with some girls who happened to be American--and teaching in France...more specifically Lille! What a small world. We had an interesting conversation about Portuguese where I learned that to say "thank you" you say "obrigado"(m) or "obrigada"(f) depending upon your OWN gender...not the gender of whomever you are saying it to. That was one of the weirder language rules I have encountered. After dinner, Sadie and I were going to rest for a bit before going out for a drink, but we never actually made it out. We spent the evening going through our phrase books (Spanish and Portuguese) quizzing each other on the most random phrases we could come up with. Really entertaining game for language nerds like us. We crashed with visions of verbs conjugations dancing in our heads.
In the morning we got ready to go to Madrid. We made a quick stop at the famous café O Brasillio for an espresso, then we were off to the airport and on our way to Spain. Once we arrived, we checked in to our hostel (a major downgrade from Lisbon, although actually pretty nice) and met up with Mandi and Nikki. We got a quick lunch and then headed towards Retiro Park. Really beautiful! I would have liked to spend a little more time walking around, but we didn't have a whole lot of time. On our way back towards the area where our hostel was, we walked down into what we thought was a metro station, but it was actually a shanty town full of box houses and homeless people. That was pretty eye-opening. Seeing stuff like that really opens my eyes to how lucky I am to have such a high standard of living as well as the kind of opportunities I have right now to study in another country and travel. We came back out and got on the metro at an actual stop. We got churros and chocolate at a popular place for them...delicious. On our way back towards the hostel, we ran into the Carnival parade...what luck! We stuck around for a bit and took some pictures. The floats were absolutely incredible! Sadie and I were lucky that when we got back to our hostel, we realized we could see it all from our balcony and a bunch of the parade was about to go by again. If I got to see one thing in Madrid, I'm glad I saw that parade...how cool! We went to Puerto del Sol (the center of Spain) to meet up again with Mandi and Nikki to go for wine and tapas. Being me, in the middle of Spain, I face planted and rolled as I was walking through the Plaza. That's not at all embarrassing... It especially wasn't embarrassing when a nice Spanish man came rushing to help me up and asked me if I was okay and I couldn't come up with a coherent sentence to let him know I was fine. Love my life. I got over it...but the bruises lasted for a couple weeks. We headed towards Plaza Mayor where we saw a really interesting street performer play piano in the air while parallel to the ground. Funny thing: he jumared up to the piano, which everyone thought was really amazing...except for me...because he was using climbing gear. After the performance we wandered to a few places for wine and tapas. I was definitely the most adventurous eater. When faced with a plate of deep fried anchovies for the table, I ate up. I'll try almost anything once. I also had my first taste of sangria, which is delicious! Made with love. Eventually we also stopped by some bar where Sadie's friend from home was hanging out. It was called Del Diego, and is apparently one of the top 100 bars in the world. Cool?? By this time, I was thoroughly exhausted and ready to catch some z's before my plane to Tangier in the morning!
Don't forget to check out the rest of my pictures on my mobileme!
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