Portugal

One word.  AMAZING.

This weekend was definitely one of my favorite ones while here - 5 friends and I ventured to Lisbon, Portugal to celebrate our day off from classes today (Monday) due to Dia de Andalucia.

The trip started out Thursday night.  Carmen (my intercambio) and I received a coupon for free drinks and tapas at a restaurant in El Centro - so I met with her and ate some deliciousss food, talked in Spanish and walked around a little.  From there, I walked to the bus station to board our 11:45pm bus to Lisbon.  We took the night bus so we could sleep on the bus and avoid paying for an extra night in a hostel, which was a good idea in theory but not so much in practice.  I slept pretty well after popping 2 Tylenol PMs but the other girls in the group didn't get so lucky.  So, we got to Lisbon at 6:30am Friday morning, got to our hostel, realized we couldn't check in until 3pm, slept on the couches in the hostel until 8am, checked into our room (they cleaned it right away and let us check in early) and slept again until 10am.  Then, we were ready to start the day.

We roamed the city and saw a lot of great sights such as: Praça do Comércio (the plaza), Santa Maria Maior de Lisboa or Sé de Lisboa (catedral) and last but not least Castelo de Sao Jorge.  Got a nice view of the city as well as the Atlantic Ocean, supported some local artists who set up shop on the streets and stopped at an Italian restaurant.  We then went back to the hostel to freshen up and eat dinner with the hostel-mates.  The hostel offers typical Portuguese dinners for 6euro.  Probs one of the better decisions we made - we got to meet new people from all over the world (Portugal, Germany, Australia, Brazil and Canada) and eat a delicious meal (some Portuguese soup, a salad sans the vinegar and oil which we were happy about and a chicken pasta dish along with sangria and dessert!)  We had a lot of sightseeing to do the next day so we ate dinner, chillaxed a bit and called it a day.

On Saturday (after a HUGE, free, delicious breakfast - we actually had eggs for breakfast instead of dinner!!) we ventured to Sintra, a town about a half hour outside of Lisbon. Sintra is home to the Palacio de Pena - which is hands down my favorite thing I've seen since being here in Europe.  It was this huge palace built for a German king to have as a summer house but then he liked it so much he made it his permanent residence.  Since then, it's been the residence of royalty in Portugal.  It was at the top of a hill and when at the top, we could see the entire town bordered by the ocean.  The pictures don't even begin to do it justice...so we decided to put our cameras down for a couple minutes and just take in the beautiful view.  We then got to walk around inside the palace and see King Ferdinand and Queen Amelia's bedroom, the chapel, Amelia's dressing room, the private sitting room which was described to be cluttered due to "the horror of empty spaces and the desire to collect" and much, much more.

We got back from Sintra and joined our new hostel friends for dinner once again.  Today we had another type of soup, salad and the famous Portugeuse fish dish, bacalao.  With plans of discovering the nightlife of Lisbon, we got a few bottles of wine and went into the main room to socialize.  The hostel gave everyone a couple rounds of free shots and we taught our new friends how to play an American drinking game, which was a hoot.  The workers of the hostel brought us out on the town and showed us a good time....possibly too much of a good time.  While taking care of a friend who was a little too borracha, somebody stole my camara - complete with ALL of my un-uploaded Portugal pictures as well as ALL of my pictures from Spain that have only been uploaded to facebook, not my computer (the pictures on here are stolen from Salima's blog)

We ended our trip Sunday by walking around the city, visiting Santa Justa's elevator (below), relaxing in the sun, browsing the local market complete with hand-crafted jewelry and gifts and saying goodbye to our travel friends at the hostel.  

I left Lisbon questioning a few things...

1. Why the first time I ate McDonalds in at least 5 years was in Portugal...
2. How the levitating man we saw in the street was actually levitating...(picture below)
3. If our foreign friends are going to teach the drinking game we taught them to their friends...
4. How many people laughed at us while we chased pigeons...
5. Why people say that the Portuguese and Spanish languages are very similar.  Couldn't understand anything when listening to Portuguese.
6. How common it is to be offered hash twice on the street within a half hour...
7. If Portugal was REALLY this amazing or if we had skewed judgment since it was our first trip outside of Spain.
8. Where in the world my camera is now and if I will ever get it back.
9. How ridiculous it is that we just assume we can speak English to anyone in a foreign country, expecting them to understand...because 75% of the time, they do (when we went to McDonalds, for instance, we just started ordering in English and didn't think anything of it).
10. How ironic it is that the Spanish woman (also visiting Portugal) who found my phone knew exactly where WI was and mentioned the she spent 5 weeks in Green Bay (before she knew it was my hometown) and said it was one of her fondest memories...small world

Adeus (good-bye in Portuguese)