Lisbon, why did our ancestors ever leave?

So the trip over to Lisbon was more or less like the movie Rat Race. One of my friends was unable to use her credit card to book a flight online; so, she ended up having to take a bus. And my other friend had accidentally booked the wrong flight to Lisbon… she booked a flight that was leaving Madrid at the same time as the flight we had discussed BUT the day before. So we were all arriving at different times, and the two others were arriving the night before me. Our mobiles didn’t work in Lisbon (or were too expensive to function), and the hostel we had planned on meeting at was overbooked. So, there was a huge miscommunication at the start of the trip and lots of panicked e-mails to people who didn’t have access to computers, etc. I had to spend the night in the Madrid airport to avoid spending money on a taxi, but I ended up running into 2 girls from class who were in a similar situation; so, it ended up being pretty pleasant. Once we all finally found each other in Lisbon, we were definitely excited.

Day 1 we got to our hostel and dropped our stuff off. The hostel owner perked up at the sight of my last name and kept calling me Maria and telling me all the directions to places (like I can speak Portuguese…and well, I was the only one of the three of us who had any sort of experience with the language… which doesn’t bode well, but I was actually pretty functional). We ended up finding our way around fine. We walked around the entire city, to a castle, just stopping and peeking into little shops or stumbling upon terraces and gaping at the view of the ocean. The weather was 23 degrees Celsius and sunnier than anything. It wasn’t muggy heat though, it was really nice (twisting the knife, I’m sorry). We had been walking around all day and decided to have a picnic in a botanical garden; so, we stopped into a little fruit shop and got cheese, rolls (Portugal has the BEST bread), salami, wine and a bunch of bananas, plums, and strawberries. We just sat around in the sun and enjoyed that. Then we went back to the hostel and took a nap before we went out that night. We went to a couple bars and I tried a caiparinha a.k.a. the mojito’s crazy cousin. If you waited for the ice to melt and stirred it a lot, it was okay, but… at points it tasted like cough syrup. Very strange. Anyways, we ended up at this club where there were two djs in a row of pretty weird electro/hip-hop stuff, but fortunately we ended up sticking around because this underground hip-hop “legend” from the UK showed up and did an impromptu show. We had never heard of him, but we decided to make the most of it and ran up to the front and were dancing crazy and throwing our hands in the air like we just [don’t] care. It was so fun, until we realized there were cameras there recording the gig, and at one point one of my friends went up on stage with a bunch of other people (I got shy). Anyways, we’re thinking there will be videos of this up on youtube at some point, and I haven’t decided if this is a good thing or not…

Day 2 we went to the beach in Cascais, a half-an-hour train ride east on the coast. It was gorgeous and we just lay around for the afternoon and then headed back to town to catch a traditional fado show, two guys playing guitar and a bunch of solo vocalists singing traditional Portuguese musics, odes to Lisboa and the like. We ate a traditional Portuguese meal, I had bacalhau à lagareiro, a salty cod fillet that was grilled and served with small roasted potatoes and grilled onion and pepper and it sat in a bunch of olive oil. So good… so rich.

Day 3 we walked around and then took a train 20 minutes east along the coast to the cultural center at Belem (Bethlehem). We went to this famous pasteis de nata pastry “factory” and grabbed some of those delights as well as some coffee. Then, we had collected enough energy to go to a contemporary art museum there and then lay around in a park in front of the Monastery of the Jeronimos. Then we grabbed some fresh fruit from a fruit store and headed off to the airport and caught our plane home. When we got home, it was almost midnight and we caught the last train home… which we had to run to catch and would have been a crying shame to have missed, as we would have had to wait an hour and a half for a bus, and we had class the next morning.

It’s allergy season in Spain and Portugal; so, I got some medicine from the Farmacia here, but… it’s still a pain in the butt. I can’t really complain though, other than the fact that the allergies were aggravated at the beach, which is very weird to me. I think that was the first beach I’ve been on in 6 years or something ridiculous like that; so, it felt pretty good, and the sun wasn’t too intense, but I’m pretty golden brown I suppose. I’ll be getting my disposable camera pictures back tomorrow. So, I’ll post those when they come! Okay, I should go get some Smithwicks (if they sell it) and celebrate St. Paddy’s day!

P.S. Lisbon might be better than Barcelona....