Warning: Novel

Yes, yes, yes. I'm 2 weeks behind. I realize. Let's play catch up. Although I'm warning you now there will be no pictures in this post and I won't be very witty. Wow that makes me not even want to keep writing, let alone read this. Shoot. Ok, maybe I'll make an effort.

Two weekends ago I made a very spontaneous decision to change my long weekend plans from going to Zaragoza (an uninformed vacation choice made in the first few weeks and planned by other people) to go to Portugal. I refunded most of my bus ticket (the TEN HOUR bus ride) to Zaragoza for the next day and bought a train ticket to Lisboa with a different group of K students leaving that night. Very spontaneous, but one of the best decisions I've ever made.

We took the train over night and got in to Lisbon the next morning, checked into our hostel, and napped for a couple of hours. It was raining a lot, but we ended up walking around town for a bit anyway before stopping at a restaurant for lunch.

Sweet plaza by our hostel despite the construction

Portugal is famous for their cod (bacalhau: pronounced vaca-joww in portuguese) and we had a huge and delicious 2 hour meal.

 

 

 

 

Delicious. And floating in Oil.

Portugal is also known for its coffee (according to my host family, it's the best coffee in the world, and I must say I have to agree. It comes in espresso form in a tiny little cup but takes forever to drink because you have to take tiny sips. It's so strong it's almost thick, but it's so so delicious.

By this time it had stopped raining, so we walked around some more, exploring the neighborhoods. Lisbon is an absolutely gorgeous city. Most of the buildings are tiled on the outside, which I was obsessed with.

The city is on a hill, so at the top, we found a beautiful church that looked over the whole city. (click if you want to see it bigger: I told you it was beautiful)

That night, we walked around some more and found a really neat lookout onto the mouth of the river (that becomes the ocean). We were standing there looking out at the water, wondering why it looked super foamy when we realized it was because we were surrounded by thousands of fish! It was so disgusting, they were packed together so tightly they would occasionally jump out of the water. I literally took about 25 pictures of them, but I'll spare you.

The next day, it was raining pretty hard again so we decided to take the train to Sintra, a small town about 45 minutes away from Lisbon. Buying train tickets in Portuguese was an interesting experience. It was nice to get out of the rain for a while on the train, but it was raining even harder whn we got there, which was a shame because most of the things to see there are outdoor castles etc. Nevertheless, it was amazingly beautiful. When I buy my European summer home it's going to be in Sintra.

Stupid picture, but did you know umbrellas will actually do this if it's windy enough??

To get out of the rain, we ate lunch for a couple hours again (accompanied by wine and coffee of course), then walked around one of the palaces. The rooms inside were really cool. There were these two strange conical towers which we realized were actually huge chimneys from the kitchen. They just had huge roasting racks over a fire right on the floor. Pretty intense.

Sunday, we went to Belém, which is sort of like a suburb of Lisbon. There's a pretty cool tower there right on the water and a giant cathedral.

My camera battery died right after I took this picture and I was super sad, but Elizabeth let me use hers so it ended up alright. (Although I've yet to get any of the pictures from her). We then went in search of the pasteis do Belém (famous pastries originating from a factory there). We eventually found the factory, which turned out to have a million tables inside and got some of the pastries (and café com leitche) which were delicious.

After that, we went to the Castelo do São Jorge which is located looking over the city. It was really pretty, and there were actual peacocks running around! Pretty sweet. There was also a moat, which I was really excited about. After eating (more bacalhau) we wandered around the city some more. Our train didn't leave until 11:30 so we had lots of time to kill. It started raining again so we stopped in a café and got some port wine (which is from Porto, a city just north of Lisbon). I had a sweet picture of the plaza we were sitting outside of, but it's not letting me upload it right now.




My host sister used to live in Portugal so she had given me a list of things to do while we were there. So far everything she'd recommended had been amazing, so we decided to give the last attraction a shot: the Santa Justa elevator. It's a strange looking elevator located in the middle of the city. There was a super long line, so we figured it must be great. 3 euros and a 30 second elevator ride later, we were about 4 floors up looking at the city through a chain link fence. The elevator is attached to a building behind it by a walkway which goes next to an old cathedral which we'd actually been wondering how to see it up close. However, the exit to this so called "Eiffel Tower equivalent in Portugal" was a back entrance into a courtyard on a hill we'd been standing in 30 minutes earlier. The gate was open. So essentially we paid $5 to ride up 3 floors on an old elevator. It was so ridiculous it was hilarious, and we couldn't stop laughing the whole way back to the hostel.

The Eiffel Tower if there was a back entrance out the top.

Overall very successful trip.