Lisbon

My last trip of the semester: Lisbon, Portugal. My friend Lindsay and I were about to attempt the unthinkable: could we see most of what this coastal city has to offer on just 24 hours time? We were about to find out.

Praça do Comercio

We took off perfectly on time to land in Lisbon at 6:30pm. We grabbed an airport shuttle to get to the city center and quickly learned that Portuguese isn’t as close to Spanish as we’d hoped. In fact more Portuguese people speak English than they do Spanish; at least the ones we met did. Usually finding our hostel isn’t a problem, but then again every trip is an adventure and therefore there must be obstacles. We knew the stop to get off at and the address and directions so we set off walking after the bus dropped us off. We were at Praça do Comercio and walked along the Rio Tejo while taking pictures of the beautiful coastline. We walked through a quite sketchy area of Lisbon until getting to Santa Apolonia station only to turn around and go back the way we came. After asking 4 cab drivers where the street was we finally found it and opened the door to a staircase barely wide enough for one person. Up to the 4^th floor reception area we went, breathing in the smell of mouth balls the entire way up. Thank goodness we were only there for one night.

We finally got to our room and decided to turn and walk right back out. We were in Lisbon and therefore wanted to take advantage of it while we could. We walked around a little until we found a cute restaurant to have dinner. It was pretty empty so we sat down and had a typical Portuguese feast. Soup, salad, bread, some fried appetizer the waiter gave us for free, vihno verde (my personal favorite) swordfish and boiled potatoes. No dessert for us clearly. We walked around a bit more but we were tired so we headed back to the hostel to sleep. We went to bed praying it didn’t rain the next morning.

Surprise; rain. The one thing that could ruin our one day in Lisbon…rain. It wasn’t too bad so after a quick, free breakfast we were off to explore the city. There’s a common scene used in many movies where someone is having a bad day and a taxi drives through a huge puddle while the person is standing on the side of the road and the gets soaked just to make their day that much worse…now I know it happens in real life too. Except this vehicle that went through the puddle was a bus. What a day this was turning out to be.

We didn’t let the rain or our wet clothes get us down and walked around the city center for awhile. We did a little shopping and made our way walking uphill cobblestone roads to the Castelo de Sao Jorge. It had finally stopped raining so our walk up to the castle wasn’t bad. The views from the top were amazing; unfortunately it was too foggy to see very far. We met a nice couple from Madrid who lived in New York for awhile and invited us for coffee but we were on a tight schedule. We walked around the old fort for about 2 hours and decided it was time to go to the thing we had planned Lisbon around—the Aquarium.

Little did we know, being in Spain and out of the US news, President Obama happened to be in Lisbon the same day as us. I wish I could be writing right now how we met him, had burgers and talked about last week’s episode of Glee but we never saw him. We did however see the hundreds of policemen patrolling every corner of the city. It started to rain again and between dodging raindrops and policemen it became increasingly hard to navigate Lisbon. We made it to the Lisbon Oceanário finally and it was nice to get out of the rain, we figured it’d stop by the time we were done.

It was amazing. Being a huge fan of aquariums I can say this is one of the best I’ve seen. There’s a huge tank in the middle with sharks, rays, barracudas and a very rare sunfish. There’s a lot more to see but you can always go back to the central tank. We probably spent 3 hours walking around inside. We expected to come outside to clear skies and a pleasant rest of the afternoon however now it was pouring. That wasn’t the only bad luck we would have on our trek to getting back to Madrid. I have done a lot of traveling over the last 4 months and what I’ve learned is a traveler’s worst nightmare is a delayed flight. Try a 2 hour delay to wait for a bus that can’t find the plane, only to walk through the pouring rain without an umbrella because it broke 20 minutes prior to wait 40 minutes on the runway. Needless to say I needed a nap.

We landed back in Madrid at 12:30am and thankfully caught the metro home. By the time I got home, settled and went to sleep it was 2:30am and our group had a trip to Cordoba the next morning and we were meeting at 7:30am. I had very little sleep only to wake up to another day full of rain. I’ve said it before but I still think our lives in Madrid would make a great reality show.

1 more week in Madrid before heading home. Trying to make it a great one despite finals.

Hasta la Proxima!