Lisbon

Portugal was gorgeous!  Lisbon was the one city that I came into knowing practically nothing about it.  No monuments, no museums, nothing.  The hostel that I booked, the Living Lounge, had come on the recommendation of a friend of a friend, and it was.....well.   This year it was voted the #1 medium sized hostel in the WORLD.  That should tell you how the hostel was.  When I booked it months ago online, there weren't three nights of dorm rooms available, so I opted for my first night in a private room and the two following nights in the dorm.  The cost of living in Lisbon is so low that my private room  there cost the exact same as my eight bed dorm room in Paris.  It seemed like an affordable luxury.  Each room in the hostel had been decorated by a local artist, so they all had different themes.  My private room had a giant mural of a ship and red furniture, while my dorm room had a lomography theme and pictures everywhere.  The lobby of the hostel had antique furniture and a really lovely fully stocked kitchen.  A local chef came to the hostel and cooked dinner each night at 9, which you could buy into for €10. I arrived a little late to figure out the area and find food on my own, so I joined the dinner.  I was able to drop off my laundry with the desk clerk, and for a small fee it was washed, dried, and folded overnight (which was a lifesaver because out of all of my clothes, the only things I had that were clean we're a pair of underwear, my AirBerlin socks, and a shirt I'd washed in the sink the night before).

The next morning, I woke up early for the free breakfast of homemade crepes and to go on the free walking tour.  The chef from the night before was the guide, and he lead us on a four hour tour of Lisbon.  What a pretty city it is.  Everything is so colorful and sunny.  Some of the buildings were painted in bright pastels, but most of the buildings are completely covered in brightly painted tiles.  Some of the tiles date back hundreds of years, but unfortunately a lot of them were lost in the great earthquake in the 1700s.  Most of the tiles follow patterns from before that time, though.  Also the streets and sidewalks are also made of black and white rocks places into mosaic patters.  There is just so much detail with the aesthetics going on all of the time.  We walked around the city center for a while, and then hopped on one of the vintage trolleys.  These trolleys are the actual public transportation system, and not just fixed up for the tourists.  There's also a small subway system for longer travels.  The trolley took us to a massive outdoor flea market, where you could wander around and look at cheap handmade stuff and antiques.  

After that, the guide led us into the Alfama district, which is the Moorish area.  The streets are so narrow and winding that cars can't drive there.  Sometimes you would see a scooter, but rarely.  To use a map to find your way is useless, because the streets are so curvy and change names at every intersection.  There are giant grand churches and temples mixed in, but everything is so close to each other that there are no plazas in front of them and the beautiful facades just butt up right against the backs of houses in front of it.  When the earthquake happened, it was a holy day and so lots of people were inside the churches and couldn't get out in time and died.  Something like 50,000 died.  After the earthquake, it was decided that all new churches constructed would have a plaza in front, and that's how you can tell the age of e churches in Lisbon.

Our guide led us by a small shrine covered in Barbie dolls and wedding decorations, and told us it was for Saint Antonio, the patron saint of weddings or something like that.  All donations that were placed in the plate in front of it were gathered and doled out once a year to poor girls deemed "worthy" to help cover the cost of their weddings.  Praying to Saint Antonio could apparently help you find a husband or wife, so this one cute girl in my group was like "Well I need all the help I can get!" and she dumped a TON of change into that plate, hahaha.    She told me later that in her area of Canada, there is a "man drought" and it's something like 3 or 4 women for every man.  Totally average dudes will come up to women in bars and stuff and go, "Hey, want to buy me a drink?". I was like, come to Texas, we'll find you a nice southern boy.  ;)

After roaming around the tiny corridors of Alfama, we came to a little cafe that served local specialties.  I wanted to try something new to me, so I ordered the sardines.  Out came four pretty big sardines, heads and tails and all.  I just picked them up by their little silver heads, scraped the meat off their tiny bones, and put their little fish skeleton on the extra plate.  They were good!  Salty.  So for €10 each, we got our entree, some veggies, soup, bread, olives, vino verde (green wine), sangria, and espresso.  Good deal!  Since we're talking about food here, let me mention the hostel meals.  They were also €10, and came with the entree, soup, salad with honey dressing, bread, dessert, and wine.  I had the hostel meal every night.  The first night it was seafood rice with prawns and profiteroles for dessert.  The second night it was this fried Cod and onion dish with chocolate mousse for dessert.  The last night it was this veggie ravioli dish with lots of fan veggies and strawberry creme mousse for dessert.  They were all sooooo good, and it was fun eating with all of the other people in the hostel all of the nights.  Some of my favorite meals of the trip.

The second day, I decided to take the tram to a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon called Belem.  There were some lovely monuments I'd heard of and wanted to see, as well as a free modern art museum.   The museum was awesome and had a great collection of Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Jackson Pollick, Andy Warhol, etc works.  I also strolled around and had these little custard tarts that I'm totally forgetting the name of right now.......  They are to Portugal what gelato is to Italy and macarons are to France.  I had like three of them from this famous bakery that was celebrating 175 years of service.  The whole time, though, I'd been fighting the inevitable.  This whole trip, sun allergy and sprained ankle aside, I'd managed to stay pretty healthy.  However, I could feel a cold coming on.  I went back to the hostel and laid down for a bit, watched some Mad Men that I was behind on, and joined the dinner,  and that was it for my time in Lisbon.  I really wish I had scheduled more time there.  It's such a pretty place, everyone is so friendly, and the Euro goes a lot further there than elsewhere in Europe.

Right now, I'm on my last easyJet flight to Barcelona.  Thank goodness.  So far on this flight they have gone up and down the aisles with a cart of food and drinks you can buy (no free drinks and peanuts on this carrier, no sir), a cart with perfume, sunglasses, toys, etc, and now they're giving us the hard sell about donating to their charity.  Maybe they should do that one first next time, because I don't see anyone dropping any coins into the donation bag.  That €7 packaged sandwich must have cleaned people out.

Barcelona is my last stop in Europe, and I'm a little worried about the pickpocket situation there since it has the reputation of being the Pickpocketing Capital of Europe.   It seems like almost every traveler I've encountered has a story about something that has been stolen from them there.  I've been a little lax with my belongings so far, but I'm going to have to step it up in Spain, I guess.  After almost six weeks of travel, I'm wearing down a bit and I'm excited to enjoy my last week here, head to Boston for a few days, and then home to Austin.