Hi All,
A new day and a new country. This time it is Portugal and we spent 8hrs on a bus travelling through vast fields of olive tree, medieval towns surrounded by fortress walls containing towering castles and churches, even under an aquaduct, and past the largest solar panels arrays that I have ever seen. The bus was quite comfortable so the time passed surprisingly quickly.
We arrived at Lisbon late in the afternoon and were disappointed with the initial sight of the city as it was either modern in view or completely run down and there was no old city to be seen. The transport system is a little less tourist friendly than Madrid and we found ourselves at the metro trying to figure out how to buy a ticket from the automated system and eventually got help from the staff and were on our way.
Got off the metro to find that our short walk as advertised on the hostel webpage as advertised was a long walk uphill and when we arrived the staff told us our booking was incorrect. Vanessa sorted it out quickly telling them we had booked online, had the booking reference, and that it was a contract so we ended up with the room and paying a lot less than the hostel expected. Don’t mess with Vanessa after a long bus ride and heading for the relief of the bed.
We had a treat as the hostel had a stove and cooked chicken to make chicken burgers with mustard for tea. Probably doesn’t sound that nice but it is a nice change from sandwiches. Yum.
While out doing the dishes I started chatting with a girl from Brazil who for some reason wanted me to find her a boyfriend from Australia as a present (any takers?) and then went on to tell me that she wanted to get breast implants as Brazilian men liked big breasts. Interesting conversation with someone she only just met. She didn’t speak much English and I only a small amount of Spanish and very little Portuguese. So with a Spanish/English dictionary between us we pursued the topic in further depth often needing to use hand gestures until retiring to bed. Maybe she wasn’t talking about breasts at all and maybe she was hearing something else from me but it was certainly an interesting conversation on both sides. Language difficulties are great sometimes.
This morning was not a good start. Someone protests too much as I write. Somehow we did not communicate where we were going to each other this morning. A pathetic paragraph so far says the protester. So we almost but might as well have gone to the wrong bus station which was completely in the wrong direction and then had to go all the way back and then out to the correct bus station. It felt like our day was being spent just on the metro. We found that we couldn’t get refunds for our return tickets to Madrid as we were going to go to Oporto then onto Barcelona instead. We ended up with a plan based on a 2hr trip time, which the travel agent gave us, to Oporto where we could go for a day trip before the night bus to Madrid so committed to a Madrid onto Barcelona ticket only to find out a little later that the trip to Oporto was actually 3.5 hrs each way so Oporto disappointingly had to be ruled out. So the morning had disappeared. Protests still continue as to the accuracy of this paragraph but as we know history is recorded through the eyes of the writer and not necessarily true to the facts.
We caught the metro into town to the information centre where we gathered brochures one at a time as the helpful but seemingly preoccupied desk girl gave information concisely in answer to my questions but no more. We encountered this response in South America were you might get the answer ’yes’ to ’do you know how to get to the plaza?’ when asking a local person rather than them thinking ’why is this person asking this question?’. Technically correct answer.
Eventually we got all the information we required and caught a tram out to Belam where we had lunch in a lovely old park before walking along the waterfront and through the grounds of the yacht club to the impressive Monument a los Descubrimientos monument built to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the death of prince henry the navigator. Along the way we saw many schools of mullet and at an outlet of unknown content into the ocean they were swimming along with their heads out of the water as if trying to get a breath of fresh air or intoxicated from drinking too much.
Further along we came to the fabulous torre de belam which is so impressive that even Buddhist monks in their saffron coloured garb, with digital cameras around their necks, can not resist the temptation to visit.
As we looked around we found more and more impressive architecture. We walked over to the nearby and massive Monasterio de los Jeronimos which contained ,other than amazing stonework, the beautifully carved burial crypt of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer who discovered the important sea route between Portugal and India, and a well viewed group of ‘contiki tour‘ like british girls in short tops and even shorter shorts and a skateboarder out the front seemingly oblivious to them and the remarkable building he kept passing.
There were cute little trams in normal service running past filled to seemingly well beyond their capacity with passengers and we caught the normal size tram around peak hour and were also squashed inside like sardines in a can for the 6km half hour ride back into town. We extracted ourselves from the tram in the centro area where we discovered the amazing mall which has an arc d’ triumph like entrance and has a view of a castle slightly obscured by the buildings down one of the side streets. As we entered an old guy walked over to us and opened his hand and flashed us a neatly packed plastic bag full of dope and asked if we wanted to buy some. Yeah right take it home and put it back into your grandsons pocket where you found it. No thanks with a laugh was our response as usual as we walked off down the patterned dark grey and cream coloured cobbled street.
David had a beer then he spied a Portuguese tart through the window and thought greedily to himself I must have one or two of them before I leave Portugal. I was powerless to stop him and before I knew it he had a tart in each hand and he was offering me one…and it tasted nice!
Yes Portugal likes it’s people is a little rough around the edges but look beyond the obvious and you will discover that it is a gem.
Strange. My beer bottle was full when I started writing and now it is empty. Must have a hole in it.
Bye,
Vanessa and David
