Portugal

Portugal Day One:

This year the closest I got to celebrating Halloween was passing a tired looking group of vampires in the metro the next morning. I spent the entire night on a bus and it couldn’t have been better spent because, even though I was candy-less the next day, I was in Portugal with a full four days to see the sights, taste the food and meet the people!

1^st Stop: The Police Station

Although it’s a unique cultural experience, I can’t take credit for planning this one. I don’t want to point fingers, so, I will blame this one on my toothbrush. If my toothbrush hadn’t forgotten to pack itself before I left for school, I wouldn’t have lost those precious ten minutes picking it up on the way to the bus station, I wouldn’t have arrived just as the buses were loading, Ann and I wouldn’t have ended up on a different bus than Victor had, Victor wouldn’t have been alone at the rest stop to be mugged and forgotten.
But I did forget my toothbrush. At 22:00, two buses left Madrid’s Estacion Sur with the three of us aboard. At 7:30 the two buses vanished into the slowly thawing horizon, leaving only two of us frozen in the residual Halloween spookiness of Lisbon’s deserted Estacao Oriente.
Anne and I had watched carefully as the passengers of the second bus unloaded, we had checked with the bus drivers, we had walked up and down the aisle of the second bus, even called his name, but there was no sign of our friend, Victor. Increasingly horrifying scenarios ran through our heads as we exhausted our options. Our phones do not work outside of Spain, the pay phone ate our money, everything was still closed, we didn’t know where we were, and there was no one in that ghost town to ask.
Eventually, we found the nearby Police Station and our luck made a 180 degree turn. The police ended up being just our first taste of what the overwhelmingly hospitable Portuguese people we would were like. They spoke English and let us use their phone without hesitation. Normally, the phones that we get don’t work outside of Spain, and we expected to have to call our program director back in Madrid for help. But on the off chance that Victor hadn’t even made it to the border, we tried him first. He answered. And he was in Lisbon! Even though he had seen us at looking for him at the station he had taken the bus to the second station. So we thanked the police and met our him at the metro stop they recommended.

2^nd Stop: Cascais and the Boca de Inferno

After a quick nap, our day continued to improve. We took the train to Caiscais, a beach town that my friend recommended as a day trip from Lisbon. We rented bikes for free and rode up along the coast toward the Boca de Inferno, a natural grotto, where the waves pound against the rocks so powerfully that the terrifying sound is said to be emanating from the mouth of hell. It was a calm day, so this natural phenomenon ended up not being so phenomenal, in fact, we passed it with out even knowing it, but it was really fun to ride along the coast taking in the unmatched scenery and enjoying the warm weather.

3^rd Stop: Belem
On the way back we stopped in the town of Belem, the port from which a lot of important explorers, like Vasco da Gama, took off, and where there are three major tourist sites. We got there at dusk so we didn’t get to go inside but we did get to see the sun set on them. . . . . . . . . . . . The Torre de BelemThe Monument to the Discoveries

. . Jerónimos Monastery

4^th Stop: Sintra

The next day, my other three friends had arrived, and we went to Sintra, a land of fairytale castles. The coolest part was the Quinta Regaleira. It was the fantasy filled home of an eccentric millionaire set designer built in the early 1900. Only the perfectly level floors and the crisp edges give away the palace’s modern construction, otherwise I would have assumed it had appeared there by magic thousands of years ago before the fairy tale even began. The coolest room by far was the library. Mom would have hated it. It was a two story square room whose walls were packed with books and who’s second floor is only a platform magically suspended in the air. The fantasy extends into secret gardens through which dark subterranean tunnels lead you between magical grottos and caves, to the bottom of the Knight’s Templar Initiatory well. After a couple hours exploring the enchanted gardens, we took a bus to the top of a mountain and hiked through the sequoias in the Park of Pena, to the colorful 19^th century Portuguese Palace of Pena that looks out onto the realm below from an almost unreachable height.

5^th Stop: Lisbon

We spent our third day checking out the sights of Lisbon beginning with a walk up to the old Moorish castle, Castelo de Sao Jorge, where you can get a 360 degree view of the city from a 16^th century periscope or from the tower walls. That night we took a cable car ride over the water at the site of the 98’ World Expo.

6^th Stop: Oporto

On our last day we took a bus north to Porto. We walked through the town of blue tiled houses, through the gardens of the Cristal Palace, and down to the river Douro River where had dinner and took tour of Calem’s Port wine cellar.

The Food:

As far as I could tell, the most important food to the Portuguese is Bacalhau, cod fish. It is on every menu of every restaurant and is prepared in about a million different ways. One of my favorite meals in Portugal was creamed bacalhau. It reminded me of clam chowder but with cod instead of clam, and much cheesier, thicker, and bigger. Another Portuguese dish that I liked was roasted sardines. They were a lot bigger than I expected and looked nasty and it was a little gross the way you have to scrape the meat off the bone and avoid eating the guts, but actually tasted good.

The Hostel:

The hostel was too good to be true. It was clean, convenient, and cheap. But what really made it special were the people we met there. And the little old lady who ran it was so sweet that we were all ready to trade in our senoras for her. She only spoke Portuguese but she spoke it extra slowly to make us understand. She loved us because, even though she threatened him with a bat for being a Portuguese who doesn’t speak Portuguese, she loved Victor. She shared weird egg yolk deserts with us and showed us pictures of her family. She also warned us to stay away from the Spanish boys who were staying down the hall, who despite her advice we made friends with and had fun hanging out in Lisbon’s Praca de España that they proudly pointed out was “their” square.