First Impressions of Lisbon

I left Athens on July 12^th and started my 17 hour journey to Lisbon, which only 5 of those hours were flying, 7 hours wait in my stopover in Vienna, 1.5 hours transit time from my hostel to the airport, and 3.5 hours of random airport waits before my first flight and after my last flight.
I arrived in Lisbon at 3am (local time, which was 2 hours behind Athens time, making it feel like 5am to me) completely exhausted. Chad was waiting for me at the airport and took me to our hotel which was just down the street from the airport. I awoke a few hours later to see a beautiful view of the city. Lisbon is such a clean, lively, beautiful city! What a drastic change from Athens!
We left our hotel with our luggages and took the metro down to the water to check into our hostel. The metro in Lisbon is excellent!! It’s clean, well decorated, and the tickets system is so advanced! You buy these small ticket cards which can be continually reloaded with money and used over and over again, so you don’t need individual tickets for each ride. Once dropping our luggages off at our new hostel we decided to explore the city by foot.
We climbed up one of the highest hills in Lisbon to find the Castelo de Sao Jorge, a castle from the 11^th century. We were able to walk all around along the castle walls. It provided the most amazing view of the city!






We stopped for a drink in the castle and we were welcomed by a very large and beautiful peacock.

After walking around the castle for a few hours I was exhausted from my few hours of sleep so we took it easy for the rest of the day.
The next day we decided to go on a hop-on-hop-off city bus tour, so we could get an idea of all the major sites in the city and hear all about their history and importance.
The bus tour started at the Praca do Comercio, also called Palace Square, which was unfortunately under construction, but was the location of the royal palace for 400 years.

The tour started by driving up Rua da Prata, which was completely destroyed in the 1755 earthquake. The earthquake is known as one of the most destructive in history, reaching an estimated 9 on the Richter scale. Since almost the entire city of Lisbon was completely destroyed, they had a few options for the city: one was to demolish everything and start building the city from scratch, and another was to rebuild the city on top of the ruins. They decided to demolish the city and start building everything from the ground up. They organized the city so that the street names corresponded to activities taking place on that street.
As we were driving we saw many statues throughout the city:

We then went by Lisbon’s famous bull ring, called Campo Pequeno. We learned that in Portuguese bullfighting the bull is not killed (which is not the case in Spanish bullfighting). Also, horses are very important in Portuguese bullfighting, and the horseman is usually the star of the show.

We then went by Lisbon’s prison, which was built right after they abolished the death penalty.

We then saw the Aqueduto das Aguas Livres, which is an aqueduct that supplied the city with water until 1950.

From there we went over to Belem, a suburb of Lisbon, to see the Torre de Belem, a small fortress.

We then walked over to the Monument to the Discoveries (also in Belem), which was built in 1960 to commemorate the 500^th year anniversary of the death of Henry the Navigator. The monument shows some of Portugal’s key explorers during it’s history.


We then drove by the residence of the President of Portugal.


I have to say, I was pretty excited that the building was pink!!
After our tour we were pretty tired, so we headed to the grocery store to pick up supplies, and then took a long siesta.