Last Impressions of Portugal

Unfortunately we only had 3 days in Lisbon, and they went by so fast!! Our last day in Lisbon was July 15, and we had a train ticket for Madrid leaving that evening.
Before talking about our very last day in Lisbon, I think I should tell you a bit about our experience with some authentic Portuguese chorizo sausage.
On the evening of July 14^th, our 2^nd last day in Lisbon, on our way back to the hostel we decided to stop and buy some food at a small shop. A Portuguese man, who only spoke a few words of English and some of French, convinced us to buy 1 kg worth of chorizo by exclaiming “C’est bon! C’est bon! It’s good! 3 Euros!”. I suppose we were pretty easily convinced, mainly because we were so hungry!
Chorizo is a sausage, made in many parts of the world, and can be either cooked or uncooked. In Portugal (and Spain) it is a fermented cured smoked sausage made from pork, fat, and lots of salt (and a few other ingredients that I’m not too sure of), and it is eaten without cooking. This makes it very heavy and hard to digest if you aren’t used to it.
Anyway, we got back to the hostel with our Portuguese chorizo and ate a few full sausages each. Needless to say, it was the worst decision we’d made all trip! I spent the rest of the night, and the following day feeling sick to my stomach and was in some pretty unpleasant pain. Chad on the other hand, with his stomach of steel, felt amazing after consuming the massive quantities of chorizo.
Since I vowed never to eat it again, we decided to give the hostel owners the rest of our chorizo. We explained to them how I got so sick from eating it, and they asked us how much we had. We causally told them we had a few sausages each and their mouths dropped in shock. After having a good laugh they explained to us that you are only supposed to have a few very thin slices of chorizo at a time since it is so heavy, and consuming a whole sausage (or multiple sausages) is not normal and definitely not recommended!!
They convinced us to keep the chorizo, and explained a technique of “cooking” it to make it less heavy. It can be cooked using a shallow pan by covering the bottom with rubbing alcohol and cotton balls. You put a grill over the pan and put the chorizo on top. Then light the cotton balls on fire, and they will burn very slowly, cooking the chorizo. Apparently this technique lets the chorizo keep the flavor, but reduces the fat content, therefore making it easier on the stomach. We have yet to try this technique.
Changing the topic back to Lisbon, we spent our last day in Lisbon at the Lisbon Oceanarium. It is the 2^nd largest in the world and opened in 1998. It has 8,000 animals and plants and has a huge central tank with enough water to fill 4 Olympic sized swimming pools. Within the central tank we saw a pretty cool looking fish called the Ocean Sunfish.

Here are a few other photos from the oceanarium:





We learned that some sharks lay eggs! Here is a photo of shark eggs:

After the oceanarium we did a little bit of shopping and walking around the town before heading over to the train station for our overnight train to Madrid.
We both bought Euro-rail train passes to give us access to all the train routes across Europe. But even with a train pass, you still need to reserve your train tickets and pay a reservation fee. The reservation fees differ in price depending on the type of seat you want on the train. Since it was a 10 hour overnight train we thought we would go all out and reserve a private room with beds, one of the more expensive options, rather than just a seat on the train.
Our room was tiny, and there was only enough space for one of us to stand at any given time!

We were pretty happy with the service. The room came with free bottled water, and each one of us got a (purple) cosmetic bag with a toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, razor, soap, Kleenex, sewing kit and a few other goodies. On top of the freebies in the room, a very nice breakfast (eggs, bacon, pastries, orange juice and coffee) was also included with our train room.

All in all a very successful trip from Lisbon into Madrid, Spain, and well worth the extra cost of the privacy, security and comfort of a private room.

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.