¡Lisboa!

This weekend, I traveled to Lisbon, or Lisboa, Portugal. We left on the train at 3am and arrived at 10:30 on Saturday morning. When we got to Lisbon, we walked around the city for a bit, but it was raining miserably. So we decided to check out the Oceanario Aquarium. It was pretty cool. They had really cute otters that we realized resembled three people in our group. After the aquarium, the weather had gotten better and the rain had stopped. We decided to take a ride in gandalas over the ocean.


Then we headed back to the area near our hostel. Some of the group went up a huge hill to find a castle, but Andrea, Alie, and I decided to walk through the city and sit and talk by the beach. Alie and I put our feet in the water to say we´ve been in the Atlantic Ocean! This was my first tme seeing the Atlantic! It was so nice, though, just sitting by the water at night. Definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip.

Once everyone else caught up to us, we headed back and checked into the hostel. This hostel was amazing. It was rated the third best hostel worldwide in 2010 and for good reason. Super cheap, really nice rooms, places to lock our stuff, free linens, free internet, free breakfast. Fully stocked kitchen, bar, parties every night, and free shots at 11:30pm. The staff were super nice and helpful and we were able to meet some people from all over the world. Perfect hostel. I´ve found from Barcelona and now Lisbon that I kind of like hostels better than hotels. I know I´ve been lucky so far, though.

Steve made dinner for us again Saturday night. He made amazing pasta. Such a good cook! He had a bit too much food, though, so we shared with some other people at the hostel and it was a big hit.
Sunday morning we got up and packed up our stuff and headed out. While trekking through the city, we saw a street performer who had two absolutely adorable puppies! The people here who look for money on the streets are smart. Lots of them have puppies, which I bet makes them most of their money. Anyway, we stopped and I got to play with puppies for the first time since I´ve been here! It was great. Even though I see dogs all the time, I can´t pet them or play with them, so I´ve been missing dogs a lot. And these puppies were so precious. I was a happy girl. After this excitement, we went and saw the ocean again, then took a tram to a famous monestary. It was pretty cool. We realized it looked a lot like Hogwarts, which was pretty exciting. After the monestary, we went across the street to a street market. We spent a while there, shopping, until we had to start making our way to the train station. We took the metro to the station and, with little time on our hands, we got into a panic about where our train was supposed to be. We figured it out, though, and made our train, ready for the seven-hour ride back to good old Valladolid.


Some random things about Lisbon:

• It is a lot like San Francisco. It´s super hilly and also has cable cars. It is said to be San Francisco´s cousin city.


• We were never really sure what language to speak, or what language other people were speaking. I think most things were in Portuguese, but we weren´t always sure. And some people spoke English, some Spanish, some, it seemed like neither.


• ¨Obrigado¨ is ¨thank you¨ in Portuguese, the one word I was able to learn.


• Barcelona was better, but Lisbon was stil cool in its own way.

Overall, great trip. Two weeks until London!!