Live, Laugh, Love, Lisbon

Welcome to Lisbon!

Sister to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fran

This past weekend, my roommates and two other friends from school decided to stop over next door and check out Portugal for the weekend.  We arrived in Lisbon early Friday morning at about 8am.  At this point, we all had slightly different agendas as some of the girls had to register for classes in the afternoon.  Steph and I, having no school obligations, decided to go check out the beach that the hostel had recommended to us.  A mere half an hour later, we found ourselves relaxing on the beautiful beach of Cascais on the western most coast of Europe.  The weather was beautiful and hot and Steph enjoyed the day soaking up the sun (luckily we remembered the sunscreen) and only took a break to get a sandwich and pitcher of sangria to split.

Steph and I headed to the beach

Cascais

That night, we met up with the rest of the girls at the hostel and enjoyed a hostel-made dinner of a famous Portugal dish involving Bacalou (codfish) and it was absolutely delicious.  We met two guys from Canada who were possibly the funniest duo I have met on this Euro adventure thus far.  They were like a comedy act playing off one another and kept us entertained all night.  Interestingly enough, they thought my Minnesotan accent was the funniest which is ironic seeing as how I was by far the closest in proximity to them back home.  They got a kick out of how we supposedly turn the o's in words like hockey or coffee into an 'a' sound... go figure.

New friends at the hostel taught us the After Eight challenge

Goal: get the thin mint from your forehead to your mouth without using hands

On Saturday, we woke up and were all set and ready to go on the 10am "We Hate Tourism Tour" we had booked which everyone who had been to Lisbon was raving about...too bad the tour was actually at 9am and the time was wrong on the website.  Needless to say, we missed the tour and were pretty upset about it and made sure to give the tour group an earful about having the correct information posted online.  After ensuring that we got our money refunded, we decided to roll with the punches and took off for the beach once again.  After a full day on the beach with lots of shenanigans, we all came back to the hostel with battle wounds of sunburns in places where we forgot to reapply.  Personally, aside from the random splotches, my feet looked like two raw slabs of meat... still recovering from that one.  That night we ate with the hostel again and met some British guys from the Cambridge field hockey team who taught us all sorts of games we had never played before.  We went out with them to see what the Portugal night life was all about. After braving the insane crowds we realized that mingling with the entire Portuguese population and getting shoved, stepped on and hissed at (guys will do this in lieu of whistling essentially) was not conducive to our idea of a fun evening on the town so we headed back a little early.

Nursing sunburns after a day at the beach

On Sunday, we had no real agenda planned so we decided to take a ferry across the river (the river leads into the ocean just a little ways down) to a town called Costa do Caparica.  We spent the day wandering around town and then went to the coast once again to enjoy one of the longest beaches in Europe.  The weather was once again beautiful but as we were all still suffering from the pains of the previous day, we made sure to stay a little more covered up.

The ferry we took

Lexi and I on the ferry

The whole crew at Costa do Caprica

Ridin' Solo

That leaves me here today, quite a bit tanner but still recovering from some lingering sunburns and looking at the daunting task of packing for spring break which begins this Friday...