Thursday February 24, Day 6
After braving yet again another subway with our backpacks we headed to the train station and said goodbye to Annie. Annie went to Southern Spain to visit her best friend from home who is studying there while Caroline, Megan and I (the Blonds we finally managed to get rid of all the brunets) were heading to Portugal for the rest of the trip. We decided to go to Portugal as Caroline’s mother is from Brazil and she therefore grew up speaking some Portuguese. So with that we hopped on a bus at the train station and headed to the airport.
There had apparently been a slight computer glitch with Megan’s ticket as it printed as Megan Fett5 and we were nervous that there would be a problem as her name wouldn’t match her passport, however no one really noticed / cared and we have subsequently started calling her Megan Fett the V. The flight went perfect and because Portugal is an hour behind the rest of Europe the hour and five minute flight was actually only five minutes long when we finally arrived.
When we got to the airport in Lisbon we decided to go to the tourist center, as I couldn’t find where our hostel was on the map. We then found out from the very nice Portuguese woman that we were in the wrong city. My initial reaction was denial… we had flown here it wasn’t like we had gotten off at the wrong train station. We realized that we must have booked the wrong hostel accidently (it was actually located 300 miles away from Lisbon in Porta Portugal). After some quick thinking we called and canceled our original hostel and started calling hostels off the sheet that the woman at the tourist center had given us. On the third try Megan found one with three available beds and we then got directions to our hostel that was now in the right city. After taking a bus and a tram we got off at the stop that the woman told us to. It is in the old medieval part of the city. The streets wind and twist almost without reason or logic. We proceeded to get lost and the city started to become kind of sketchy. I was starting to think to myself that I was not staying here when Carolyn turned to me and said “ABSOLUELY NO”. We then went to plan B, while taking the Bus I read my guide book and had read a couple good hostel recommendations, we called the one and they amazingly had 3 beds! At this point Megan cheerfully goes “we’re like legit backpacking making this up as we go along” when Carolyn went, “yep its great, and I’m getting the hell out of here and taking a taxi”.
Five minutes later we were in the nice part of town and had arrived at the world’s nicest hostel. The hostel was extremely nice with high ceilings, freshly painted, hardwood floors and eclectically decorated. If you ever travel to Lisbon don’t pay for a hotel stay at this hostel.
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| The best hostel in the world, living room and reception |
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| living room and looking into dining room |
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| cozy dinning room, the chandelier was made out of tea cups |
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| really nice kitchen |
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| sitting room outside our room designed to look like a park |
After dropping of our bags we headed out to find some dinner and explore. The city has a lot of open squares with narrow streets. We decided to eat at a cute little restaurant that had delicious fish and was absolutely amazing. I however didn’t like it as they charged us for the bread (I had let my guard down I though we were far enough away from Italy for that madness to have stopped).
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| delicious dinner in Lisbon Portugal |
After dinner we went on a wild goose chase for gelato (its not hard to find gelato but its hard to find quality gelato which we have now grown accustom to). We ended up finding the most amazing homemade and unique gelato. I decided to be adventurous and try the pineapple-mint, which sounds absolutely disgusting but was absolutely amazing. We then headed back to the hostel and as we were all enacted we decided to stay in for the evening. Carolyn even fell asleep at like 9 pm (which was really 10 pm in the time zone that we are use to but still). I took the opportunity to catch up with my blogging which is where all of my previously blogs that were filled with all kinds of spelling mistakes were written.
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| The best gelato in the world - I think that is what the window says in Portuguese |
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