Supplement regarding my trip to Lisbon

As I am constantly searching for excuses not to study for the upcoming exams (it's said that law students are the kings of procrastination), updating my blog appears to be a temporary appropriate way to avoid aforesaid studying. Apart from that, my report of my trip to Lisbon is still due, so I'll kill those two birds with one stone. As the trip dates back to the beginning of December, I might have forgotten some details, but nevermind, it shortens my entry.

Our journey (I traveled with two German classmates) began on the 6th of December at 0:00 o'clock. Yep that's quite late/early to start a trip, but we wanted to take as much impressions with us as possible, so we took the night bus to Lisbon. During the six and a half hours long ride, we intended to sleep, which looking back had been a screwy and naive thought from the beginning. As we were heading north, weather got colder and fresher. We arrived in Lisbon at 5:30 AM (time shift of one hour), that's when first bother appeared: we had intended to take the metro into the city centre (bus station was quite outside the city) but the metro station opened at 7 AM. So we set down and watched the homeless people sleeping on their paper-maché-mattress being woken up by the local security-guy around 6 AM... Quite a depressing sight to start the weekend.

After the metro station had opened, we quickly managed to buy a ticket and took the metro into the centre, quite a bit to be honest. We changed metro line one time (with 4 lines Lisbon got 4 times as many as Sevilla has) till we reached the destination. We had a hard time finding the hostel, but thanks to the help of a friendly young man, who told us where to go in English we reached the "Lisbon destination hostel", a lovely place directly located on the upper floor of a historical train station. As check-in was 3 PM, we left our luggage in the hostel and decided to have breakfast (we were starving after the long ride). We caught the first glimpse of Portugal's capital during sunrise. We went up one of the countless hills, always accompanied by the tram-lines, the landmark of Lisbon. On the top of the hill we found a nice viewing point, which granted us a ridiculous beautiful sight over the city and the harbor.

We enjoyed the view as long as we could till the hunger won and we stopped off at a nice little café across the road. We sat down and ordered some natas (small tartlets, typical food of Lisbon and Portugal in General) and espresso, to keep ourselves awake and prepare us for the upcoming day. We sat there quite a while and watched TV reports in Portuguese (Mandela had just died). When we went along, the sun had long shown whole of her beauty and kept us from freezing. It's said that Lisbon is one of the cities with 7 hills (quite played down, even more if you ask me). Of course we had intended to climb every single one of them and so we started walking through the city, even without any clue where to head, we just moved along and that led us to the city's castle, a wonderful monastery and various churches (all of them on one of the hilltops).

We also went by the coast and enjoyed seeing the sea. We had lunch at a cute little bar in the very centre, where a unbelievably nice man served us brasilian soup, meat and a coffee as dessert. In the afternoon we took the tram to take us a bit outside the centre, that's where the main tourist attractions are. We drove below a huge bridge connecting two parts of the city (it looks exactly like the Golden Gate Bridge, it was built by the same architects). When we had gotten to the area of attractions, we started by visiting the Monument of Discoverers and a Museum of Modern Arts (among others they had some Warhols). We spend quite some time there and made plans how to spend the second day, because we hadn't seen all of the local attractions and decided to return the next day. We returned to the hostel in the evening and ate there. Soon we all went to bed, exhausted after being awake 36 hours which we had most time spent walking up and down.

The next morning we had breakfast quite early to continue our journey through the city. Well actually, the second day does not differ that much from the first. Walk around, have typical meal, take pictures, repeat... By the way, I was really impressed by the friendly people of Lisbon (everybody could speak English or Spanish, so we had no problems to communicate).

On the last day we took the chance to get some pasteles one more time..

We took some rides on various trams, carrying us around the city, visited a market and had a last dinner before heading back to the bus station outside the city. The dinner was astonishing good (and cheap). We, of course, had checked out before and handled the luggage-question like we had at the beginning of our stay. The motor took us back outside the city, where the bus waited to drive us home again. Another 6 and a half hours without sleeping. Don't know how long I slept that Monday, in any case the day was gone.

I had a remarkable time in Lisbon that I'll hardly forget and a nice second advent at the seaside!

Photo gallery