Portugal: Lisbon

We had gotten to Rio airport with plenty of time to spare, expecting the worst with our dodgy e-tickets but for the first time and in a country where we didn't speak the language they worked fine and after flying through the underworked security checkpoint we were left with three hours to kill. And guess what, Rio airport has three overpriced shops and a broken internet cafe left over from the 90's. :(

The flight itself was pretty full, and the inflight entetainment kept working long enough for me to watch Quantum of Solace (average), and Slumdog Millionaire (quite good), and I even managed to snatch a few hours sleep which was useful as we were arriving in Lisbon in the morning and needed to get a full day of sight seeing in as we were meeting up with our old friend Ruth from Auckland, and her new british friend Nicola.

After a really rough start fighting with stupid Portugese ATM's we managed to catch the local bus in from the airport and found the hostel we had booked almost straight despite an apparent desperate shortage of materials for street signs in Lisbon. The hostel was about the nicest we've stayed in during this trip, bright and clean and oddly layed out. Our dorm beds wouldn't be ready till the afternoon but to make it up to us we got breakfast which went along way to humanizing us after the long trip.

Our good luck held and we found Ruth's fancy hotel pretty close by and we headed off for the Torre de Belem. Lisbon is a really interesting compact city to visit, so much so that we didn't find out that the tower was closed for Easter until late afternoon. On the way we explored the botanic gardens, stopped for morning tea, viewed the city from a lovely Mirador (I hereby pronounce this spanish word captured and introduced into english), found the slow but fun electric train along the waterfront, stopped for more pastries, viewed the front of an immense monastery, and skimmed through a very large and very free modern art museum. Needless to say we weren't terribly upset and continued on to accend the Monument to the Discoveries. We had a good view of the harbour and especially Lisbon's copies of other peoples monuments. Amusingly the harbour bridge is a dead ringer for the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and sited behind that on a concrete pedestal is Christ the King, a fairly good likeness for the Christ the Redeemer we had just visited in Rio.

Day One in europe ended with a little lie down in our dorm and a good dose of chinese food. We had stumbled on an authentic and not too expensive restaurant while searching for authentic portugese food and immediately succumbed. Jacquie got to practice her Chinese and I got to drink brandy made from (tree) flowers, Awesome!

Day two continued in much the same vein except that the owner of our hostel had shown up and jabbed at us with cinnamon pancakes during breakfast, pronouncing "Eat!". We did, and it was very good. Then after retreiving our high living friends we trapsed over to the Castle of Saint George. Stopping for a couple of Cathedrals, and another Mirador. The larger cathedral was awesome and gothic and even had some real layered Roman/Moorish ruins in the cloister. Europe seems to be drowning in this history stuff, you daren't break ground lest you find some history lurking around. Jacquie is always surprised by the piles of authentic roman Amphorae lying around outside museums that they just don't know what to do with.

The castle itself blurs a bit already but I don't think it was particularly big just a square figure eight with two large courtyards and some towers to climb. If there was anything particularly distinctive about it I've completely fogotten about it after visiting the Alhambra (yes that is a teaser).

We went for a drink or two with Ruth that night and it was great to continue the catch up, it's amazing how great it is to spend time with folks that you A) know and B) share a common cultural context with.

The third day Ruth and Nicola went shopping and we made a bee-line for the Torre de Belem and got to hide inside while Lisbon got thoroughly rained on. The Tower is built right in the water and was built to guard the harbour from incoming ships with ill intent. It was nice enough but suffered from some traffic issues as half a horder of tourists tried to get up and down a perilous narrow spiral staircase. We also got to visit the Oceanarium. I was completely hooked on going once I discovered they had a sunfish which did make some pretty awesome viewing.

Transport outward was on the dubious portugese coach system, but I'll have to try and catch up on that later.