Lisbon

It's been quite a long time since I posted.. As the previous post suggested, I went to Lisbon as the second part of my Portugal trip.

Lisbon: Shot taken with my Polaroid

This would be the one photo that I took that pretty much sums up my entire experience of Lisbon.

It's a powerful city. The people there are really nice and helpful. There's this intensity that comes with the city though. Reminiscent of the old. Statues and memorials and museums.

The best part of the trip though, was the trip to a small town outside the main city, called Sintra. It's sort of a fairy tale town. Reminds me of Disney. We were lucky to get there on a sunny day.

We stayed at this hostel: The Lisbon Lounge Hostel. By far, this is the best hostel I have ever stayed in. EVER. And I do pretty much like to think that I travel a lot, having been to about 15 cities in the past few months or so. They have excellent service, they do tours... they pretty much have a lot of activities lined up for you, in such a way that you would not have to plan anything for yourself. They have cheap (BUT EXCELLENT!) dinners at night too.

As much as we would like to think of Portugal as the land of Nandos, it also turned out that they don't really eat Piri-piri chicken all that much. But when you do find a restaurant that serves it, it's fantastic.

Oh, and the Portuguese egg tarts in Bellum. There's only one place that's famous there. Hard to miss. Pity I can't remember the name. Heh. But man, I'd fly back to Portugal just for those egg tarts.

As you can guess, no matter how majestic Lisbon/Portugal was, the only thing that really made it worthwhile to me was the food. Yup.

Porto

We started off our trip by going to Porto. Mind you, this isn't the best time to go to Portugal. It's rainy and gloomy - winter was coming after all. Truth be told, we didn't get to see much of anything!  That wasn't because there was nothing to do though. Once quick look at the tourist information for Porto, and you'd find a ton of attractions. It wasn't really because of the weather either.

it was because.. all we wanted to do was eat and drink.

Not terribly exciting, but we just wanted to relax. And so, relax we did. And we did so by doing two things:

i) We went to Cais Da Ribeira.

It's a nice place to chill out at. And well, it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so I do suppose it counts for something. The only problem was that it started raining, so we went off to the other side of the river, to where all the port wine houses were.


ii) Taylor's Port Wine House

The rain was pouring outside, while we stayed indoors sipping on fantastic port wine for free.

Port Wine... for free?

Yes. Free. Take the tour. The guide will explain lots of things about the History and all that, but... at the end of it you do get free white and red ports! There were many glasses leftover.

We helped ourselves.




That very night, we followed a guide from our hostel to watch a Fado performance. It's Portuguese music, played with a  Portuguese guitar and a Spanish guitar, and a singer. The songs are all deeply emotional. A very moving sort of thing. Apparently the good ones are in the little unknown, old Portuguese bars - like the one we went to. That was really good.

The next day we spent walking at the Foz district. We ate roasted chestnuts, walked, and chatted some more. We went to the Casa Da Musica. Architectural wonder? Well, I suppose. Didn't look all that fantastic to me. We were more amazed by how the price of a cup of coffee and a muffin in the cafe was only 2 Euros. Damn. That'll cost me a bloody £6 in London.

And that's it for Porto. Next stop: Lisbon.