Well this post is long overdue.....Anyways three weekends ago, I took a weekend trip to Lisbon, Portugal because we had a three day weekend! I had a fabulous time there. Lisbon is a very quaint and beautiful city. The city is FULL of hills, I really can't even count how many hills I walked up. However the hills make for some great views! I left on a Thursday afternoon with two girls in my program. We stayed in a hostel recommended to us by some friends and it actually turned out to be really nice for a hostel. It had a living room, dining room, and kitchen that were common areas for all guests! Also it had a balcony with a great view of the city. The whole place was clean and neat and full of furniture from IKEA. The best part of the hostel was the people there! There were about 3 or 4 people that are studying in Lisbon that live in the hostel and they were very friendly! Two of the guys took us walking around the city on Friday when we arrived. It was really nice because we didn't get lost and got to see a lot of things. When we got back three more girls had arrived and it turned out they were in our same study abroad program, but they had been here since September. The six of us went to Sintra, a small town outside of Lisbon, the next day. We saw two castles, well one was mostly ruins of a castle. The second one was amazing. It was kind of a mix of different things, but there were lots of colorful mosaics and engravings. On our last day, we went biking around Lisbon! We rented bikes from a company that my family has used in the past, and biked along the river. It was a gorgeous day out and we stopped at a delicious pastry shop as well! We also had lots of fun during the nights in Barrio Alto, which is the happening neighborhood in Lisbon. On Friday night we went to a bar to see one of the guys from the hostel play his guitar! It was funny because we went to the bus stop and the bus wasn't coming and it started to rain so we decided to just go back and stay in. However, we ran into the hostel owner, Deborah, and she was actually on her way to the same bar. When she heard we were going to stay in, she started protesting saying that we only live once and that Barrio Alto is the best place in the world to go out. She successfully convinced us and off we went. Then when we got there, she bought us a round of shots and then proceeded to shimmy around the crowded bar. Though we had a great time she obviously thought we didn't because the next morning our friend told us that she told him that we left after two songs and didn't have fun at all, which was a total lie. We thought it was hilarious though. Anyways on Sunday our flight left at 8am so I was up at 5:30 after going to bed around 3.....it was a rough morning. I took a nice nap though when I got home. I was actually watching a movie on my laptop with Omar, my 5 year old host brother, and we both ended up falling asleep for like 3 hours, it was precious:)
P.s. I posted pictures from Lisbon! Click this link to view them Lisbon/Sintra Pictures
