Having booked it back in January because of the cheap flights, off I went to Lisbon this weekend, and I loved it - what a great city. I couldn´t quite get over that it was a capital because it really did seem like a small old town and it was notably different to Madrid, and Spain in general. All the houses were either painted white or bright colours like pink, green, yellow or blue and each roof was bright orange or "terracota". It was also very cobbly with lots of hills (almost like Edinburgh!) and there were little trams about everywhere (unlike Edinburgh! . don´t get me started). Unfortunately when we arrived it was raining and not too warm so our first stop was of course lunch. Maybe a stupid decision but we actually went for pizza instead of typical Portuguese food and mine had banana on it, which although doesn´t sound too good, was amaaazzing. A bottle of wine was also consumed (and we had started drinking on the plane at 10am that morning ;) ). After lunch, we did a lot of walking around and by this point I had already decided how great I thought the city was.
Our hostel was called "Home" and it was pretty cool, all decorated like a house with a sitting room, dining room and "study", and the people who worked there were fun and friendly. They also offer you a welcome drink which is a sort of cherry liquor in a shot glass, which Sarah and I made the mistake of downing straight away, when as we discovered afterwards, you are meant to sip on it. Oops. However, they did mess up our room allocation so the second night we had to sleep in the office. We didn´t go out the first night because I was basically dying from a number of coughing fits, not helped by the fact that after each fit I would go out for a cigarette, so we just chilled in our hostel room which was a four-bed dorm. The other guy in our room was a weird older English guy. He had set his alarm for 5.30am and didn´t wake up which meant there was a good hour of me getting angry until we decided it was time to wake him up. One of the hostel workers had also come in to wake him up, saying that he had a flight to catch, but he didn´t really move. Anyway, after a bit of shoving and "excuse me...excuse me" he sat up and laughed and just goes "Hey! How are you doing?"...freak. We asked him if he had a flight to catch, because of what we had heard from the hostel worker, and he said that it wasn´t until 10am. Strange. So then we asked him to turn his alarm off for a while if he wasn´t getting up. He went back to sleep. The alarm went off again. The fiasco continued for another half an hour. We also think he missed his flight as we were pretty sure he was with the "rowdy" group of annoying older bald men who had been in Lisbon for the Tottenham match and we had heard them leaving early on, chanting away Tottenham songs and generally being a "disturbance".
It ended up being a good thing that we didn´t go out though as it meant we weren´t hungover for the walking tour we had signed up for the next morning. Our tour guide, Hugo, was really cool and relaxed and I found it all pretty interesting, and again, beautiful. Luckily it wasn´t raining that day but it was still fairly "chilly". Anyway one of the things that I geekily found interesting was that Harry Potter actually has Portuguese influences. JK Rowling apparently taught English in Lisbon for a while and used certain aspects for inspiration. For example, school kids in Lisbon literally go around in black uniforms with black capes, we saw a few, and they literally looked like they attended Hogwarts! The character "Salazar Slytherin" was also taken from an evil Portuguese dictator called "Salazar".
The tour ended around late-lunchtime and by this time we seemed to have acquired two followers - Sim and Claire. We had met Sim the day before and she was nice and everything but didn´t have much chat. She was Lithuanian and looked like a sort of punk-hippy and I was probably a bit of a bitch making impressions of her voice later on. The other girl Claire, was Australian but lived in London and yeah, she had noooo chat. I mean she was DULL. Anyway after the tour they overheard we were going to find lunch somewhere so decided they would "tag along". After not long we realised that we didn´t really want to have lunch with them and so lied to them saying that I had to go back to the hostel to take medication for my cough. Lies! Anyway, it didn´t work because they then, being all nice and all, decided they would accompany me and wait. We weren´t even talking to them the whole journey back, we really didn´t understand why they wanted to hang around with us so much...even though we are, lets be honest, brilliant. We got back to the hostel and I said that I actually wanted to chill for a bit so we scuttled off to our room and waited about 20 minutes, hoping that they would leave. Of course they hadn´t though, and there they were waiting for us at the bar in reception. Great. So we went out with them before saying that we weren´t actually hungry and that they should go and eat if they were. Thank fuck. We got rid of them. That was a good hour and a half wasted. I don´t think we are very nice people...
We decided to stay in the hostel for dinner on Saturday night because we had heard good things about it. It was called "Mamma´s dinner" and "Mamma" was the old Portuguese woman who owned the hotel and she cooked a lovely three course meal of traditional Portuguese food for all of us. At the end, everyone was poured a shot glass of port and a toast was made to Mamma, how cute. (We didn´t down this one..) By this point, we had made other "friends", including another Australian girl called Abbie. Abbie was cool and I´m not going to lie, I think I fancied her a bit. We also got on like a "house on fire" as they say and we all went out on the hostel´s pub crawl together. The pub crawl had good intentions. The first bar was completely free for an hour, and we abused this by getting quite a few vodka lemonades, depsite the crowd. However, it wasn´t quite hitting us and the drinks were definitely not as strong as in Spain. I liked the atmosphere though because there seemed to be "no rules"...everyone could smoke inside and the streets were filled with people drinking outside. It was all pretty casual, so I felt a bit sorry for the American girls in the group who had come very dressed up. However, we later discovered that was in fact for the mission they were on of I think probably fucking a guy every night of their travels throughout Europe. They definitely got a lot of attention anyway, especially the girl we just called "legs" because her pins were so beautiful and long. The second bar was shit and we didn´t even get a drink because the bar was so crowded. We then contemplated going home but thought we should experience more of the nightlife so went on to the club. Again, we didn´t drink because it was about 10 euros for a test-tub-sized mixer, so we just decided to dance. I loved the dancing because it was all the early "noughties" hits like Flo Rida, Black Eyed Peas and Usher and despite the cock fest that was going on, literally there were about 3 other girls in the club, we had fun. I´m not saying being surrounded by guys is a bad thing, in fact most of them were pretty fit, but of course being European, the sleaziness took over and I wasn´t such a fan of someone brushing his cock up against me from behind.
Hungover the next morning with about 2 and half hours sleep, disappointing considering the night we had, we decided to just chill until we needed to leave for out flight. To be fair, I guess we had drunk quite a lot throughout the day and we abused happy hour slightly, drinking fish-bowl-sized glasses of wine for 1 euro. We talked to Abbie for a good two hours about her travels through Europe and the time seemed to pass. I was quite sad leaving, especially coming to work this morning, but oh well...will be travelling in the summer so I´m looking forward to that.
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