Lisbon

It was our last trip after a really busy summer (Barcelona & Alcossebre, Paris & Venice). I have to say, I didn't expect anything incredible, maybe because Portugal is pretty close to Spain and because the very little I know about it is not very beautiful...
Big mistake!
We arrived early in the morning (Vueling, of course) and waited for the bags for almost an hour. When we finally got them, we went by bus to the city center, straight to our hotel. After a couple of problems, we found it and had a little "morning siesta" to recover from the trip...
The hotel was in a nice place, we had a grocery and a metro station (Marqués de Pombal) near it.
The first day was not very interesting. After sleeping for a while, we bought some groceries and ate at the Eduardo VII park. That was the first of many meals from the grocery. It might sound boring and tiring, but we did a pretty good job! We always had bread, but we mixed it with cheese & jam, some meat sometimes (For me, obviously), had some yogurt every once in a while... It was fun!


Anyway, enough with the food. The first day we just went in a recognition mission: Praça do Comercio & Rua Augusta. Katie also went to H&M to see if she could find some sweater to buy, cause it was chili (NOT COLD) and she didn't bring anything for cold weather...
The next days we started to see everything. We saw all the city and we also make some small trips outside Lisbon...
The things I liked most of all were the Saint George's Caste, Belem and Sintra.
The Castle is on the highest mountain of Lisbon and you can see everything from it. We went in the early afternoon, expecting a lot of people and a really hot weather, but once we went inside we found a little park with benches everywhere and tall trees that gave a nice shadow. We had a little siesta (another one! :)) and after it, we visited all the castle. It was really cool, it had "2 castles in one". The old part, the inside one, was were they all hid when they were under attack, with high strong stone walls.


Belem is a city near Lisbon. It's famous for the Jeronimos Monastery, the Belem Tower and the Belem Pastry. We went to the Monastery and we also paid to get inside the Cloister... that was amazing! It had a little garden that looked really good with the sun and the fountain in the middle... Muy muy bonito!



The Belem Tower... well... we thought we went to it, but in the end it turned out that it wasn't the real Belem Tower, it was the Monumento de los Desubrimientos. It was really high, so we got a really good view of Belem, el Puente del 25 de Marzo, the Monastery... everything!
And finally... the Pastry. There was a huge line outside it and it was really hot, but one of my cousins told me to taste the Belem Pastries cause they were really good, so we stood in line. Thank God we did!!! We bought 5 and regretted not buying some more. Extremely delicious!!! :)



Finally, Sintra. Another city, farther away than Belem. We arrived after 40 minutes on the train and an "unexpected connection". Then, by bus to the Palacio da Pena. I had read that there was a lot of people during the day, that if I wanted to visit it, I should do it very early in the morning. Well, 15 people caught the bus at the train station stop. I was wondering if we were just being lucky, but once we entered the real Sintra up mountain, we understood everything... We were so lucky to get the bus up to the castle!
Once there, we got in. It turns out that the castle is not the only thing that's there. There is a huge garden around it, with lakes, statues and many other things.
We didn't have time to see it all, but after going inside the old part of the castle, we took the long way out through the garden. It was SO BEAUTIFUL! I think I liked it better than the Palace! Small lakes with ducks and (black & white) swans, big green trees... I loved it!


And that was pretty much everything... The only bad thing is that I "lost" my cell phone over there, but I didn't have time to be angry or sad cause I was with Katie, so... always positive!