Día Tres en Lisboa

(The sea otters at the Oceanário in Lisboa, Portugal)

On Sunday, I woke up a bit later and in a somewhat coordinated manner, and slid down the ladder without disturbing anybody. I showered, got dressed, and headed downstairs for breakfast where I ate with Lidia. Kevin joined us about halfway through and then we headed to the computer room to plan the day's activities. All of the BC kids except for Kevin and I were heading back to Madrid early that afternoon, so it was going to be just the two of us all day.

After we had something that resembled a plan, we headed to the nearest Barclay's ATM, as I was running out of cash. I stuck my card in, gave the machine my pin number, and asked for 100 euros. The screen went red and printed me a receipt that said, "Your card has been captured for security reasons. Please call your bank. Thank you." I didn't even move. I stared at the screen and hoped that my card would pop back out. It didn't. I had 15 euros on me and, of course, it was Sunday, so the Barclay's was closed. I called Kevin over and the two of just stared at the red, flashing screen. After about 10 minutes of my calmly asking the machine for my card back, we decided to give up. Kevin said he had enough money to get us both through the day, so with my poor card still under the captivity of the ATM, we headed to the metro.

We took the prior day's recommendation and trooped on over to the Gulbenkian Museum of Modern Art. It is free on Sundays (lucky for me, as I was still panicking about not having any money) and it was pretty cool. Much of the symbolism was over my head, but the stuff was fun to try and figure out. It's always bothered me that at modern art museums there is never an artist's explanation as to the meaning behind the pieces. Most of the pieces don't even have a title and the information cards simply say: "Untitled #42." Very unhelpful, if you ask me.

After we wandered through most of the Gulbenkian, we got back on the metro and went to the Expo Center, which is an area near the river with a lot of modern architecture and art displays that was built for the Expo '98. The Expo area also houses Lisboa's Oceanário, which we decided to visit. The museum sits out on the water and it is really quite large for an aquarium. There was one big center tank and lots of exhibits around the perimeter. My favorites were the penguins and the sea otters. Penguins are always spiffy and the sea otters were sleeping on their backs being just about as adorable as possible. One of the other coolest things we saw was this huge sunfish. I had never even heard of them before, but they are these huge fish that look like floating mattresses. They can weigh over 2 tons and their fins are too small to really do anything, so they just float around in the current. He was pretty nifty.

We spent almost 3 hours at the aquarium, and by the time we were done, we were hungry. We were in a pretty commercial area and hadn't seen any restaurants, so we headed back to the food court at the Vasco de Gama shopping center (a huge building in the expo area). We ended up splitting a pizza at Pizza Hut (don't judge - you have no idea how much I miss pizza) and then had to come up with a plan for what to do next. We had realized at some point during the last two days that the first pastry place in Belém the group ended up leaving was actually really famous. Only three people in the world know the recipe for the pastries and Samantha Brown went there with the Travel Channel. While no one else seemed bothered, Kevin and I were kicking ourselves for not having realized where we were at the time. So we decided to take the bus all the way back to Belém, just for the pastries, (I didn't need much convincing, although Kevin was a bit more hesitant). The bus ride took us a solid 45 minutes, and the line at Pasteis de Belém was out the door and around the block. The line was moving pretty quick, so it really didn't take very long to get to the counter. I ordered two of the famous little pastries (they're about three bites each) and one cinnamon muffin (I was overly thrilled about the muffin - I haven't even seen one yet in Madrid). The place goes on forever and there are about seven different dining rooms, but since all of the tables were full, Kevin and I took our pastries and ate outside near the Monasterio. Those pastries are good! Pasteis de Belém gives you a little packet of cinnamon and another of powdered sugar to sprinkle on top of your custardy pastry, so there was definitely a proper method of eating these. I hadn't quite mastered this method yet and ended up with powdered sugar all over my shirt. I then ate my muffin, which was also fantastic, and after taking some pictures of the monastery at night, we got back on the train and headed back downtown.

We had heard talk of an old neighborhood, Bairro Alto, where there were supposed to be a lot of eccentric little shops. We weren't sure where it was, but we had plenty of time to explore and just wandered in the general direction. We stopped to take pictures in a few plazas and also looked at the Santa Justa Elevator, a turn-of-the-century, eiffel-tower reminiscent, once-steam-powered scenic elevator. We didn't go up, as one has to pay to do that, but we took pictures from the ground, and then asked for directions to Bairro Alto. Of course, it was on top of what I would call a mountain. We were exhausted by the time we finished climbing, but there was a nice park with a great panoramic view of Lisboa at the top. By now, it was almost 8:30, so it was already dark and all of the shops were closed, so we headed back down the mountain/cliff to our hostel.

I stopped at the pastry shop near our hostel again, and got a slice of cinnamon cake with fruit glaze that would serve as dinner later. Then at the hostel, we splayed out on the couches in the TV room. There was a Canadian couple there who had just finished a pilgrimage walk across Spain, (some 780 km, they said) and we talked with them for a while about their trip. I decided 780 km might be a tad long for me, especially when there are no pastries involved.

Now, our flight was leaving early the next morning and we didn't want to pay the hostel for the night when we would only be sleeping there for a few hours before heading to the airport. Because of this, we had already checked out that morning and left our stuff in the security room. Our plan had been to come back to the hostel and watch movies in the common room until as late as possible and then just grab our stuff and go. We watched Cinderella Man first, for which I was mostly awake, and then I went to get The Devil Wears Prada. A woman from Argentina joined us for this one, but I fell asleep during the first scene. Kevin must have fallen asleep, too, because we woke up when his alarm went off at 4 am. We grabbed our stuff, (the hostel was very nice and didn't make us pay for sleeping on the couches) and got on the bus to the airport. We got off a stop early, but walked to the right terminal and a few hours later we landed in Madrid. We took our designated metros back to our homestays and put the lid on our trip to Lisboa!