Holiday Weekend

Friday was Columbus Day in Spain, so we had a long weekend. If I had stayed in Madrid I could have seen a military parade featuring the king and queen of Spain, complete with tanks and fighter jets, but instead I decided on a whim to buy a bus ticket to Lisbon. Only after I bought the ticket did I remember the inconvenient fact that in Portugal the people speak Portuguese, not Spanish. Fortunately, most of them also speak English (as it turns out, Spain is far, far behind the rest of the European Union in learning English; it’s one of the EU’s 23 official languages, and the commonest second language).

So after class on Thursday I hopped on a bus and traveled for just over eight hours to Portugal. From this I learned never to travel by bus, no matter how much more it costs to go by plane. Our bus drivers got lost and had to ask for directions, what should have been a six or seven hour drive took 8 hours to get there and 10 to get back, it was hot and icky, and I was extremely car sick, probably because the driver’s goal in life was to become a Disneyland teacup-ride operator and he felt he needed to get some practice in whenever he could. He tore up every roundabout we encountered.

Other than the bus, it was a pretty stellar weekend. The city is much smaller than Madrid, with about 600,000 citizens and 2 million in the metropolitan area. But it felt even smaller. There was no grid to speak of—the streets seemed to be laid out randomly in a spider web design, even more than Madrid’s, which are difficult enough to navigate themselves. Many were paved in cobblestones, and almost all the sidewalks were tiled. They were too narrow to allow much traffic.

Most of our time we spent visiting various old churches from the Romanesque period. We also visited a monastery and a ruined castle. Both of these were almost completely open to tourists, with few areas prohibited. We could climb to the top of the towers and along the walls and see the whole thing. It was neat.

We bought tickets for a double deck tour bus and went on a cursory tour of the city. It was a hop on, hop off deal, so we also used this as transportation to go to different places we wanted to look at.

On Saturday we took the train to a seaside town about half an hour from Lisbon and spent the day on the beach. We went to an open-air café on the beach and I got a fantastic swordfish steak. The water was absolutely freezing, and I had left my swimsuit in Madrid, so I read a book and enjoyed an Irish coffee while the others braved the water. The beach was very beautiful, and reminded me a lot of Hawk’s Cay in the Keys.

Saturday evening we returned to Lisbon and went to a club on the river. It was expensive and the music was awful, not nearly as cool as some of the clubs in Madrid, but we managed to enjoy ourselves anyway.

Then we woke up early on Sunday and caught the first bus back to Madrid. The rest of the day was spent in transit, and by the time we got back to the city I was wiped and went straight to bed.

I’m having a lot of trouble uploading pictures, but as soon as that’s resolved I’ve got a few to share with you.