Dorktown, USA: two redheads in brown North Face jackets touring Lisbon, Portugal together

For Hallie’s last weekend in Europe, we decided to do a five-day trip to Lisbon and Lagos, Portugal. We took the midnight bus from Sevilla after saying goodbye to Donny and Julia for the last time. As we found our seats, a redheaded boy in the back of the bus gave us a knowing nod, acknowledging that we were all Americans. Ben, as he calls himself (Benji, as I took to calling him) approached us immediately upon descending the bus in Lisbon at 6 am Portugal time. We decided that we would make the journey from the bus station into the center of the city together, none of us really knowing neither how far it was nor how to get there. After speaking Spanish at a Portuguese bus driver, we discovered that the walk would take at least an hour and the public transportation didn’t start running for another hour and a half. So, we pooled our cash with some other French kid and jumped into a cab towards the “center of the city”. Since we had no destination and the French kid had somewhere to go, we let the cab take us to wherever that kid was getting out and ended up wandering the city for three hours until 9 am when things started opening.

We found an internet café thanks to my trusty guidebook and looked up some info we had remember seeing about the “best” hostels in Lisbon. The search for a hostel lasted about an hour until we eventually made it to the Lisbon Old Town Hostel. It had just started to rain and as we barged into the lobby, soaking wet and obviously very tired of walking around the city after a sleepless night on the bus from Spain. The rain couldn’t have been more opportune, giving us the perfect image of three homeless college kids just looking for somewhere to sleep. The young hostel owner Jãoa opened his heart up to our pathetic situation and, despite the hostel being full, moved three beds into the unfinished upstairs of the building for us to use for the night.

We ditched our stuff and made our way towards the castle at the top of the city. There was some sort of international mercado going on inside the castle and we got some free coffee and a free purse type thing. Then we experienced this awesome reflection thing that gave us a 360 degree view of the city from within the castle. I still don't understand it enough to explain it because the whole tour was conducted in Portuguese.

At the end of the night, some Irish kids were trying to rile us up enough to go out, but we all found ourselves extremely tired after our long, long day of walking and just passed out instead of hitting the bottle.

The next morning we took the train to Sintra, a UNESCO world heritage site just outside of Lisbon. The Palacio Nacional was beautiful and filled with original furniture and artwork from when it was inhabited. The Quinta da Regaleira is an incredible estate that belonged to this absurdly fortunate man. The maze of caves, paths, sculpture, chapel and palace is summarized poetically as being the place in which “Heaven and Earth meet and merge in a tangible reality, the same that presided over the formulation of the theory of Beauty, of Architecture and of Music, whose echoes the acoustic shell of the Terrace of Celestial Worlds propagates throughout infinity.” Yeah. Me too. My apartment in Madison is pretty majestic.

After the Quinta, we hopped on the ridiculous bus ride up to the castled mountaintop. The weather was awful, Benji had to catch a train fairly soon and the castle/palace cost over 11 euro, so we deciding to walk in as far as we could get without having to pay. Hallie and I played Rummy along the castle walls as Benji measured up the doorman to see if we could force our way past. No luck there.

We slept in Lisbon one more night and then took a train down to Lagos. Maia met us at The Rising Cock hostel on Monday and we spent the rest of the day relaxing on the beach before heading to bed. A woman who calls herself Mama owns the joint and prides herself on the all-you-can-eat buffet of crepes and lemon tea in the morning. I was determined to make the 20 euro-a-night worth it by eating my weight in crepes. I think I have developed an eating disorder when it comes to food that’s free. This doesn’t cost me anything?! Eat as much as you can!!

The next day Maia and Hallie let me explore. I found sufficient rocks to swim to and jump off of and even a caved in area that I had to climb a rope to get to. Unfortunately I never found the ultimate cliff to jump off of, but Lagos is close and I think I might go back.

That night we went out with two Canadian friends we met, Dan and a young Ferris Buehler. We hopped around between a couple of bars, beat them at pool and then found ourselves drinking an entire bottle of vodka and other mysterious ingredients out of a fishbowl. I think the fishbowl is the primary culprit for the shit show.

So the following morning I intended to take the 6:30 am bus back to Sevilla, and Maia strolls into our hostel room at 9 am (without a key, Mama had to let her in, knowing all too well where she had been) after spending the night with Canadian Ferris Buehler. She wakes me up to let me know that I had once again missed an important early morning scheduled affair within the same week (the previous having been a field trip with my university class to a natural park at 9 am after I had stayed out until 7 am the night before). Hallie, being the concerned best friend that she is, chimes in from the upper bunk bed, “Oh no, Bridge, what are you going to do?” to which I promptly responded, “No one is allowed to talk about the fact that I missed the bus.” We all fell back asleep in the cloud of tension of the shit show until 11 am, when we were awoken by the stinging desire to fill our stomachs with freshly cooked, all-you-can-eat crepes by Mama. As the three American girls rolled into the kitchen, Mama let us know that two cups of lemon tea are the best cure for a hangover and handed us plates with crepes ready to be eaten. We enjoyed our last relaxing breakfast in the beautiful beach town, laughing with the Canadians about all of our follies from the night before.

Dan and Ferris walked us to the bus station and left us in our hungoverness to wait for the 6-hour bus ride back home. We kept occupied by reenacting Lion King, word-for-word, as we waited for the most miserable bus ride of our lives. Upon getting back to Sevilla, I was welcomed by a voicemail from my Spanish teaching family, letting me know that the kids ended up having a birthday party and I had missed nothing! Bonus! All works out well again for the irresponsible booze-hounds studying abroad.

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