Sintra and Lisbon, Portugal

We left for Lisbon (aka Lisboa) at 1:30 am from the Salamanca train station.  Nick and I were split up because the rooms were divided by sex. I was lucky because the helper fella who jumped off the train came straight to me. He read my ticket and walked me to my room and then took my ticket away from me. I settled in and went right to sleep trusting that someone would wake me up so I didn't miss my destination. Nick had a different experience he was left on his own to find his car and bunk. When he asked someone the answer was, "down there." As he was standing in the hallway the train started to leave the station. Lucky for him the ticket fella came by and helped him to his room. We both slept really well.

We were woken up by a knock at the door. Turns out our stop was the last one. We we arrived in Lisbon and jumped off the train and headed to the metro to get to another train station so we could get to Sintra. We made it in plenty of time so we took a short nap.

Train to Sintra:

We did a lot of research about the place before we went but we were still confused when we got there. Everything worked out fine, though. We walked a lot and took a ton of photos. Our first stop was the Castelo dos Mouros. We climbed the wall and had a great time exploring. The views of Sintra and Pena Palace were amazing. We spent a lot of time here.

Next we headed to Pena Palace. The colors of this palace are so much better in person. To keep things interesting let's play a game. Try to find Nick in the photos that we took of the Pena Palace.

Were you successful? Trust me he is in every picture.

Next we headed to to Sintra city and walked/slid down the narrow streets.

We stopped at the oldest pastry shop in Sintra and ate their two most famous pastries. The recipes are not shared with anyone and we could tell why.  So yummy!

After our wonderful adventure we headed back to Lisboa by train. Nick and I both thought the train would end where it picked us up so we both fell asleep. The train stopped and we had no idea where we were. Lucky for us the train was going back to Sintra soon so we decided to stay on and figure things out from there. It took us 2 hours to make it to our wonderful Airbnb sailboat. (We found out later, through experience, that we could have taken a bus that took us straight to our sailboat. Oh well, live and learn)

Nick took a much needed nap and I explored the area nearby by myself. When Nick woke up, we went out for dinner. This is when things got a little uneasy for us because as soon as we exited the subway Nick was approached by a man asking him to buy drugs. At first Nick had no idea what he was talking about, and I was a good 3 steps behind him so the next thing I heard was a frustrated Nick stating loudly, "I'm Mormon and I don't do that crap!" We walked quickly where there were lots of people in a tent and it turned out to be a small market (at 10 pm) We tasted a few things and left to find a place to sit and eat. We went up some interesting back-roads , following people of course, but the higher we went the more uneasy we were feeling. Nick and I decided to walk back down and find food near the subway station and that's how we found this amazing Saw Fish waiting for our taste buds.

I wish that I could tell you that we had no problems after we finished our meal (By that time it was midnight) but that was not the case. On our way back to the subway we were approached again by a different person, this time drugs were in his hands as he was shoving it towards us. We walked quickly and tried to shake the uneasy feeling that this city was giving us. 

Sunday we got up and went to church. We really wanted to visit Tyler Tillman but his building was too far north and the subway wasn't running all the way up there, so we had to settle for these two dudes.

We left our wonderful boat to explore more of Lisboa before we caught the train back home. We went to see the views at the St. Jorge Castle it also had peacocks. 

After the castle we were headed down the hill when we found this cool shop. Nick really wanted to purchase a tile because they are very popular in Lisboa. This old dude had a lot of tiles that he has collected through the years and Nick settled on one of them. We also heard that grilled sardines were a must, so we tried them... BONES, BONES everywhere!

We made it to the bottom of the hill and caught a bus near our train station. We decided to take a one-way cheap gondola ride as we were killing time and it dropped us off at a super cool shopping area that was attached to our train station.

Nick got sick of me taking picture of him and he thought he was giving me that, "I disapprove"

look but in actuality he was giving me the, "I'm super sexy" look. I guess he needs to work on his modeling skills.

Overall it was a great trip. We got back to Salamanca at 1:30 in the morning but we had Monday off to sleep in.