Sintra y Belém

About time I wrote this entry, amiright?  I'm sorry I haven't written in so long, but it's been so rainy here that I just don't feel like doing much of anything.  We're going on 3 weeks straight of rain.  Luckily, it starting during Semana Santa, so I've only experienced about 2.5 weeks...but, come on!  This is ridiculous, I need some vitamin D, or it's going to be a really hard month-and-a-bit.  Can you believe it?  In less than a month I will be done with classes and on my to Andalucía!  Crazy how time flies.  I spend a lot of time simply waiting to be home again, but at the same time I really do enjoy being here and seeing new things.  I went to Gijón again yesterday to see it when it wasn't raining, and luckily the rain held off so I got some nice photos of the old city.

Anyways, after we spent the day walking around Lisbon, we went to Sintra, a small town about 45 minutes west of Lisbon.  We had to wait in line at the train station to buy tickets with hundreds of tourists for almost an hour, I'd say, maybe less.  It was a surprise, Rick Steve's didn't mention it, but I guess everyone else also knew that Lisbon doesn't have that much to offer and you have to leave the city to see the cool parts of Portugal.  The train took us through the outskirts of Lisboa and through some smaller suburbs on the way to Sintra, we could see an old aqueduct, but other than that, it was uneventful.

Sintra is a kind-of small town with an old fishing-town feeling, even though it isn't on the ocean.  When we got off the train we started walking up to the castles and palaces.  And we kept walking.  And walking.  It wasn't until we got up a bit of the mountain, did we realize that there were buses.  But it was too late.  We had no choice but to continue climbing.  I'm not sure how far we walked, but we walked up this mountain for an hour and a half.  It wasn't that it was particularly difficult, it was just boring and tedious.  Finally we reached the top and bought tickets for the Pena Palace and the Moorish Castle.  After eating our picnic lunch, we headed up to the Pena Palace.

The Moorish Castle on top of its mountain. That we climbed.

"House" on our way up the mountain.

The Palace was really cool - a bunch of different colors and cool architecture.  Instead of describing, I'll just show you:

After the Palace, we walked back down to the Moorish Castle.  Mary and I went to the castle, which was a bunch of ruins and a terrifying stone wall that looks like a much smaller Great Wall of China.  Grace walked back down to the station to wait for us, since she didn't buy tickets to the Castle.  Mary and I got a little lost walking back from the Castle, but we only wasted about 10-15 minutes getting back on track (luckily - Sintra was a freaking maze).  She and I found the buses and took the bus back down, since we were dead tired.  We met Grace at the station, grabbed a train, and headed back to Lisbon.  By the time we got back, it was 6 or 7pm, so we went to a little sandwich shop to grab dinner, and headed back to the hostel to decompress.

Moorish Castle:

View from somewhere on the wall.

The next day, we grabbed breakfast and headed down to the Plaza and hopped on the trolley to Belém.  Belém is a little neighborhood, I don't think it's its own town, about 3 miles down the river from Lisbon.  The trolley was sooooo packed that we couldn't make it to the ticket machine, so we didn't pay :).  Belém is this little town with a bunch of monuments to Portugal's maritime achievements.  We hung out there until about 2 or 3pm, after seeing most of the sights, though we didn't go inside of the famous clouster of a church (we did go into the church, though).

Some pics from Belém:

Monument to the Discoveries

Belém Tower

Monastery of Jerónimos

Inside the church

Anyways, we all had our flights back to Oviedo the next day, Saturday.  Mary and I were on the same flights back and they were decently uneventful...except for our first flight was delayed and we had to run to make our next flight.  If our second flight had been on time, we would have just barely made it.  "Luckily", the second flight was late, too.  If I learned one thing on this trip, it's that I hate flying.  Especially landing.  Ugh.  We took a total of 5 flights, and let me tell you, that was 5 flights too many.  And I still have 7 flights left before I'm in Massachusetts again.  Yaaaay.

Other than going to Gijón yesterday, I have done nothing exciting since Semana Santa.  It is soooo rainy here, like I said, and I can't be bothered to leave the house most days.  On the next nice day, I'm planning on going to Avilés, another small city on the coast near Oviedo and Gijón.  Next week, though, I'm going on my trip to Dublin!!  I'm actually pretty excited, though I have a feeling that the city is going to be like Lisbon - you go to see the city, but there aren't things to do, necessarily.  Hopefully we'll also get a chance to explore the Irish countryside.  I'm pretty stoked.

Only 39 more days until I'm home!  That is both exciting and sad at the same time...

Hopefully I see the sun again before I go home, there are so many things that I want to do but don't want to do wet...it's unfair.  I have limited time and the weather is being so cruel.

*Besos*

Unos Días en Lisboa

¡Hola todos!  I decided, as I probably mentioned, to split up my Semana Santa experience into a few entries.  Though, I don't really know if anyone cares anymore, since my readership has significantly dropped since January/February....I guess as long as my family continues to read the blog, it doesn't really matter if no one else does.

Anyways.  Lisbon (Lisboa).  We got in on Tuesday night and took a bus into the center of the "old" part of the city.  Of course, we got off on the wrong stop, but this time it was because we didn't know we had to push a button to stop the bus... So this time, we had to back-track to the hostel, but it was a lot shorter walk and just from the price of the bus ticket we knew that Portugal was going to be a much less expensive experience.  The hostel was relatively decent.  We had a dispute about giving our passport number to the hostel people since Mary wasn't comfortable doing it, and I kinda had to bail her out and give mine, otherwise we would have quite the challenge of finding somewhere else to sleep.  It's unfortunate that our ID has to be our passport while we're abroad, Europeans have an international ID card thingy.

On Wednesday we woke up relatively early to find a café or somewhere to eat breakfast.  We found a café that we ended up going back to every day, except one day when it was closed.  After eating, we met up with Grace, who had gone to Sevilla earlier that week and then flown to Portugal on Tuesday, but because all of our flights were changed, we didn't see each other until Wednesday.  We walked around the city, following my guide book's suggestions.  We saw a bunch of different neighborhoods and things.  Lisbon is pretty hilly and small.

Graffiti (Mural) on the way up to Bairro Alto

Statue in the center of the Plaza Mayor in Lisbon

Cathedral in Lisbon

Lisbon is hilly - there is a castle up by those trees that we walked up to earlier

Instead of fountains, like Oviedo, in every round-about in Lisbon they have obelisks (or statues)

Gorgeous train station

Walking straight down the tile streets to the Plaza Mayor and the river

It wasn't really what I was expecting - not really a let-down, but after seeing Paris...it definitely wasn't like Paris.  I guess I was expecting old and historic, but since they had an earthquake in the 1750's, the old part of the city isn't exactly old.  Lisbon isn't a city where there are a lot of things to DO or SEE, it's more like you see the CITY.  And it was definitely cool, to me at least.  It had a much more laid-back atmosphere compared to Paris.

Statue in Plaza Mayor at night

Por la noche

River/Ocean

In a separate entry I will talk about Sintra and Belém, two places outside (sort-of outside) of Lisbon in Portugal that we went to while we were there.  Other than walking around and souvenir shopping, we didn't do too much IN Lisbon.  On the other hand, I don't feel like I ever need to go back to Lisbon to tend to any unfinished business (aka, see things I haven't seen), whereas I definitely need to go back to Paris.  And I'm really glad that I went to Lisbon, since Portugal isn't that popular of a tourist destination and I wouldn't want to make a whole trip to Europe just to go there.  Paris, on the other hand, merits its own week.

¡Hasta Luego!

París en la Primavera

¡Hola todos!  I just got back from my Semana Santa adventure yesterday!  We took 1 car, 1 train, 3 metro rides, ~6 buses, and 5 airplanes to do it, but it was worth it.  Even though I really hate flying haha. 

Anyways, I met Mary at the bus station on Sunday and we took the airport bus to the Oviedo airport, only 30-40 minutes away.  We had a really long wait in the airport because we were paranoid about being able to get the bus there, so we played some cards and sat for a really long time.  Finally, we boarded our first plane, a connection to Barcelona.  I don't remember how long the flight was, but only one of our five flights was longer than an hour or so.  When we landed we had a short layover and then we were on our way to París!!

From the Paris airport we had to take the bus to the city and then the metro to our hotel.  It took us a while to figure out the bus, and we could only pay with coins...so we had to get change inside the closing airport.  But we managed.  Once on the bus, we got off at the wrong stop (mostly because Mary was like, "I think this is it!!" so we panicked and got off.  Luckily, we found a map on the street and we were only one stop away, so we walked the half-kilometer to our stop, which was a metro station.  We figured out how to do the metro, but when we got off we didn't know where our street would be and it wasn't marked on any map.  Unfortunately, the information booth was empty, so we couldn't ask.  After a couple of minutes a woman came up behind us and started talking to us in French about the information booth and when we gave her blank looks she was like, "Oh, English?" and I said, "Yes, o español".  So she spoke to us in Spanish and helped us ask people around for our street in French and then showed it to us.  It was so awesome.  First interaction with a French person in France: f(rench)tastic.  

Our hotel room was small, but relatively clean.  We decided not to stay in a hostel in Paris since they were so far away and not actually that much less expensive for a double room.  By the time we got to the hotel it was around 11pm, so we went to bed to prepare for our reeeeally busy day on Monday.  Because of our flight-changes and the way the flights worked out, we only had one day to see Paris.  

Challenge excepted. 

Looking at my guide book I saw that it would be a long walk, but we could go from the Eiffel Tower in the morning, to the Arco de Triunfo, walk down the famous boulevard to the Louvre, and to the Notre-Dame cathedral and geographically it would make sense.  I knew it would be a long walk...but I didn't think it would be ~6 miles of walking...Keep in mind that we walked to and from the Eiffel tower a few times and did a bunch of other walking as well, this is just the main route:

What we walked (in one day) in Paris

Anyways, now that I've bragged a bit about the exercise I got and explained how we got TO Paris, here comes the good stuff:

Our first mission was to climb the Eiffel Tower.  It was the only thing we actually went into in Paris.  We stood in the really long line, not realizing that the stairs line was separate and we could have waited less time and walked up instead.  But it probably would have evened out, since taking the elevator is a lot faster.  We went up to the very tipy-top, 900 feet in the air.  It was a closed-in area, but the ride up was terrifying.  Pictures on that level were through very dirty glass, so they didn't come out so great.  We rode the elevator back down to the second level, which was open-air, so we were able to take some awesome photos:

Mary and I in front of the Eiffel Tower :)

A view from the very top (note the Eiffel Tower's shadow)

Similar photo from the lower level

Pictures of the Parisian skyline are not that thrilling, there was haze (smog?) that disrupted viewing too far away, and there are not too many interesting buildings that make up the skyline (other than the Eiffel Tower, of course).

From the Eiffel tower we walked up to the Arco de Triunfo, not too far away, maybe 20-30 minutes or so, not counting photo-ops or stopping for food.  The arch is in the middle of a HUGE round-about, we had to walk through a tunnel under the traffic to get to the middle.  It was pretty impressive to see, and I think you could have gone up to the top of it, but we didn't, we already went up to the top of something much higher!

The best viewing point of the Tower

Arco de Triunfo from the other side of the traffic

It was so hard to pick a picture of the arch, since in no picture was I able to get the whole thing...

After we crossed back through the tunnel to the street, we walked the loooooong boulevard Champs-Elysees to the Tuileries Garden and the Louvre.  The way we heard about this road, it seemed like Las Ramblas in Barcelona, but it was mostly just shopping and some other stuff, not too exciting.  We did see some cool buildings, like the Pantheon, and some nice little parks, though.  I understand why people love Paris in Spring, we saw so many blooming trees, flowers, and green trees - it was gorgeous.  

The endless boulevard (Champs-Elysees)

Paris in Springtime :)

We started to get really tired along this walk, so we took a few breaks on benches and chairs set out specifically for people in our situation haha.  We eventually made it to the gardens in front of the Louvre and to the Louvre itself.  We didn't go in because we didn't have the time, energy, or motivation to spend hours looking at art.  But we took a few pictures outside of the museum:

The Louvre :)

An arch outside of the Louvre

From the Louvre it wasn't too long of a walk to the Notre-Dame cathedral, which is on an island in the middle of the Seine river.  It was really gorgeous on the little island, there were even parts of it that no tourists had infested and were actually quiet and nice.  The cathedral was very impressive, though, again, we didn't go in.  But, honestly, I've gone into SO MANY cathedrals in Europe...I don't really feel like I missed anything.  We walked all the way around the cathedral, went to get some food (Subways because we can't afford decent food) and had a picnic-style early dinner outside of the cathedral while watching adorable children playing on a little playground.  

On the way to the Louvre, the Siene

Love Locks :)

Notre-Dame

Notre-Dame :)

We were so tired from the day that we only just barely managed to find a metro station to take the metro back to the hotel.  We regrouped for about 20 minutes, and then went out for a glass of French wine and to see the Eiffel Tower at night :)

Mary with our wines :)

:)

Light show - the white lights flashed for about 5 minutes, unable to be captured by photo

Moon :)

Again, we went to bed decently early to get up early the next day.  We had breakfast at the hotel on Tuesday because it was just too expensive to eat in Paris, and even though the breakfast in the hotel was €7, that was better than anywhere else we could have gone.  We grabbed some lunch to go and went to sit in front of the Eiffel Tower for an hour before we took the metro back to the airport.  We got slightly ripped off by the metro because the one stop from the main metro line to the airport costed €8.40!!!  The bus would have costed €7, so it was only a difference of €1.40, but still. So ridiculous.  And when we got to the airport there was a HUGE line of people and tons of people waiting around - it was crazy.  And every flight was either delayed or cancelled.  We didn't know what was going on at first, but then we realized that there was a French air strike - the Aircraft Traffic Control were on strike.  Of course.  Fortunately, we were very lucky and our flight wasn't cancelled, and our delay was only an hour (and we had no connecting flight to catch).  Who would have thought, the two days out of my entire life that I was in a French airport there would be a strike?  Just goes to show that they go on strike about SOMETHING every other day in France.

Anyways, we eventually got on our 2-hour flight to Lisbon, which (other than terrifying me as usual) was uneventful.  Other than the fact that we had the same exact flight crew as our Barcelona-Paris flight.  What are the chances?

Blog entry for Lisbon/Portugal coming soon!  I hope you enjoyed hearing about and seeing París as much as I did.  I definitely need to go back with more time (and more money) and see Paris at a slower, more thorough, pace.  

(Now to go through 864 photos to find a number under 15-20 to put in this entry. Sigh.)

*Besos*

PS: I laughed, I cried: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VLcLH97eRw&feature=related