Sojin Josephson

After a week in Barcelona, we headed for Lisbon. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of Portugal until I actually got there. It was a place that I read about in history textbooks, but never thought I would actually go to. The crew, about 15 of us in tow, arrived in the evening. We found our hostel, called Lost Inn Lisbon, which was ranked No. 3 in the world last year. Kim, Melissa, Perry (our wonderful friend from Whitefish, MT who we met through Michela) and I had a private room. It was so clean and beautiful and white and I felt relieved the second I walked into it—especially after the 12-person room of chaos in Barcelona. We settled in and then walked down the street to a local market where we bought a lot of fruit, water and granola bars.

The next morning, we had breakfast at the hostel and met in the lobby for this woman to take us to the starting point of our walking tour. Our tour guide ended up being half insane. I can’t really describe him, but he was sure entertaining. I learned more about his college days, Harry Potter and the vents of Lisbon than Portuguese history, but the tour still helped us orient ourselves with the city. After the tour, we went with the guide to a local restaurant. The place was so quaint and had phenomenal food. I had codfish because it’s a famous dish of the region. I don’t even like fish, but I thought I would man up and try it and I’m glad I did. We then toured around the city center of Lisbon on our own. For dinner we went to a place called Time Out, which was a fancy food court/cafeteria. All the classy business people go there and the place had every type of food imaginable. We went here for dinner every night. The U.S. should have places like this.

The second day in Portugal, we took a train for 2 euro to Cascais—a little coastal town 40 minutes outside of Lisbon. It was pouring in Lisbon, but Cascais was like a different world. It was so sunny and hot and the best weather we had seen on spring break. We walked on the beach and then made our way up into the town where we saw Casino Estoril—a place Frank Sinatra played—and found food trucks. I ate at this really cool one run by hippie English guys who drove a beat up old truck down just for this food festival. After lunch, we walked the entire boardwalk, stopped for drinks at a beach café and then went into the village. We shopped for gifts in the cutest local stores, Kim got her nose pierced on a whim and then we headed back to Lisbon.

After another dinner at Time Out, we attempted to go on a pub crawl organized by the hostel. A few of us didn’t want to go to the club at the end and therefore didn’t want to pay the full price of the crawl, so we just followed the crowd and sort of did our own pub crawl. On the way back to Lost Inn Lisbon, we met this 26-year-old American guy who was actually lost in Lisbon. He was trying to find the club that we never made it to, but he was a talker. He said he worked for the government and traveled 326 days of the year in 2014. He doesn’t like Hillary Clinton because she made people peel her grapes on the plane and said that he had to take vehicles to Washington so President Obama could drive his family to Camp David. After listening to him ramble on like that for 30 minutes and pointing him in what we thought was the correct direction, we finally went back to the hostel.

 The third day, we took another 2-euro train to Sintra. This was also a little coastal town where we took a bus to visit three different castles. On the second stop, we hiked through the most beautiful, green forest area and spent a few hours there. It reminded me a lot of hikes in the Gorge (except here there was a manmade path.) After we arrived back in Lisbon, we went to the market again where Stas, Perrey and Melissa got ingredients to make homemade sangria.

That evening, our last night, we took a really cool electronic wagon (the trams were on strike) to the best lookout spot in Lisbon. We sat and looked at the city lights for over an hour while eating chocolate. It felt like the ending scene to a movie series. And then the credits rolled on spring break 2015.