Portugal ch. 4: Leaving Lisbon for Lagos

WARNING: This post is very long. You have my permission to read it in pieces.

And now, for the final chapter of my week in Portugal!!!

We left off on Sunday late afternoon in fairy tale land in Sintra.

That evening once we'd returned to Lisbon on the train we decided to take it easy because we'd had a long day of walking/hiking. We ate dinner and relaxed at a coffee shop called Brown's Coffee to eat and read. It was like a large starbucks. We just camped out and didn't move for a couple of hours until it was time to return to the hostel to shower and sleep.

Monday:

Apparently in Portugal Monday is the day that nothing is open. We had been informed of this the previous day by our breakfast friends (whom I forgot to mention we ran into at the moorish castle in Sintra). We decided to wander around the areas known as Barrio Alto and Alfama. They were in opposite directions so we began with Barrio Alto. To reach this neighborhood involved a lot of uphill climbing but we passed by a plaza that I later recognized to be the same plaza where Ali and Roberto took pictures. Most things were closed because it was still before 11am. We found a really book store where I spent some time leafing through books. It was a pretty cool area.

Afterwards we returned to our neighborhood and sat by water for a half an hour, I was reading To Kill A Mockingbird and was almost done with it so I was trying to slow down so I'd have something to read on the train ride to Lagos.

We walked to Alfama, considered Lisbon's old town, caught lunch, and walked over to another castle. Outside of the castle a rasta guy was selling something. As I passed him he said to me "Eres Española?" (Are you Spanish?) I shook my head and half smiled in delight and then he said "Oh! Eres Italiana!" (Oh! You are Italian!). I grinned, so happy to be presumed anything other than American, and he gave me a high five. The next two pictures are from Alfama:

We walked back to our neighborhood and found ourselves on a major shopping street, so naturally we spent a few hours popping in and out of stores. We bought some pastries and returned to Brown's to relax. Once we were ready for dinner we headed over to the local mall and ate in the food court. We each got huge salads and then to balance that out we ordered chocolate cake.

Tuesday:

Tuesday morning we had a 10:20 train to Lagos (pronounced "Lagosh"). We arrived at the train station around 9:40 and couldn't find our train time on the monitors. In horror I looked down at my ticket and realized that our train station was the Lisboã-Oriente station, the one in the suburbs about 10 minutes before Lisbon. I had noticed this a couple of days earlier but we figured that didn't make any sense and that it would just stop in the main station on it's way down to Lagos. There were no teller windows in that entrance and I frantically ran across the street to what seemed like some kind of train building as well. I showed the woman our tickets and asked her if that meant we were at the wrong station. She kept telling me I had to cross the street and look at the monitors to find my train platform. We were losing precious time! Finally she listened to what we were asking and she confirmed it and told us to find a taxi. We happened to be in the one city where taxi drivers do not wait in or around their taxi when they are in a line up. We found 15 taxis and none of them had drivers. We crossed the street again to the main drop off point for the station and hopped in a cab as soon as some woman got out. He didn't speak english so I broke out my rusty spanish. "Tenemos prisa!" I told him (we're in a hurry!).

He flew and got us there in ten minutes and I gave him a tip and thanked him. At the station the monitor had out train time but a different city other than Lagos was listed. I asked this older British couple and they said our tickets indicated a transfer at that other city, then on to Lagos. We sat down, relieved, and waited for the train to come. The British couple took us under their wing (I'm SURE they were grandparents by the way they took care of us) and made sure we got on the right train car and everything. We knew how to board a train but I just smiled and let them help us with whatever they wanted to. On the train I instantly wanted them there to tell us when to get off and transfer, but they were far away in another train car. The ride got prettier and prettier the more south we got. We looked out the window at the sea and at miles of orange bush things (they had oranges on them but it didn't look anything like a tree). After our transfer I looked out the window and saw several geckos crawling around by the tracks.

We reached Lagos around 2:45 pm.

Once again, we followed the crowd and then we got directions from a rent-a-car place to our hostel. They also gave us a handy map of the town. Lagos is known for it's beaches and is quickly becoming a vacation spot for lots of British who are buying up properties. I can tell it is still a city in development (it looked like a poor man's Huntington Beach) but in a few years I could see the prices rising and the tourism business becoming more professional. As we were asking for directions everyone kept telling us to walk past the big statue of the person, the statue that no one really knows what it is:

After checking into our hostel, which felt liked it too belonged in southern california, we found lunch and walked around. The town is really tiny. This was late October, but I bet that in the summer it is over-run with families and college kids doing beach stuff and clogging up the restaurants. I'd love to return in the summer. As it was, there were already tons of Brits there when we were there. Really, it was a town of British people. We found dinner at this hippy place where we ate on a couch because the mexican place we'd wanted to eat at was empty. The food was delicious and we enjoyed the vibe.

Wednesday:

We ate breakfast at a tiny place called the Odeon café, owned by a middle-aged British man who also serves as the cook, and his daughter (who was around my age and was on facebook on the computer everytime we walked in) was the waitress. It had a tv and the menu was full of cheap american/english breakfast food like pancakes, hash browns, eggs on toast, beans on toast, and juices. The atmosphere was very friendly. When the daughter would take our order she'd sit down next to us at our table and write everything down. They also had free internet. We returned each morning for the rest of our time in Lagos.

That afternoon we spent a few hours at the beach because it was about 80 degrees and Jennie wanted to tan. I am done with tanning on purpose, I'm hella afraid of getting sun spots and premature wrinkles..not to mention skin cancer. So I put sunscreen on constantly. And I still got tan, woohoo!

There was this dog on the beach that was about..twice as big as tiger and asia and had black curly hair. It spent all afternoon harassing beach goers with it's incessant barking. It barked at everyone who went near the water. It barked at me as i was halfway in the water but eventually switched to barking at a group of British college-aged boys. Every sound was amplified because of the rocks and at one point, as I was reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (a book I'd picked up the day before because I'd finished my other one), I heard one of the guys yell "F*ck he's after me!!!" British accent and all. I looked over, along with every single other person on the beach, and watched as this kid tried to swim away from the dog, only for the dog to follow him into the water.

As the sun went down it got chilly and we stopped for tea and "read" a couple of Portuguese magazines.

We ate dinner next to an American/Canadian couple at an otherwise empty restaurant. They were acting oddly formally and politely but we couldn't figure out what they would be doing in Portugal on a first date. I decided they must've come with a big group of friends, and everyone else was not interested in dinner quite yet, but they were and they decided to eat by themselves and they didn't know each other before the trip hence the awkwardness. Afterwards we got hot drinks at a café called Xpreîtaqui. They played coffee shop music and we chilled there and chatted for awhile before hitting the sack.

Thursday:

We had breakfast at odeon café again. Then at noon we went kayaking!! The kayaks were doubles, and it was us two, a strangely quiet Australian couple, and two very tan, small-ish, and muscular guides. The journey was a 3 hour trip to see the rock formations along the shores and to visit the grottos. Jennie and I pulled up the rear the whole time, but it was a great work-out and I was glad for the exercise. The guides kept pointing out rock formations and saying "this one is an elephant, this one is a face, this one is a toilet seat.." Once he said the toilet seat one I started to wonder if he and the other guide have fun by pulling out random nouns every time they hit the water and hearing the tourists go "Oh, I see it!" Jennie and I started doing it too. I would look at a rock and be like "This one looks like a teapot! That one looks like a table!" The guides started laughing and judging by their reaction I have a feeling I'm right about them making it up sometimes.

After the kayaking we sat on the beach so Jennie could tan some more. It wasn't as warm as the day before but it was still somewhere in the 70s. After an hour on the beach I tried to find the slave market. According to our map I had passed by that plaza a dozen times already. Our map wasn't totally accurate as we'd figured out during our time in Lagos (another thing that will improve in the next couple of years). It told me it was located in one corner, but it absolutely was not that corner since that corner held a bikini store and a restaurant. I think it was this:

On the sides of the broken platform were iron rungs. Also, why else would they keep this broken slab of cement around? This is on the side of the church in the lower picture.

We showered, tried and failed to get the hostel cat out of our room and had to get help from the manager, then read for a bit and ate an early dinner. After dessert we walked around and ended up back at our café with the weird name.

Friday:

We grabbed breakfast at the odeon café. Our train wasn't scheduled until 4pm so we sat down in another café while we watched a tropical storm try to blow everyone over. We had a ten minute walk to get to the train station and there was no sign of the storm letting up. We changed into our board shorts and I put my scarf over my head and we hurried in the rain over to the station. We spent about 20 minutes in the bathroom drying ourselves off along with our luggage/shoes/purses.

Once I was done I saw a sign that said the next train wasn't until 5:20. I have a suspicion that the train time on our ticket was for our transfer stop, not from the Lagos station. Which meant we were going to miss our train. We hastily changed our tickets to the 5:20 and later called the hostel to let them know we wouldn't be arriving until sometime after 1 am. The train ride was long and we had a couple of transfers, but I survived by reading my book and eating trail mix. Except for the stuffiness I was quite content. Jennie had less patience for the train ride, and I realized that Bolivia really helped me to see transportation in a new light. After being on a 10-hour freezing cold and bumpy ride to Sucre and back, several cold 7 hour bus rides to La Paz with one bathroom stop, and taking a 12 hour train to Tupiza in freezing temperatures with unsanitary bathrooms and warm but gross blankets and alpaca socks on my feet, 6 hours through Portugal was a piece of cake.

We returned to the same cool cinema hostel in Porto that we stayed at when we arrived in Portugal. We had to return to Porto because the only flights to Paris left from Porto. I was in bed by 2:10 am and woke up a little after 8 to grab a relaxed breakfast at the hostel before leaving at 9:15 am for the metro to the airport. We arrived with plenty of time and witnessed a strange scene. The picture below is my sneaky no-flash shot of what we saw. We walked much closer but I didn't think taking a picture of a possibly dead woman would make the police very happy. In front of the police was a person on the ground covered with a medical sheet. There was no medical professional around, and the police weren't even paying attention to the body. I looked around for mourners and saw one lady facing the opposite direction on a bench and a man who was putting his arm around her. I can't even be sure she was related to the incident at all. There was an arm and a foot sticking out from under the blanket. She was there for at least half an hour with nothing going on around her except some police standing a ways away chatting. There was no rope or barrier around, I mean literally someone could've walked up and uncovered her before the police noticed. Eventually some paramedics carried her away in no hurry and put her in the back of a van that could've been an ambulance but I couldn't see it that well. I didn't hear any sirens.

Anywho, I bought a National Geographic and we boarded the plane back to Paris!!!

That's the end of my trip to Portugal! We leave for Geneva tomorrow morning for a public health field trip to MSF headquarters and WHO headquarters. We also get fondue.

-H.