I finally have some time today to catch up on blogging. Why? I will explain later. Yes it has to do with 2 words....Food Poisoning.
We'd spent about 3 nights and 4.25 days in Lisbon.
Let me start by posting what we had to eat in the plane here. Lufthansa economy class wasn't bad at all.
by the time they reached us, they had ran out of the chicken entre. So as you can see we had pasta with spinach and tomato sauce. First time I have ever seen airlines using non-disposable utensils. Which is awesome! cut down on waste.
Arrived in Lisbon around 2:30pm. The B&B was only 4 months old as we'd found out from the person who is staffed there. Clean, spacious, good location, reasonably priced and friendly staff. One thing though, their shower was a bid odd. The shower glass only goes half way without a door or any shower curtains to cover the rest of the bath. One would have to stand in a way to the water won't splash outside to the rest of the bathroom. HA! I should've taken a picture of it.
We did not do much on the first day, took a nap and then took the boat across to small town for dinner.
Seafood soupy dinner with rice. It hit the spot. Not bad at all. Thank god we have done our research before getting here. As soon as you sit down, the waiter will bring a plate of pate, a plate of cheese and a basket of bread. And they all cost $! We added them up and if we even touch those things it would've cost us around $23 euro. So we just simply left them aside and he came to pick them up later without charging us. No sir, we are not in the free bread US anymore.
Day 2 - As you can see earlier we spent the whole day making up for inactivity the day before. We went EVERYWHERE! Thank god the public transportation were FREE! I will just continue on where we had left off from the earlier post. hahaha I had to go back to look where I had left off.
After a wonderful view of the sunset and St. George castle from the opposite side of another hill, we were on the hunt for dinner. Walking around Alfama we have stumbled on this wonderful little restaurant.
Atmosphere was great(meaning low candlelight everywhere, price wasn't terribly expensive(cheap I would say compare to Madrid now), and the waiter was super nice.
I had the blacken pork, which was cooked perfectly and he had miso/portugese style salmon. Dinner was good and satisfying.
How else can we make dinner more perfect? YES! another trip to the pastries king of Lisbon would do it! I also wanted to take another pictures of the two monuments in the night time. I was a bit disappointed because they weren't lighted at all. But the portugese egg pastries soon cures my disappointment.
Day 3
Since we had finished sightseeing most of the things in Lisbon. We'd decided to take a day trip to Sintra. A 45 minutes train ride from Lisbon Rosio terminal.
First stop in Sintra - "Quinta da Regaleira is classified a World Heritage site by UNESCO. This magnificent estate is designed by an Italian architect Luigi Manini for wealthy Brazilian merchant António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro at the turn of 20th century." - no I did not write that, yes I had copy and paste it from the Lisbon Guide.
We had walked to Quinta da Regaleira from the town center which took us about 7 mins. This is an estate alright. Talk about humongous! It is a bit creepy somehow. We walked around looking at fountains after fountains,wells after wells and tons of caves!!! Caves and wells which connects from each other through dark tunnels. Let me show you an example.
This is a fountain, behind the fountain is dark cave leading to another cave(according to the map). Leading you here to this empty well.
Up above the empty well...and...
Down and down we went into the empty well. Yes...creepy...what was even weirder, there were even more tunnels and caves in the well.
We followed one that was lighted and came out here.
Maybe that's where Hugh Hefner gets his idea for his grotto?
This place is huge! There are more caves and gardens and fountains.
But here's a picture of the main house.
We bought a tour bus ticket for an easier way to get to all these places. Man we have to give it to the bus drivers here at Sintra. It is on top of a hill. Roads are narrow and winding up and down with constructions parts of the way but they were able to take on these roads like they were driving a tiny little Smart Cars. But instead they are driving these huge buses full of tourists.
Up and Up the winding narrow roads, we arrived at Palácio Nacional da Pena.
We had bought tickets to go into the castle where they still have all its furniture. Quite impressive compare to Versailles. Sorry they did not allow pictures inside the palace.
Windy and very coldddddd...Brrrrr...
Another picture of Pena.
How high are we? this is a picture of the Castelo dos Mouros from Castle Pena.
p.s. these pictures were taken with our new panasonic ZS1 camera.
pps - About food poisoning. We have no idea how it happen to me. It must be either the duck(the only thing I had that was different from him) I had for lunch(at a white linen restaurant) or the chocolate w/ churros. ARGG it was painful....I will spare details(which involves me throwing up quite a few times) and was bedridden for the whole next day. Please don't feel bad for me because I was not the one stuck in a tiny hotel room with a food poisoned girlfriend.
