Lisbon Day 22

April 21, 2010

Day 22 Lisbon

We arrived in Lisbon around 07:30 and proceeded to the ticket counter so that we could book our Porto-Paris portion of the trip.  We couldn't do it in Spain because the trip didn't start or end in Spain.  This ended up being a problem because the train we had planned to be on ended up being full so we had to book for the following day, making our stay in Porto a 3 night stay instead of 2.  I guess that's the nature of train travel (with a Eurail pass anyways.  No worries.  We figured we'll just cut that day out of Paris and have an extra beach day (I had no issue with that!)  Then it was time to find our hotel.  We got off the metro where Trevor's instructions told him to go, but as we looked around, we didn't see the street we were suppose to be on, let alone the address.  Right as soon as we got out of the metro station, we could see water and that made me happy, but when we found out that our hotel was actually over a kilometer from where we were, my happiness dwindled.  We decided to grab a little breakfast at a café before walking to our hotel.  A good chunk of it was uphill, not fun with our big bags, but we made it eventually.  Thankfully the lady let us check in early.  I went straight for the bed.  Trevor was feeling adventurous, so I told him to go wander and I would stay in the room for a little while.  I needed a nap (or at least down time) after our not-so-restful sleep on the train.  After having a little down time, I was ready to go.  We headed for the water.  We found an info booth along the way, but didn't end up using the info much.  We decided to head towards Belem.  I'm not sure if this is just a neighbourhood or an actual town outside of the Lisbon border, but apparently it was the place to eat.  So off we went, not quite sure how far we were going to go.  There wasn't much of a boardwalk or really many nice areas for the first bit.  We stopped in at a stand along the way and bought some deep fried snacks like samosas and continued along.  We finally got into an area that was nicer and had more of a sidewalk along the water.  By this time the weather was getting cooler.  Trevor found a dead rat on a little "beach" along the way and we had seen some dead fish floating in the water, so we were astonished that there were fishermen fishing along the walk.  It frightened me a little about what kind of seafood they were selling in the restaurants.  It clearly didn't frighten me enough because by the time we got into Belem (almost 7 km later!) we ended up having a fantastic meal of seafood in a restaurant right on the water.  The food was awesome!  I had shrimp soup, shrimp salad and a shrimp pastry.  Trevor (and I) tried barnacles for the first time.  I didn't care for them much, but Trevor seemed to think they were tasty.  He also got a ridiculous amount of prawns and a crab stuffing as they called it.  After our meal we headed to a popular pastry shop that apparently has the best custard tarts in all of Portugal.  They were good, but I don't really like custard tarts, so I was definitely not the best judge.  We then took the train back and I took the metro to the hotel while Trevor decided he wanted to walk back from the train station.  It was a nice day.