¡Portugal!

We are now fairly certain that the Portuguese have this game where they give wildly incorrect maps to tourists, then sit in cafes to laugh at the pathetic foreigners scaling small mountains in search of roads that do not exist. We spent the majority of the weekend in Lisboa completely and utterly lost. In fact, on Friday, Lauren and I spent nearly an hour searching out a metro station which turned out to be approximately two minutes from our hostel. Then, as if maps which are filled with the streets which don't exist and none of the streets which do, the whole city is on seven gigantic hills. I'm not talking molehills here. I mean small mountains.

Anyway, all navigational troubles aside, Lisboa is a really beautiful city, in a sort of peculiar, run-down way. It looks as if it hasn't changed or really developed in about 50 years. The buildings are in decay, with cracked plaster and missing tiles. Not to mention the streets are about an inch deep in filth of all sorts. You can barely tell the original color of the sidewalks and many of the buildings. But the whole medieval quarter (which survived a big fire in the late 1700s) is covered with tiles called azulejos, which are patterned on Moorish tiles. We spent most of the weekend finding museums for hours and hours, and a few castles and palaces (of course). Saturday we went to a little pueblo outside of Lisboa called Sintra which was gorgeous! Dios mio. We saw this ridiculous palace which was built by an eccentric millionaire in the early 1900s. Seriously, it was like the wet dream of a twelve year-old Tolkien geek.

(Also, they have ketchup flavored potato chips. Excellent.)