Gymnastically Inclined

Sunday April 6, 2008

There is nothing like waking up to a woman screaming at the top of her lungs in Portuguese at 3am…and that is exactly how my third day in Portugal began. Thanks to our super sweet hostel owner the lady got kicked out of our building, which would be the first time that he saved the day today. While showering and getting ready we broke the curtain rod above our window, which was about 9 feet off of the ground. Thanks to Allison’s tall proportions and sweet gymnastical (not a real word, but there is not adjective for someone who is good at gymnastics, therefore gymnastical is: a person who is gymnastically inclined) ability, we got the rod back up in no time. We had to be checked out of the room by 11am, which wasn’t the best because that meant that we had to haul our bags around for the rest of the day…eh. Then our hostel owner saved the day for a second time. He let us keep our bags in a spare room while we were gone for the day, thank God. We had some pastries, which were less than par and headed to Belem for the day. We went to the Tower of Belem and then to the Discoveries Monument, which I quickly labeled as “Boatlandia” because there were no less than 50 sailboats sailing right by the monument. We bought lunch and then ate it in a near by park. Afterwards we strolled through a market on the way to a famous monastery that we were going to walk through. Allison found a deck of Coke cards and a “The History of Coke” book…but it was all in Portuguese, which I still don’t speak, so I opted to not buy it. Afterwards we went to a supermarket to purchase “dinner,” got our bags from our hostel, and took the metro to the bus station. We sat in the bus station for the next 3 hours and people watched…which was quite interesting. You get a different mix people who come through a bus station during a 3-hour time period. My favorite was probably the dog that was walking its little old lady owner, which kept me entertained for a good 30 minutes. She was determined to get it in its kennel, but needless to say the canine won in the end. We hopped on our bus at 9:30pm and 7 hours later (5:30am, with the time change) we got into Sevilla. It was a long ride home, but the weekend in Portugal was well worth it with many random stories to tell!