Day 7: Spent the day with Patricia in Belem today. This was apparently where a lot of great things to see in Lisbon are, and most of them are free on Sunday. Just a shame we hadn't actually realised this on Sunday. In the end I don't think actually paid to go in anywhere anyway, so that was fine. The day got off to a slow start as we were meeting Patricia at a designated spot and she ended up a bit late. But it was fine because the designated spot just happened to be the Ginjinha stand. So we just busied ourselves with that and lunch until she arrived. Then we also ended up standing around waiting for the tram (which ended up being a bus) in the hot sun for half an hour. By the time we actually got to Belem we had felt like we had done a full days activities even though we hadn't actually done anything. Good thing the first stop was a bakery famous for it's little custard tart cake things.

I can't remember the name of the cakes but they are delicious. Patricia bought a 6 pack which we shared. With the cakes they give you sachets of cinnamon and icing sugar to sprinkle on top. Gabrielle chose with the cinnamon to pile rather than sprinkle. While we were sitting in a park eating these we watched a group of who I presume were locals playing some weird game. They would start by standing in a circle and then they would one at a time take steps towards each other, but in a kinda tactical way as to not being in range of someone else not on their turn or something like that. When they were in range they kind of did a sword fighting thing and then would pretend to lose limbs. Kinda looked like fun though we couldn't really figure out exactly how it worked.

Then it was on to the sight-seeing. There were three main things to see here. The monastery, the tower and some monument thing to important Portuguese people in history. The monument which looks like a sail was the first thing we saw. We took a photo in front of it mimicking the first group of people on the statue. As we were walking away we saw a group of Asian tourists doing the same thing. We started a trend. The tower was a rather small tower, but it was sitting in the water and looked really cool. As we were walking around here Ness and Gabrielle had decided to sing, though I can't remember what it was they were singing now. That's what happens when you do a two week car trip in a car with no way to connect your mp3 players and really s***ty radio.

After this they kicked it up a notch and started playing "The Penis Game", which Gab explained is basically one person whispers 'penis' and then the next person has to say it louder. The last person to say the word wins. Only they decided to say it in Portuguese which as it turns out is almost the same word but is pronounced more like 'Penesh', or something like that. That's how they said it anyway. They were having a great time yelling a word which to them basically meant nothing. I'm sure Patricia was horrified though. She was also getting a bit upset with me (hopefully playfully) as I kept walking right near the edges of the water and other drops. It seemed whenever there was a chance to fall, I just wanted to walk along it. This lead to one photo being taken of me, Gab and Ness all pretending to fall backwards off the edge of a small drop.

Then we got some ice cream and visited the monastery. Instead of catching the bus back we decided to walk. Patricia said it was about 15mins if I recall. This was a little of as it was more like an hour and 15mins if anything. But we broke it up by stopping at a pub on the waterfront along the way, which was nice and just so happened to also be having happy hour. But of this walk back took us under the suspension bridge going over the river. From a distance this bridge looks cool. From up close it's even better. From afar you don't really get just how huge these constructions are. It was probably 50m above our heads at least. The busses and cars going across it looked absolutely puny. And then trains were going across on rails underneath the road. I love engineering.