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the last 36 hours have been a real roller coaster ride with a fair amount of highs and lows. the lows began at noon yesterday when we had to check out of our hostel in salamanca, and had to kill time until our train left at 5 am the next morning. thats like 15 hours of beeing homeless with nowhere to go. on top of that, we had to lug our backpacks around with us the whole time because for some reason the lockers at the train station were broken. unfortunately, this was not the low of the day. the low came at 5 am, when we boarded the train to lisbon, dead tired, and the train that we thought was going to be a first class sleeper was actually a second class piece of s***. the cabins were two leather benches facing each other, and we didnt even get our own bench. there was a spanish guy lying on the bench across from us, so mike and i had to share a bench that was only about 5 or six feet long, and didnt recline at all.
after 7 delightful hours in the train, we arrived in lisbon, portugal. when we got off the train we immedidately looked for the metro, because our travel book told us to take the metro to the stop where our hostel is. the problem is we couldnt find the metro, and the guy that worked at the station told us there was no metro at the train station. we later found out that portugese people will tell you that something does not exist if they dont know where it is. so we began to walk to where we thought our hostel was by following the map in our guide book. this turned out to be a pretty rough walk because we were walking all over a completely foreign, and extremly hilly city, on no sleep, with no clue where our hostel was.
on the positive side, we eventually found our hostel, and it is by far the friendliest hostel we have stayed at. everybody talks to each other, gives each other travel tips, and just acts extremly friendly here. the hostel also hires a local portugese mom to cook dinner for us for five euros, and it was awesome. she mades us chicken with onion sauce and spiral pasta.
the one commom theme in every hostel we have stayed at is that they are full of australians. they are everywhere, and they travel for months at a time. the only weird thing is that if you ask them about a city they have been to they will never have anything positive to say about the place. it kind of makes you wonder why they travel so much if they dont like anywhere they go.
the portugese mom just told us that desert is ready, so im gonna go.
9/1207
our frist night out in lisbon, portugal was a much different experience than we had anywhere in spain. bairro alto is the part of town where all the bars are, and it is only about a 5 minute walk from our hostel. mike and i headed to bairro alto at around 1, and were immediately surprised by the bar scene. the bars are all really small, and everybody just hangs out and drinks in the streets in front of the bars. we wandered around and went to a couple bars and then we happened to run into our new friends from our hostel. monday is pretty low key in lisbon, probably because everybody is so tired from the weekend, so it wasnt to wild of an evening.
tuesday began pretty early for mike because he had to wake up at 730 in the morning to reserve us a room at the hostel for another night. i slept til 12, and enjoyed the luxury of not having to wake up early and pack my bag in a frenetic pace to make checkout time. after going to the market and making our own lunch, mike and i began to explore lisbon by foot. we walked around for awhile, and then decided to go to belem. belem is a port where vasco de gamma and henry the navigator used to sail from.
we got home at around 6, and got showered and changed for dinner. enchiladas with rice and refried beans were on the menu. it has been extremly nice eating homecooked meals the last couple nights. after dinner, our new friends at the hostel made the loung area into a dance floor with music blaring and a strobe light. after the dancing, about 20 of us headed to the bars of bairro alto for a night it of bar hopping. we were going to go to this club called lux that john malkovich co-owns, but apparently it is closed on tuesdays. the only thing that sucked about the night was that i rolled off of my bunk bed in my sleep, and i was on the top bunk. i am pretty sure my spill woke up everyone in the hostel, but it didnt hurt to much.
everybody in this hostel is really cool and friendly, and i feel like i have known them much longer. the only other american here is a guy from new york named breck. he played lacrosse at duke, though he was reluctant to admit it at first, and we actually know a few of the same people.
we are taking an overnight train to madrid at 10 tonight, and then going from madrid to seville. all the sleeper cars on the train were booked, so it could be a long, long train ride. we are both just praying that it is not the same type of train that brought us to lisbon. i cant fully explain just how awful that train ride was. people are waiting to use this computer, so i gotta go
p.s. we only put up about a forth of our pictures. the internet is really slow here, and it takes so long to upload pictures. we will put the rest up when we go to a place with a better connection
justin
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