10-1 # Lisbon Day 1

This weekend was our first excursion out of Cáceres, along with a lot of other firsts.

This was my first train ride, which was surprisingly comfortable. The leg room on a train is much larger than the leg room in an airplane! Also, the rocking on the train really puts you to sleep!

Here was my first train, and everyone's behind me saying I should step back :-P

We got off at the wrong train stop, but on the bright side that gave us extra time to walk around. Also, we ended up changing our Day 2 plans (next post) so we missed going inside the Oceanarium, but because of taking the wrong stop we still got to see the outside.

Jerónimos Monastery

After we took a stop at our hostel (which was absolutely amazing, by the way) we went to the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower. These two locations together make up a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The monastery was an excellent example of Gothic architecture.

After the Monastery, we went to the Discovery Monument, which I'm pretty sure was a Portuguese monument to us, the Americas. It was a large tower with Cristóbal Colón and his crew looking off into the distance. Behind the statue of the men is a large pillar with a viewpoint on the top that we were able to visit. I got some awesome pictures of Lisbon from up there, but the panorama didn't turn out too well because I got some of the platform in the pictures (apparently half the picture close and half far confuses panorama makers).

Jerónimos Monastery from the front. Nice fountain there.

After the Monastery, we went to the Belém Tower, but because it had an entrance fee we opted out of going inside. The outside was really the interesting part for us anyway.
There, we found a little beach-like place where the tide had brought some sand up by the tower. We did one of those little classy hand-prints in the sand pictures.

One of the cool things I didn't know was that Lisbon, Portugal is like a sister city to San Francisco, California! They both are on the coast, but better yet, they both have Golden Gate bridges! Almost identical looking and almost identical in size (SF: 2,737 m, Lisbon: 2,277 m). Finally, both have very similar cable car/tram systems. In fact, originally (in 1901), Lisbon imported their first trams from the US to replace horse-drawn carriages (though you can definitely still find some of these in the city).

Golden Gate Bridge, Lisbon, Portugal

Finally, as it was an excursion to a coast town, I had to try some seafood. We asked around and found a nice, yet cheap, local food place. However, apparently Portuguese food is not very different compared to stuff you can find in the states. This was my coastal seafood dish, which was pretty darn awesome:

It was awesome. Be jealous.