Our last day in Portugal was a trip to the town of Sintra which was about an hour's train ride outside of Lisbon. As I recall, it was seeing pictures of the Belem Tower and the various places in Sintra that sold us on going to Portugal in the first place. Sintra is where the mucky mucks built summer places because it's cooler than Lisbon. As usual in Lisbon getting there was a bit of an adventure. We walked down the hill from our place and took the metro to a nearby stop from the main train station and then walked four blocks to the main train station to catch our train. The line for tickets was a bit crazy but there were people at the kiosks to help which was nice.
We were dropped off in Sintra and had no idea where to go. There were dozens of various tour guides selling tours to the various sights. I looked on google maps how to get to the Pena Palace which said it was about an hour walk and we took off. 10 minutes up the hill we thought better of it and went back into town and bought a bus ticket. As always, we waited in line for the bus for a long time and eventually took off. I wish there was a way to describe the roads and the switchbacks. The drive up took 20 minutes and was straight up. If we would have tried to walk I would have expired.
This was just up the hill and was a minor version of things to come.
The line to get tickets was incredible and the walk up the hill to the castle itself was half a mile of road as steep as any hike I've ever taken. But the goal was completely worth it. The Pena Castle looks completely goofy as a whole but it really is stunning and they've done a fantastic job of renovating it.
Even the interiors were amazing.
This is a view of the 8th century moor castle where we went next.
Nice view from the dining room.
Quite a kitchen
We didn't go to this castle but it was beautiful.
The moor castle has been fairly well taken care of as a ruin and was fun to climb up and around. I think the high while we were there was only about 77 degrees so even though it was blaring sun, the breeze and the temperature allowed us to keep our energy up for all of the climbing.
As you might imagine, the views were stunning. This is the national palace.
This is a view of the Pena palace from the moor castle.
While waiting for the train back to Lisbon we decided to take a short walk around town. It was the only place we went to that looked really taken care of.
After all of the lines and the trains and metros we decided to walk home from the main train station. Of course that meant going up. Here is a view of the dumbest long set of stairs I've ever seen and Rebecca recovering. You can imagine what sort of shape I was in. This, by the way, was still not the top of the hill.
After a couple hours rest and glasses of port we headed out for dinner. I had found a small place down the hill but they were booked until 9:30. We took a walk to look for a bar and I managed to make nothing but poor choices in turns so we walked for over an hour seemingly all uphill. We never really did find a bar (bars as I think of them don't seem to exist in Portugal) but we did run into this. We considered finding a place to hear fado but the place we had picked out the night before didn't have fado that night this was enough.
We arrived at the restaurant at 9:30 and the very over the top charming chef told us it would be a few more minutes and brought us some wine while we waited, sitting on a set of stairs next door. 2 glasses of wine and an hour and 15 minutes later we were sat for dinner. Here is us at about 10:40.
Olives and fava beans as a nibble.
Onions, tomatoes and salted tuna in more olive oil than you can imagine to start.
Pork belly and watercress.
Octopus rice.
We managed to be served and finish eating (chocolate mousse not pictured) in about 20 minutes. Why it took the 25 people the restaurant held before us almost 3 hours to eat I don't know except that when we were done, the chef brought various bottles to the table to drink. It was about the most joyous restaurant I've ever seen. People were singing and drinking and walking outside to smoke. The chef stood out and talked to us and the other 3 couples waiting to eat late for most of our wait. He kept apologizing but said the restaurant was an extension of his house so people often stayed until he closed.
Here, a bottle of cherry liqueur, some sort of other sweet wine and below a bottle of Portuguese grappa. It's the stuff they use to fortify the wine to make port. Like Italian grappa, it's disgusting.
We walked uphill and I took a picture of the post at the entrance to our street which caused us such confusion when we arrived on our first day in the car.
And that was our Portugal adventure. I have to say, we loved it all though I don't know if going back to Lisbon would be much of a priority. It's just incredibly difficult to get around in and it's so enormous it's hard to get a handle on. We're so glad we got to see Belem and Sintra though, we don't regret it for a minute.
One day we would love to see the beaches in the south and have an extended stay at the Hotel Toural in the Douro Valley and would love to go to Porto again. With it's beauty and affordability, I'm not sure why Portugal isn't more of a thing. Certainly the language has something to do with it though we found English to be spoken generally and if not, sign language worked well enough. And while I'm on the subject, I'm used to Brazilian Portuguese from my friends in NYC and the students at GSU but Portuguese Portuguese is quite a bit different. It sounds like mumbling with a Russian accent.
Our trip home was fairly miserable. The American Airlines plane from Lisbon to Philadelphia was circa 1975 so had no internet nor usb ports nor entertainment except for video monitors in the ceiling. They showed mostly kid movies and tv shows except for a movie with Kevin Kline which wasn't good but at least it was for adults. Oh, and it cut off half way through because we were landing.
We had a 3 hour layover and then sat on the tarmac for 2.5 hours due to weather. All in all, door to door took us 20 hours. It's good to be home.
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