First time flying from Luton and it did have that low budget feel about the place, I can’t complain as I got to Lisbon on time and had a straightforward metro ride to the hostel. On arrival I had to wait to check in to my room so I dropped my bags off and headed straight out to explore the city.
First stop was the Castle of Sao Jorge which had some great views of the city. After a walk round I then headed back through to find a train station. First impressions of the city were very good (the fact it was 10-15 degrees warmer than England helped a lot).
After a bit of a mess with the trains (I got off at the wrong station) the next stop was the Belem tower. The staircase near the top was so narrow that only one person at a time could get up or down. I was very glad it wasn’t the middle of summer with loads of tourists.
Padrão dos Descobrimentos was a short distance walk from the tower. I headed back to the hostel after that. It’s safe to say that’s the most I have ever seen or done within 3 hours of arriving in a new destination.
That weekend Yes hostel won the award of best hostel from the hostelworld website. While it was in the top 5% of hostels I have stayed in I don’t really see it stood out from the other good ones. I also noticed that a lot of the best rated hostels were in Lisbon.
That evening we had a group meal in the hostel and a few beers. I got to meet a few other travelers. They had a pubcrawl planned for that evening but I knew full well that I wouldn’t be going. I’d been up since 4:00 that morning and had been on dayshift all week. I still didn’t sleep well due to drunken people arriving back at all hours. I did however discover the following day that when the group ended up in a club everyone lost everyone else so in a way I was glad I didn’t go.
As usual I joined the guided walking tour, we covered the area within a mile of the hostel. Our tour guide was not as good as the one I had in Munich 2 weeks earlier but it was ok.
The tour did perform the secondary function of meeting some other travellers from the hostel and we went for some food after. A sit down set meal including a drink was only 7.5 euros, you could easily pay double or triple that figure in some other capital cities.
After catching up on some well needed sleep I met back up with the group I had met earlier on in the day. We drank until nearly midnight in the hostel bar (which seemed to be 80% American students) then headed out. Most of the bars were in or around the Bairro alto area, it had a similar feel to Madrid and Barcelona the previous year. The group I was with did fragment towards the end but I did come away thinking that I had a good night out. I got back well after 4:00.
I was a little unsure of what to do on my final full day, I did miss a large chunk of it due to being out late. In the end I took the metro to the aquarium with the plan of walking back along the coast. It was ok but the majority of it was one massive tank so you were often viewing the same thing but just from a different viewpoint each time.
Most of the walkback was hardly tourist photo material, loads of dockyards full of shipping containers. At one point I walked past a bridge where people were sleeping rough. I did end up back in the winding streets near my hostel.
After another sleep I went for a few in the hostel bar but it was going to be an early night due to the following mornings flight. I got home without the nightmare I had getting home from Munich.
Lisbon was one of those “why have I not been here before” cities...............
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