Lisboa, Portugal!

I love Lisboa! I just returned from a wonderful three days there with my friends Alice, Julianne, Mary, Meg, and Rachel. It was 80 degrees and sunny in Portugal the whole time we were there, the steep cobblestone streets and hand-painted tiles everywhere really made the city feel ancient (unlike most of Madrid), the people were very nice and helpful (and some of them spoke a little Spanish or English), and there were a million different hand-made portugese pastries in every shop. Since the Portugese colonized Brazil and began the transatlantic slave trade out of needs for sugar cane labor, they've had an excess of refined sugar for the last 500 years or something. That's a long time to be perfecting pastries. Our wonderful day trip guide also told us that all of the pastries' recipes mostly come from monasteries. For example, the nuns would separate the egg yolks from eggs to use the egg whites to starch the priests' robes, and they learned to make pastries with all the extra egg yolks and sugar. Holy innovation, they were soooo good.

On the aforementioned pastry tour, we rode around with our fantastic local guide Bruno (that's him with the pastries, those are called Pillows of Truth) as he showed us the coolest parts of Lisboa. We went to the westernmost point of Europe (called the end of the world because the portugese actually thought its cliffs were the end of the world before they started exploring and colonizing), toured an amazing castle called Sintra that's on top of a mountain, ate the best ice cream in the world (it literally won that prize), lounged on a beach in Cascais, ate pastries, went to Belem and, oh yeah, ate more pastries. Sintra was amazing, a huge mix of architecture with lot of Arabian influence, plus everything was covered in these amazing hand painted tiles (one of my favorite things about Portugal: hand-painted tiles everywhere on every building!) and incredible terraces and carvings everywhere. The surrounding grounds and mountain are all a nature preserve with a variety of trees and plants the crazy king had shipped in, like Sequoias and Japanese trees.

We also visited an amazing museum and its gardens called the Gulbenkian, tons and tons of ancient pottery and ceramics and an amazing collection of Baroque and Renaissance oil portraiture. I think I've spent the majority of my money here in Spain (and Portugal) on the metro, and on postcards and stamps. I love sending mail so I can't help it! Watch your mailboxes, everyone!

Our hostel was really great. Not only did it have an awesome location (walking distance to the awesome electric tram tracks and cool bars, but the atmosphere was very welcoming and safe and it was beautiful and cool. A Portuguese mum cooked a big family MEAT PIE dinner one night, all you can eat for 5 euro. I know, some of you are probably wondering why this wasn't the first thing I wrote about. Meat Pie is my favorite kind of pie, but honestly this one wasn't as good as the one I got for my birthday at Macalester or the meat bread from the Menogyn kitchen this summer. (mad props, chefs. you trumped a portugese mom). Plus there was a really cool patio/lounge area/bar, AND we had this awesome view from our TWO balconies.

All in all, a fantastic trip. I hope to go back sometime soon, after I've slept more. We're all exhausted from traveling, and we're heading to Salamanca tomorrow to tour a winery!

Back in Spain, I've been reading a lot on the Metro. Books are pretty expensive here and the English section has a limited and very odd selection, but I bought myself two books! "Tender is the Night" by F. Scott Fitzgerald for a little St. Paul connection, and a book of Spanish love poetry my Spanish lit professor recommended called "La Voz a Ti Debida" (by Pedro Salinas). I really should be reading more in Spanish to develop my language skills, but it's hard to turn down all the Pulitzer Prize winning books my friend Alice brought over (I highly recommended "Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout). But I have borrowed "Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal" (the first one) from my host mom and I'm reading slowly but it's easier than the poetry because I've read it before. Also probably because half the words are spells in latin and written with middle schoolers in mind.

Okay that's the scoop on Portugal! Hope to hear from you soon,

love Natalie

the end of the world