Honeymoon Crashers - Portugal

It turns out nothing goes as planned in Lisbon, so don't waste your time planning. It was very sunny out in Lisbon with clear blue skies and I had no sunglasses still. I explained to Ally what happened to mine and she assured me Oakley would send me a new arm. Apparantly they send Erik sunglass bits all the time. In the meantime she lent me a pair of her sunglasses. Very generous of her to give me the pair with one full arm and one half-arm. There was enough arm left for them to stay on, but not for them to stay on straight. Which is why they are crooked in all my pictures. By the end of the day the other arm had broke in half too and then they were pretty much useless.

We walked down to the cool part of town and spotted the castle high above us. We asked a very friendly kiosk dude how to get to the castle, and if we could walk. He recommended a tram.

After standing in a "queue" for 4 trams, we finally got on and headed to the castle. I use the term queue loosely as we were basically tossled out of line and pushed aside but locals, so we never seemed to be moving forward. But we did eventually get on a tram, with about 1,000 other people. The tram climbed and wound it's way through Lisbon. Ally said we had passed the castle at one point so we got out at the next stop. Turns out it was just some building with castle-like walls. At this point we lost Lori and didn't see her again for three hours. We waited where we lost her for about 40 minutes before heading to the castle. The castle was pretty cool and I took a lot of photos. After the castle we got a text from Lori to meet at the hostel so we headed back there.

We decided to head to Alcobaça at that point so we walked down to Rossio station which is a big bus station. We tried to buy tickets at the ticket kiosk but the lady told me in broken English to go to the tourist office. We walked through some government protest trying to find it. Five people with huge backpacks, we seemed to stand out even amongst the protesters.  We eventually found the tourist office, which was in a totally cool part of Lisbon we have to go back to. They directed us to the other end of the city to get our bus to Alcobaça. We took the metro to the bus station then bought our tickets and had dinner before catching our bus. It was about 2 hours of vomit-inducing twists and turns. Good times.

We did have a very helpful, English-speaking lady on our bus who pointed out the monastery and a good hotel for us as the bus drove through Alcobaça. We managed to score a room for 5 for only €90 so that was pretty sweet. It even included breakfast.