Lisbon

We arrived in Lisbon during their annual city festival: the feast of Saint Anthony.  Because the festival is so popular for tourists, the city was packed and we were unable to find any Couch host.  We struggled to even find a reasonably priced hostel that wasn't full.  We spent our days walking around the city.  So many people were visiting and partying in the streets that our experience in Lisbon was unique.  Each day, we would check out of our hostel hoping that someone would accept our Couchsurfing request, but we were unsuccessful for a few nights.  Finally, a nice man accepted our request, but told us that he was not going to be at his house very much.  We were still happy to accept his offer, so each additional night we spent in Lisbon, we waited late into the evening for him to pick us up. 

The city of Lisbon is not the most beautiful.  I really enjoyed the winding streets that line the hills of the town, but the town has a very dirty feel to it.  When you are walking in the center of town, you are constantly berated by people selling drugs.  We were told that most of these people are offering fake drugs (in hopes of taking you somewhere), which is how there are so many running around without getting caught. 

An important thing to know about Portugal in general, is when you go out to eat in a restaurant, do not eat any bread or other appetizer they put on the table unless you want to pay an exorbitant amount for it.  In many places - like the U.S. - if bread, butter, or anything else is put on the table before ordering, it is complimentary.  In Portugal, they will put out many little plates of appetizers, and if you eat any of them you will pay many Euros.  We even experienced times where more than half a dozen little plates were put out in front of us.  We personally believe that this is a strategy to squeeze money out of hungry resturaunt patrons, waiting for their actual meal.  This is particularly sleazy when considering that many tourists may not know about this little trick.

Lisbon offered us the ability to take buses to many places, but once we got to those places, it was hard to move on.  There is plenty to see in the vicinity of Lisbon, but if you want to do a little bus-tour loop, you will find it difficult.  Many of the small towns don't have connecting buses to other towns, so you will often have to go all the way back to Lisbon to continue.  When we did a loop around this area, we ended up hitchhiking back to a train station before nightfall.  The reality of this is that we were very lucky.  Hitchhiking in Portugal is really awful, but we will get to that later.