So after a week of classes with assignments picking up full speed, we headed off to Lisbon early on Friday morning. And by early, I mean I got up at four again to take the complex network of Roman public transportation to get to the airport on time to catch a 9 oclock flight. Good news: we made it. Bad news: the train ticket to get to the airport was 14 euro, and no one even checked our tickets. That´s called being responsible and paying for things when you don´t need to, because maybe one day they´ll actually check tickets and we´d end up in some kind of Italian jail. That sentence was poorly structured, but I only got two hours of sleep last night, and about five the night before. As a matter of fact, I haven´t gotten a solid eight hours of sleep since I arrived in Rome, and anyone that knows me, knows that this is a HUGE ISSUE. But what the hell, I´m only going to be nineteen in Europe once and I´d hate to sleep through it. Although right now, a nice nap sounds wonderful.
So back to Portugal. We arrived in Lisbon around noon and checked into the hostel. It´s super nice! And the people staying here are really great (more on that later...). The area we´re in is kind of sketchy. As in every time we go outside, someone offers us drugs. One of the members of the group I´m travelling in (I won´t mention names...) was stupid enough to ask one of them "how much", which resulted in us getting followed by said drug dealer four about five minutes while he tried to negotiated prices with us. NOT COOL. So once we got rid of druggie, we walked up to the local castle, and it started to POUR with rain. The first rainstorm I´ve been in while in Europe. So we all got soaked walking back. Then we had dinner at the hostel (traditional Portuguese food. Fish pie done right. Sorry mom, but you´re noble attempts at it are a failure in comparison). AND then we went out on the town with four Slovenian boys we met at the hostel. They´re all around 19 and are studying mechanical engineering in Lisbon for four months (and superrrrrrrrrr cute, so of course me and Elise were thrilled because our goal for the semester is to meet lots of foreign boys). We went out to a bar, again in a sketchy neighborhood, and taught them the finer points of the art of beer pong. They told us their normal drinking games are seeing who can drink the most the fastest, but we weren´t really game to play. Any way, After that they wanted to go clubbing and so we went with them to an apparently really happening spot. We got there at midnight, but there was no one there, and when we left at two there was a really long line outside to get in. But it was really fun, except techno music gets really obnoxious after about an hour. And so we made our way back to the hostel and I didn´t get to sleep until about 3, and then I got up at 6:30, but it was really 5:30, damn time changes, and got ready to head out for the day. Except now Elise and I are an hour early to breakfast, so we´re burning time. Hence the super long blog entry!
Today we´re catching a bus to Fatima. We´re all really excited about this leg of the trip, and hopefully I can get some cool stuff up there to bring back. We´re going to try and get back to Lisbon in time for 5 o´clock mass, and then hopefully we´ll hang out with the boys again tonight. We´ll see! I leave tomorrow morning, and then I actually need to do some homework (two papers and a test coming up... eeeeek! goodbye sleeping).
Switzerland next weekend! If anything super exciting happens in Fatima, I´ll be sure to write about it here first.
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