Day 28 - Lisbon

Lisbon!  I did not get really excited until I walked out on the deck for breakfast and saw red-tile roof hills all around me.  The view is already spectacular, and we can’t wait to begin exploring.  Adrenaline rushing, we disburse into the city.  Within five minutes, we were panting from walking up steep, uneven steps and skidding down slippery cobblestone sidewalks.  We will soon have calves like melons.

All students picked groups to do an ongoing class project with.  My group and I set off in a different direction than everyone else, looking to interview someone at a hospital.  We found a hospital pretty quickly.  Actually, we found a whole street of them.  We walked into one hospital after another asking, “Fala ingles?” to which the reply was always “No,” and then we would just stand there awkwardly, having used up all of our useful words in Portuguese.  After over an hour of walking in an out-of-the-way part of town, we found no one that could help us with our project, hijacked an open wi-fi network at a clinic, and broke a coffee machine.  It was time to hit the tourist center where we oh so clearly belonged.

On our way, we happened across the Portuguese parliament building, which was adorned with guards much like in Britain.  We had arrived just in time for the sloppiest changing of the guards I have seen yet.  The guards were not in sync and kept glancing around randomly, as if bored or distracted.  Nonetheless it was a pretty neat sight.

On our way toward the center, we passed through a beautiful park with palm trees, fountains, statues of people we have never heard of, and exotic flowers and duck-like birds.  We indulged in a playground for a short while.

We had not been wandering anywhere near the center yet, but we already loved everything we were taking in.  The style was very different from that of the other European cities we’ve seen, and it is a welcome change.  All the buildings are all brightly colored, and even the abandoned ones look cheery.  The sun is bright and the place was full of energy.  When we finally found the city center, we were back in the “Is this our life?” state.  Of course, the first sign that indicates you’ve reached the exact middle is a Starbucks.  We join the other tourists for lunch in the large pedestrian strip running through Lisbon.

Along with tourists, the city center is filled with some sort of rioters.  At first we only see twenty or so, but then we see large groups, hundreds of them.  They are students, perhaps, all in stiff black uniforms, chanting and yelling and singing.  Among them are also people dressed up in bright orange with pig ears and snouts, and sometimes tails.  We approached one of the girls in her black skirt and black tights to find out what the deal was.  She speaks English!  They were students at the University of Economic, and we were seeing the welcoming (hazing) of the freshman class.  This year they dressed up as pigs, but the animal changes each year.  The upperclassmen “baptize” the freshman with the disgusting fountain water, pour flour on them, sing abusive songs about them, and perform other acts of public humiliation.

Later on, we sat on a historic tram up the hill to the Castelo de São Jorge to watch the sun set.  We ran into many more SASers with the same idea.  The group passed around bottles of wine and sat on a ledge overlooking the city.  We watched the sun get lower, lower, and finally disappear beneath the buildings.  We also discovered that we could see our ship!

When there was no more sun, a few of us broke off to explore the castle itself.  We eagerly scoped out the drawbridge, archer slots, and lookout towers.  We walked along the outside wall, taking note that there were no railings before the age of tourists and the outer wall was very low.  We then toured the inside rooms of the castle, which had exactly zero lights in them, and by this point it was dark.  My friends climbed up one of the lookout towers over the city, where I was confronted with my newly-discovered fear of heights. I climbed back down and planned my escape route.  I waited for my friends to take about 500 more photos of themselves sitting and standing on the ledge, then headed out.  The direction we picked led us to more narrow ledges with low railings leading around the outer walls, but we couldn’t figure out how to get down.  We finally found some steep stairs with uneven steps and stumbled down them.  Rather, I stumbled down while everyone else just walked.

We joked about how many people would get sued if something like this existed in the US.  Americans would put signs, directions, and warning labels all over everything, and still get injured.  Later, we decided it was a way to weed out the tourists, and that Europeans are strong proponents of Darwinism. 

Back on the ground, we walked back to the ship.  Pretty much everyone got ready to go back out except for the sick kids.  I did not go out.  I am not sick, but I will lose my voice in two days.