What else can I say about Lisbon?

My other observations --

*I had the best calamari in the world there, right next to our freaky little hostel.

*Bring your walking shoes. Lots of hills. It is cool, unless the person you are with (i.e. Chuck, a 10 year Army vet and former paratrooper) whines like a little baby and complains about walking too much every 15 minutes.

But, the fact that the city is all hills leads to an interesting view. Buildings and streets are consistently on top of each other and higher than the previous one.

*The castle that overlooks the city is really cool, or at least the remnants of it. Lisbon is a port city and most of it is on a bay. At the entrance to the bay is this big castle up on a hill. You can walk right up to it (maybe 1200 feet or so). I got some good pictures of that, maybe this time I will get around to doing something with them inside of 7 months.

*The first night we went out for dinner and we were feeling all the wine from that day a bit and our voices might have been slightly louder than we realized. We sit down in this restaurant and there is this enormous meathead (one of the biggest I have ever seen) sitting at the bar maybe 5 feet from us. So, Chuck leans in and makes a derogatory comment about the dude´s meatheadedness...bad idea. Almost immediately, the guy turns around, looks directly at Chuck and says, "You have a problem?" I personally don´t know how the story finishes because I got up and ran directly out of the restaurant and didn´t stop until I hit the bus station.

But, as I hear it, Chuck stuttered out a self-deprecating response and calmed the guys rage. Who would have thought that he was Portugese but lived most of his life in London. The funniest thing was hearing him speak with an extremely thick London accent.

*The most common phrase I heard in my time there -- "You want some hash?"

Unbelievable, it was constant. If you were outside, someone would ask you. if you were walking in the street, someone would ask you. If you were eating food at a cafe, someone would ask you. It was ridiculous, but funny. There were seemingly different "teams". There were the native Portugese who all wore striped shirts and sold sunglasses as their "in". I think they all wore stripped shirts to identify themselves to each other and as a way to help them collude in a more efficient manner. Not sure they sold too many glasses though. First clue was that as we were wearing sunglasses, they would approach us. Then, as soon as we said no to the glasses, they hit us with the question about hash.

The second group was the Moroccans. They didn´t fuck around with formalities. If they saw you walking down the street, sitting down at a table, in a store, it didn´t matter. They would just walk up to you and whip it out. The first time it happened I thought I had a potential Pee-Wee Herman wannabe following us. This guy walks up and looked like he was going to expose himself to us on the street and all of a sudden he pulls a block of hash out of his pants. We said no immediately and even if I wanted it, I didn´t want it from him...knowing where he stores it...

*The aquarium is pretty cool. It´s in a newer section of Lisbon. There are apparently two sections, the old and the new. The new is where they held the World´s Fair in 1998. Who knew they even had World´s Fairs anymore? I thought those ended in the 1890´s or something. But anyway, this section of the city was super modern looking with the architecture. There was a waterfront area with loads of restaurants, parks and tourist type attractions very reminiscent of the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.

*THE BUS! We took a bus from Madrid and it cost us 65€´s roundtrip. Not too shabby. Even better, the bus was overnight so you don´t lose as much time travelling. I was thinking, this rocks...until I took the bus.

On the way there, we had 3 Brazilian women talking behind us. NONSTOP. AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS. At one point (right before I beat the old one) I looked at the time and it was like 4:45am. I mean, seriously? 4:45? At least give me a whisper! Turns out they were meeting family that they hadn´t seen in a while and that´s why they were so excitable. It´s a shame that one of them will have black eyes in all the pictures...

On the way home, it was even better. And by better, I mean much worse. We were scheduled to leave at 9pm. We got there like 5 minutes beforehand. No sense wasting time sitting on a bus in a parking lot right? Exactly our thinking! We board the bus. Trouble. Someone overbooked the bus. HOW does that happen? Does someone just say one day...we only got 55 seats and I already sold 55, but I´m gonna go with my instincts on this one, "Saddle Up Partner!" This is something I just don´t get. So, while they worked this problem out, we sat on the bus.

Scheduled Departure Time - 9:00pm Lisbon Time (10pm in Madrid)
Actual Departure Time - 9:45pm Lisbon Time (10:45pm in Madrid)

Video Killed the Radio Star is on the radio here right now. The owner of the internet cafe just jumped on the counter and started dancing. He reminds me a little of Rex Manning.

So, we are driving home on a smelly bus and nice and late. On the way to Lisbon we stopped twice, for a half an hour each time. It wasn´t so bad then. But, both times we stopped at a rest area with a gas station, restaurant, etc...Within a half hour of leaving them each time, we stopped for gas. Who plans these operations, Donald Rumsfeld? Let´s get gas when we stop at the rest area? On the way home we stopped twice at rest areas for 30 minutes, took an unscheduled detour to some other bus station to drop two people off and pulled off the road for gas twice and once for a driver change. When we stopped for 30 minutes the last time it was like 4:30am. I thought about killing the driver and burying his body somewhere along the road from Madrid to Badajoz. To top it off, we hit morning traffic entering Madrid. I got into my apartment at 7:30am. I had about 1 hour of sleep on the bus. Took a 3 hour nap and then it was off to educate some people...

Total bus time from last Friday until Wednesday - 17 hours, give or take.