Lisboa!!

Lisbon....what an awesome place!! Four days of sun. Four days of great food. Four days of walking like mad. The old streets, especially in Bairro Alto, were fantastic. The cute little bars in Bairro Alto where hipper than hip, or old fashioned fado. A lot of life music, people drinking out on the streets at night (including a HOT brazilian dude we got chatting to), just fab. The castle is a must see, and worth the entrance fee for the view alone. Cascais and Estoril are well known beach towns, where I walked along the esply and ate my first seafood of the weekend. We took a train to Sintra, a world heritage site 30 km northwest of Lisbon. We walked up and down so many hills that may calves are still sore. But oh, such beauty. Pena castle (that had a striking resemblance to Disneyland castles) and the Moorish fort were especially worth seeing. Belem, 15 minutes down the coast on the train, is famous for its tower and egg tarts. Good tourists as we are, we visited the factory and had one. Yummy. Though not as yummy as the chocolate cake we had at Fabulas, a cafe in Baixa. We managed to eat it there three times in four days. Day four I dragged Amsterdam friends Emily and Jackie (who happened to be there too on a romantic weekend away) there as well and they loved it as much. On the subject of food: Trang turned out to be as much of a foody as me. She had done her research, and so had I! So we ate in this fantastic resto specialised in chicken (fantastic food that is, in a setting of plastic chairs and paper table cloths), in a seafood resto that served us beautiful tiger prawns, lobster and clams (after which we took a taxi back to Fabulas for chocolate cake number two), and in a cool organic caf full of media types. Sitting in the BA lounge at the airport, Trang and I could only conclude Lisbon is the best. For food, for sightseeing, and for bars. Defo worth a repeat visit!