Portugal

Portugal was fantastic. The first thing we did when we got there (after checking in at our residencial) was buy and eat a Portuguese tart. We had chicken too, which I assume is Portuguese chicken although not very similar to Australian Portuguese chicken. Portuguese chicken in Australia is always splayed wherease the ones we found in Lisbon were neatly tucked in, looking like they'd been killed while asleep. They're tastier too. The old hag at our residencial was the freakiest piece of leather I've ever seen. She had goggly eyes that popped out when she started speaking, and would roll them around her head and she was balding slightly but still did her hair up in some pouffy style, dyed orangey pink with grey roots. She walked around in tracksuits and ugh boots and the first time we got there, we rang the doorbell three times in five minutes because she took forever to answer and we weren't sure if there was even anyone there and she screamed at us and said 'ONCE! ONCE ONLY I CAN HEAR YOU NO NEED TO RING IT AGAIN AND AGAIN!!!' And then she had the nerve to ask Mum for a tip when we left. Mum didn't understand her Portuguese because half her front teeth were missing, and she said 'Give me your wallet and I'll show you what I mean,' to Mum. Ha!

Travelled all over Lisbon by bus, foot and metro. Went to the Alfama region (the photo above is of St. Vincent's preserved hand, a relic in Se Cathedral), Belem, where we managed to catch a Frida Kahlo exhibition as well, to the Monument to Christ on the other side of the river... amongst other things. Very touristy but loved it. Allen and I went to Lux nightclub near St. Apolonia station. It was great! We got there at around midnight but the club didn't open till around 12:30, so we were waiting behind a group of around nine British girls all dressed up in stilettos and cocktail dresses, hair that they probably spent two hours on and makeup an inch thick, all chattering excitedly and laughing and giggling. Anyway, this very cool looking woman came up to them with a clipboard in her hand and asked them 'Are you on the guest list?' One of the girls said, 'No. We called yesterday and the woman we spoke to said there wasn't a guest list.' And the cool lady said 'Well, I'm afraid there is a guest list. If you're not on the guest list you need to pay 180 Euros to get in.' The girls started arguing furiously on the verge of tears but the lady was unmoveable. She gave them a name of another club that they could go to and as they left, one of the girls said 'I've never been rejected from a club before. How humiliating!' Anyway, Allen said to me 'Well, I'm not paying 180 Euros to get in, let's go home.' But I was determined to get in because we'd walked around half an hour to get there. So I made him ask the bouncer if we needed to be on the guest list, and he told us to wait till the British girls (who Allen and I called LEPers, short for Loud English People) had all left and then talk to the lady. To us she was very nice; she smiled and told us it was 12 Euros but the money was exchangeable at the bar for drinks and wished us a nice night. It's not really a nightclub at all, no dancing, no dance area, just a really decked out, glorified bar. Very nice decor and heaps and heaps of benches to sit on. But the drinks were only average.

We also went to Sintra and Coimbra. I think my favourite tourist place in Portugal was the library in Coimbra. They have the oldest university in Portugal there, and the library was just... it smelt like old books, had shelves lined with leatherbound volumes, wooden tables, wooden chairs, gold... Just imagine studying there. I don't think it's actually used as a library any more but it was so worth the visit.

When we got back to Madrid, we had an hour to get to the bus station for a bus back to Logrono. We got to the station at 6:45, wanted to catch the 7 pm bus back but the line for tickets was out the door. And people kept holding up the line. These three Spanish idiots in front of us had probably 15 minutes to decide where they wanted to go, when, what time etc. and still took 10 minutes going 'Oh, wait, maybe we should catch it an hour earlier... wait, do we want to get return as well... can we ask for seats at the back... wait, no we want the later one...' If they spoke English I would have happily abused them. Luckily I was wrong about the bus time- it left at 7:30 instead- because by the time we got to the front of the queue it was 7:15. Some woman in another queue went nuts at the man at the front ordering his tickets. Kept calling him a son of a bitch, harrassing him for taking forever. I really don't like the queue system here. Basically you get into the queue with the least amount of people and hope no one takes his/her time. I once read an article about those people whose job it is to make companies more efficient. Anyway, if you have a queue where all the people line up in the same queue and go to the next available desk, there's an average waiting time of a few seconds less than if you have the system that you find in Spain. But it's a lot fairer because everyone ends up waiting almost the same amount of time.