The trip continues!

Lisbon. A lovely city.

Picking up with Day 2 - after the nightmare at the Amsterdam airport, I was happy to buy my souvenir "I AMsterdam" magnet and get out of there. David and I weren't able to sit together on the plane, but I was directly in front of him, so we were able to touch hands over the top of the seat. So romantic.

The flight was a nice one for sleeping - the kind or sleep where every few minutes your head falls forward and wakes you up and you realize you are drooling all over yourself. Lovely.

Before I knew it, we were landing in Lisbon. Yippee! Now, there were six of our group on our flight: me and David; Kim and Kyle; and Alan and Erin. Lea and Amit were on a separate flight. They were scheduled to arrive in Lisbon first and Kelly would arrive from Texas shortly thereafter. I think the plan was that they would go to the apartment first and perhaps have wine and cheese waiting for us.

I was eager to get a Portugal stamp for my passport, and was upset when I realized no stamp was coming. Apparently, once you are in the European Union they don't give you a stamp again until you leave. Total bummer.

Well, as we left the baggage claim, we were greeted by the warm smiles of Lea and Amit. Immediately, we knew something was wrong. Kelly was missing.

Not really, her flight was just delayed and no one really knew when she would be arriving for sure. Fortunately, there were eight of us, and a couple people actually had phone and or internet access and it was quickly decided that a small crew would wait at the airport for Kelly, in the wine bar...and the rest of us would take the Aerobus to a location someplace approximately close to our apartment.

 Waiting for the Aerobus.

We would then navigate on foot through the windy and steep hills of Lisbon to our happy home for the next few nights.

Lisbon - where the sidewalks are made up of little white tiles. It is also much hillier than I thought it would be. And graffiti everywhere, which pretty much summed up most of the trip. There is a lot of graffiti in Europe.

These pretty flowers contrasted nicely with all the graffiti.

It was quite warm, but David navigated us expertly...although we discovered we had to go up quite a ways, just to go down, and then back up...and then up four flights of stairs to the apartment. No elevator, but that was okay because it was early in the trip and I was not yet carrying around bottles of wine and a small arsenal of magnets.

The apartment was really nice...five bedrooms, two and a half baths, a kitchen with a refrigerator with a strawberry on it.

There was also this odd painting of a woman eating a baloney sandwich.

Alan, Amit, and David went to the little grocery store up the way and came back with wine (1 euro a bottle!), cheese, pasta, tomatoes, and corn flakes. Yes, corn flakes would be the breakfast of choice on this trip.

Eventually, Kelly and the others arrived and we all relaxed on the terrace with wine, cheese, bread, and guidebooks aplenty.

 Where's all the wine?

While David and Kym prepared dinner, we planned our course of action for our first full day of sightseeing.

 

We all went to bed a little early, full of good wine (well, for 1 euro a bottle I'm not sure how good it was) and good food.

 We were all very tired.

Check back tomorrow to hear about our marathon day seeing the best of Lisbon and our experience with Lisbon drug dealers.