Road Trip to Portugal

Since we had a Thursday and Friday off this past weekend, I went on a road trip to Portugal with our language assistant friends from Utrera (Eilidh and Ellen) and Córdoba (Jodie, Grace, and Rebecca) and an English teacher from Córdoba named Bea.

The trip began when we all met in Seville on Thursday morning. The girls from Córdoba had rented a 7-person van, but with all of our luggage it was still a bit of a tight squeeze. It was a long trip to Lisbon (about 4.5 hours), but it was definitely worth it. Lisbon is the capital city of Portugal, and the largest in the country (approx. 2.8 million inhabitants). The city is very hilly, with some beautiful views.

Our van

Once we were finally in the city we drove around for another hour trying to navigate through the city streets to find our hostel. We had to stop and ask for directions several times, and it was strange to hear people speaking Portuguese instead of Spanish. The really strange part was that I found I could understand most of what they were saying. It was like a weird mix of Spanish and Italian words, with a few different sounds thrown in for good measure. This was lucky though, since we needed all the help we could get to make it to our hostel.

Since it had taken so long to get to the hostel and get settled in, we were all pretty hungry by te time we got there, so we decided to go find some dinner. We ended up in a little side street where we found a cute little Portuguese restaurant. The owner recommended the special, and brought us two gigantic platters of pork and steak, along with French fries and salads. It was all delicious!

Our first Portuguese meal: Bea, me, Jodie, Rebecca, Eilidh, and Grace.