Lisbon! There are clouds here!

Yesterday we celebrated our last night in Madrid. It's a fine city but 5 and a half days were about 3 and a half too many. Our favorite attractions, the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the City Park can easily be appreciated in just a couple of days while allowing you to spare yourself from the stifling and, honestly, mood destroying heat of the city.
Still, we made the best of our last day in Spain's capitol city and met our Italian friends for lunch. They made a delicious pasta for lunch (clearly) and then we finally said goodbye as they rushed off, late for their scheduled time at the Prado. At this point we were presented with the task of finding something to do for 7 more hours in Madrid because our train was scheduled for 10:25. We got some drinks at LIDL to fight off the heat and then decided to go find the Crystal Palace which had eluded us on our previous visit to the city park. On our way, we did some souvenir shopping which will certainly encumber us on our flights home (bulky stuff!) We also stopped at the Jardin Real Botanico, or the Royal Botanical Gardens. I'm not a big botanical gardens fan but, at the very least, I felt that it might be a great place to get some good air and rest in the shade. Unfortunately, we soon realized that the peak (only) time that one should visit these gardens is in March, April or May. By the dog days of July, most of the flowers were drying up and the weeds were taking over. We were pretty seriously underwhelmed with the "Real Jardins" but we did find some really comfortable benches and some shade and breathed in the air being purified by what was left of the flora.
After the gardens, we took the longest path possible to get to back to the city park and realized just how navigable Madrid really is. If you get past the heat, you can get from anywhere in the city to anywhere else on foot within 45 minutes...if you walk slowly. We found a really cool stream in the park and, continuing with our theme of the day, laid down to take in some more fresh air and embrace some shade. This lasted for about 3 minutes until a rather large woman walked past with her dog. This woman apparently thought that it was perfectly acceptable to walk around in public with only a bikini top and jeans on... and her bikini top, at least 3 sizes too small, wasn't very good at its only job. Apparently the shady spot we found was right next to a sunny patch that she decided to claim as her own. This was our cue to leave (and void our stomachs and pray for blindness) and soon we miraculously found the Crystal Palace amid our relatively aimless wandering around the park. After our discovery, we turned back and hiked back across Madrid to our hostel where we picked up our bags and then took the metro to the train station.
Our night train to Lisbon left at 10:25 and got here at 7:30 Lisbon time (which is an hour ahead of Madrid). When buying tickets, we were presented with two options: either buy regular seats for just 5 euro or get seats that will recline into a bed for 20 more euro per person. We cheap, stupid college students chose the regular seats. This was a mistake. We were in a large compartment with a bunch of other like-minded cheap, stupid college students from around the world and, though Paul and I watched Ace Ventura until around 1am, the other students didn't feel like shutting up until 2 when the train officials finally decided to turn the lights off in the compartment. At 4:30am they were rudely turned on as we crossed the border into Portugal and were woken for Passport control.
In the end we all probably got about an hour and a half of sleep. Still, we somehow managed to get off the train and to our hostel this morning. We were ecstatic to find that this hostel has AC and that we have single beds this time. After dropping off our stuff and rubbing the sleepies out of our eyes, we headed out for a day in the city or, as I hoped, a search for a nice beach to relax on.

The view outside our hostel was of the beautiful Praca Figueroa (Figueroa Plaza). We quickly realized that while Paul is a Spanish major and Matt took Spanish all through high school, this means jack when it comes to understanding Portugese. I was the most upset at this since I've only now been able to master a few Spanish words and am now being thrown a whole new language! Needless to say I definitely thanked more people in Spanish than in Portugese today.
We decided to see the older part of Lisbon today and had three big landmarks in mind but, again, if a beach popped up I was definitely going to anchor the group for a bit. Unfortunately, this was the closest Lisbon has to a beach.

After abandoning hope for the famous Lisbon beaches, I resigned myself to seeing the old city and we decided to walk over their. Though we expected the walk to take about 45 minutes, we were fine with that and were taking advantage of the clouds and the not 100 degree heat.

About 45 minutes into our planned 45 minute walk, we realized that the old town was a lot farther away than we thought so we caved and hopped on the bus. It was a really strange walk actually... The harborfront at the newer part of the city is pretty well developed but then in between the new town and old town there's just a lot of construction and virtually wasted waterfront space. The first thing that we saw when we got there was the old Lisbon Tower.

Note the tiny beachfront teasing me and also the beautiful, white things in the sky that most call clouds.

We got some really beautiful views of the Lisbon inlet and I did, as seen earlier, manage to get in the water a little bit...meaning that in one summer I have touched the Pacific Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Win!
On our way back from the Tower, we saw Portugal's beautiful, guarded Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Next on our journey was an amazing monument to exploration and the new world. I was a bit skeptical of a monument to imperialism and colonization but the work was dedicated to the spirit of adventure of the explorers and the spirit that the new world offered. It is absolutely massive in scale but has really beautiful details and carvings.

As we got closer I was even more impressed.

Again note the beautiful clouds in the blue sky. We got paradisaical weather today. After leaving the monument, we finished our tour by visiting a beautiful old monastery nearby.

Inside was the body of Vasco de Gama and outside was a very pretty, small courtyard.

We then took the bus back (not repeating our earlier mistake) and went to the grocery store to make our dinner for our last night together. I'm starting my epic journey back to the US tomorrow with my flight to Frankfurt so we decided to have our last "three best friends" dinner tonight. Of course, I made a Capresi Salad and Matt made a really nice pasta dish with two sauces. The red sauce was really excellent - it had a really cool spicy kick. The white sauce that Matt bought and didn't alter was a "cheese-milk" sauce. The white sauce, by itself, was pretty bad. But when Paul and I mixed it with the red sauce, we found that the result tasted EXACTLY like vomit. Literally, we somehow recreated the human digestive process with pasta sauce.
After throwing out the white sauce and washing the taste out of our mouth we finished our dinner and are now ready to sleep for the next seventeen hours.

I'll do my best to blog from Frankfurt and/or Dublin over the next few days.

Check back soon!

-Simon