Lisbon

Days 15-16, Lisbon
The point of our Lisbon trip was to pick up the two new people for our crew and another rental car. We, the students, did not have to be involved with any of this. The PhDs drove us into Lisbon and set us free. We all stayed in a tiny hotel that was cheap, pretty nice, and clean.
We arrived there around noon. As soon as we got our rooms settled we headed to the tourist center to pick up street maps and figure out how to use the tram system. We knew we wanted to go to the area of Lisbon known as Belem. After talking to the women at the tourist center for just a few minutes (luckily they spoke great English) we headed out to Belem.
Belem is the location of an Archaeology Museum and where one of Portugal’s most famous pastries are made, the pastel de nata (pronounced pah-stache day not). They’re custard tarts and they’re absolutely delicious. They’re served all over Portugal but come from the bakery in Belem, where you can get them hot out of the oven with cinnamon and sugar on top. MMMMM! We each had two for lunch right after we got out of the Archaeology Museum because the bakery is on the same street as the museum. The museum was small but very interesting. They only have 4 exhibits there – Egypt, Portuguese Treasures, Lithuania (Greek/Roman ruins), and burials discovered by two Portuguese archaeologists. The Egypt exhibit had a variety of things including mummies but everything was written in Portuguese so we couldn’t figure out anything about what we were looking at. The Portuguese Treasures exhibit had a lot of old gold jewelry and paragraphs on the time periods written in Portuguese and English so we knew more about what we were viewing. The Lithuania exhibit had a lot of shrines and god/goddess sculptures. Everything in that room was written in Portuguese and English, as it was in the burials exhibit. The burials exhibit showcased tombs excavated mostly in the early 1900s. The people were buried during a time period where there was a transition from Roman burials to Christian burials. The objects buried with the bodies changed throughout the period but the majority of the gravestones consistently read “May the Earth tread lightly upon you.” It only took us a little over an hour to go through the museum. We headed afterwards to check out the area of Lisbon closer to our hotel.
We walked back through the shopping district. At the bottom of the street closest to the water there were some tents set up with people selling purses, cloth headbands, jewelry, leather bags, ect. It was all really funky and colorful and I had to stop myself from making several more purchases than just the bracelet I got for myself. We went into several different stores, including an H&M with four floors. I didn’t get anything but Erin and Toni both did. We headed back to the hotel around 8pm to get ready for dinner.
We went to an Indian restaurant/pizzeria (weird right?) for dinner. After dinner Erin and I went out in the Barrio Alto district. It’s a bunch of bars that were within a few blocks from our hotel. It was a fun night but it sucked getting there because it was straight uphill. And I mean STRAIGHT uphill. Steepest roads I’ve ever walked on or even seen in existence. Thankfully it was only uphill one way and we were able to get back with less effort than it took us to get there.
In the morning I walked around with Tim attempting to locate a large park that according to the map should have been a few blocks from our hotel. The map was wrong. We’re still not sure if we found the park we were looking for because the one we found was much much smaller than it seemed to be on the map. We left Lisbon around 11am.

When we pulled up to the apartment in Alcobaca Jonathan and Caroline told us we had the rest of the day off. Since it was only around 12:30pm Kevin and I decided to hop the next bus to Nazare, a touristy beach town that we do most of our survey around. It was nice to spend the afternoon on the beach relaxing rather than hiking up the sand dunes and digging test pits. It’s still too cold to go swimming (both water and air temperatures) but it was sunny and warm enough to lay out. We headed home just before 7 because we had to be back for dinner by 7:30.

Overall Lisbon was fun, I just wish we had more time there and were able to experience more of the city.