A {super awesome} visit outside and around Lisbon

On our second day in Lisbon, we wanted to head out of town to see some of the cool sights in nearby cities.  We found this great group, We Hate Tourism Tours (check out the link, you'll get a feel for how awesome these people are), and contacted them to take us around!  The van in the picture below was our limousine for the day :)

We started off in Sintra, about 30 minutes north of Lisbon - there are a bunch of castles and a tiny, pretty shopping street, but we didn't spend much time at either of those... because we were headed off the beaten track.

 We ended up going to this crazy house in Sintra - The Quinta da Regaleira - full of hidden pasages and caves, built by a man who wanted to express his, um, *ahem* unique beliefs in alchemy, Masonry, the Knights Templar, and the Rosicrucians through the architecture and landscape.  Crazy, but very cool.

(btw, he did the following photo on purpose.  remember how much Brian loves taking photos?)

After our tour through crazyville (sorry I don't have more photos... it's tough to photograph yourself getting lost in a dark underground cave, but you can picture it), we drove out to a roadside market to explore and eat lunch.

 I bought some of this jam - homemade and delicious.

But the highlight of this market stop was lunch.  Fresh bread, baked with chorizo inside, then once baked, you cut it open and put in goat/cow/sheep cheese and devour.  How to describe how amazing this was?  So amazing that I've been recreating it at home with a box of Bisquik mix someone gave me, stuffed the dough with meat and cheese and gobbling it up as fast as I can.

We would definitely call ourselves foodies, but we're cheap foodies.  I think Brian and I would choose a tasty roadside truck every time over a nice sit down dinner.

After stuffing our faces, and enjoying boxed wine on the side of the road, we headed to the eastern most point of Europe.  Below is the view... to America.

It would be a loooooong swim....

Looking south along the coast.

  Our van also provided lots of entertainment before we got back on the road...

 We then headed to Cascais, a beach town, walked along the coast, and got some handmade ice cream.

With our sugar high buoying us along, we headed to our last destination... the city of Belem.  It's more or less a suburb of Lisbon, and has lots of huge touristic sights - below is the monument to the discovery.    Portugal used to have a huge empire and control over the "new world" and made many important discoveries.

 After touring the monument and a very quick visit to the nearby monastery, we wrapped up our trip with Belem Pastries...

...and the bottle of wine we picked up at the roadside market.  We could not have asked for a better day of exploring Portugal with Marta & Miguel!  8 hours of delight, slightly crazy driving, full bellies, a more full knowledge and appreciation of Portugal, new friends and great stories to tell... that's a real travel success!

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Lisbon Postscript

Our first night in town, I located a very very typical portuguese restaurant in my tour book, and we checked it out.  I grabbed a video while we were eating of this rowdy table of old men...

Unfortunately, by the time I started recording, they were wrapping up their singing - though they had spent the previous 20 minutes all randomly breaking out into song, trying to convince one another that they were singing their song correctly and all the other men had to sing with them... imagine, 5 Richie T's and 5 Kenny T's sitting around with their buddies, making a scene, but no one around caring a single iota... that was our evening's entertainment.  I winked at the really emphatic guy you can see the best at one point, and the look of confusion he gave me was priceless!

Singing old men in Lisboa from kate on Vimeo.

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Last weekend in Lisbon

And by last weekend... I mean 2 weekends ago.  I meant to be more on top of this!

We have this list of places we want to make sure to travel to before we head back to the states... and we're slowly working our way through it.  I think this is the 4th iteration of this list, as we seem to be really good at crossing travel destinations off our lists!

We didn't have plans for that weekend, so on Tuesday night we started looking at flights for the following Saturday... we were thinking Switzerland or Italy for skiing, or Galicia for eating, or Portugal, either the southern coast or Lisbon.  Lisbon won out in the end!

Saturday morning, bright and early, we headed to the airport to catch our 1 hour flight to the capitol of Portugal.  We touched down and were at our B&B by 10 in the morning, and though we couldn't check in yet, they were gracious and let us have breakfast!  Crepes, french toast, fresh fruit and homemade preserves, and italian expresso.  I was in heaven.  I was SO in heaven that I ate so much I was sick for the rest of the day.... fail, Kate.

Lisbon is known as the City of Seven Hills, and thankfully, there are these funiculars & trolleys located all around town to save your legs from hiking up and down the uneven cobblestone!

 And, they give you access to these gorgeous views!  Lisbon is a poor, but beautiful city, trying to hold onto it's glory from the past when it was discovering the new world.

 See the bridge in the background?  It has a very famous cousin in San Francisco... built by the same company!  And to the left of the bridge, can you make out what it is?  It's a copy of Rio's Christo statue, overlooking the harbor.  Lisbon's officials visited Rio & thought the statue was so cool that they wanted to have their own...

 Old mixed with new.

This is the main plaza in town - Rossio.  I loved that with all the hills, you could really see the whole city from birds eye views.

Does it get better than this?  Enjoying a cool beverage while watching the sun set, on a terrace with 100 friends and your one and only very best friend, overlooking the water?

 Our B&B was one highlight of the whole trip - the staff were so classy and helpful, the room comfortable, the food amazing, and our views.... spectacular.  This is from our living room terrace.

The big long building in front of our door was the city market... I loved perusing the food stands run by grandmas and seeing what they had brought to sell.

 We spent 2 nights, 3 days in Lisbon, and loved it.  A beautiful, laid back city, with people that were so kind and easy going - we're so glad we visited!  My next post will be on the crazy day we spent with the folks from We Hate Tourism Tours exploring the towns outside Lisbon...

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January 2012 Review

January was pretty calm for us!  No traveling, no visitors, and simply an easy welcome to the new year.

We re-started hosting a community group at our house (we did all of last school year, but this fall, when we were traveling so much, we couldn't manage it).  Sorry for the blurry photos - but we've averaged between 10-15 people at our place every Monday night to share a meal followed by a discussion.  Currently, we're doing Tim Keller's Gospel in Life - I'd highly recommend it to anyone!  There is so much meat to the study - each weekend, Brian and I have headed to the park to have a coffee and work on the next week's study, and we've had some great discussions with just the two of us as well.

My friend Janelle, a travel agent here, invited me to go with her to a huge travel convention in Madrid.  We collected lots of information on places to visit, and we also tried local foods from various regions.  As I was walking around the Basque region booths, I was stopped by some workers and asked if I wanted to take a pintxos class, which I of course accepted!  It was fun :)

 One thing I really miss having access to is a library - we brought a lot of books over with us (most of which I've hardly cracked) but it's always nice to have access to new and interesting literature.  For that reason, I decided to host a book exchange with some of my girlfriends.  Sorry for the blurry photos.

 There were a lot of books exchanged, but in the end, I think it simply turned into a reason to get together and eat and drink :)

 I know we'll be doing it again in the near future!

Finally, we were part of the annual Skybridge retreat.  This year, it was hosted in Madrid, which was convenient for us!  It was a weekend-long event, with 20+ attendees, many flying in from all around Europe.  Brian and I hosted a session on both loving your city and working with christian distinction, which we used mainly as a vehicle to discuss how these individuals approach each of those ideas in their own cities.

What a random post... but it just goes to show that we do more than travel here :)

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Semla Cake

Yesterday, Catherine knocked on my door and asked if I was interested in trying one of her niece's Swedish cake creations.  Her niece used to live in our apartment with her family, and was visiting for a week - and baking up a storm while she stays in Catherine's place!  I gleefully accepted the gift of another baker, and here's what I received...

They said these were eaten as part of a tradition in February, so I went on an internet hunt to understand... here's what I found.

"The semla was originally eaten only on Shrove Tuesday, as the last festive food before Lent, became a traditional dessert every Tuesday between Shrove Tuesday and Easter. Semlas are available in shops and bakeries every day from shortly after Christmas until Easter. Interestingly each Swede consumes on average five bakery-produced semlas each year, in addition to all those that are homemade.
Today, the semla consists of a cardamom-spiced wheat bun which has its top cut off and insides scooped out, and is then filled with a mix of the scooped-out bread crumbs, milk and almond paste, topped with whipped cream. The cut-off top serves as a lid and is dusted with powdered sugar, it is often eaten on its own, with coffee." {from Stockholm Weddings}

All I have to say is that it was DELICIOUS.  Not overly sweet with a flavor of almond & cardamom, even though under the cream of my cake there was a small infusion of marzipan.  I only intended to eat half, and leave the other half for Brian, but I didn't complain when he offered me his half :)

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November trip to Berlin

We're going back a bit in history from the December Germany trip to our November Berlin trip, which was only a long weekend excursion.  First stop on our far-too-short weekend trip to Berlin.  We started with the Jewish History Museum.  It was designed by Daniel Libeskind, and has been at the top of my lists for cool architectural works to see while we're here in Europe.

The following morning, after all of our hotel issues, we made a huge tour of Berlin, seeing all the big stuff.  First, Checkpoint Charlie.

I didn't know much about Checkpoint Charlie before we visited, though I had heard a lot about it in popular culture & briefly in history books.  When Berlin was divided by the wall, this was one of three checkpoints between east and west, and the one that was used by international forces.  Now it's all done up with "soldiers" that people can take their photos with.

This brick line runs along the length of where the wall used to stand, throughout the whole city.

There are still sections left, placed around the city.  You can see the brick dividing line to the left of the wall.  

There is a very large section that has been left behind.  To the left of the wall, there has been a memorial/museum set up called the Topography of Terror, which has photos and documentation of what happened to the people of Germany during the war.

The land that this museum was on was on land formerly used by the Nazis to torture dissidents.  The rooms at the bottom of the pictures above were part of the basement that prisoners were held in.  The building was blown up in the war.

 This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, design by Peter Eisenman.  It's a controversial space, creating a forest of concrete pillars, which Eisenman says lack symbolism, but represent the loss of order & reason.  It was a beautiful space to be in, disorienting as an unintentional hide-and-seek, forcing one to consider ones response to the tragedy of the Holocaust.

The Reichstag - the building that holds the German Parliament, and was partially burned down in 1919, which the Nazis used to their advantage in taking power.

 The Victory Column, gigantic statue in the middle of Berlin's Tiergarten, the huge park (like Madrid's Retiro or New York's Central Park).

 The Brandenburg Gate.

 We rented a couple of bikes on our last morning in Berlin and enjoyed riding around the city exploring.

One artist we really like is Richard Serra, and we seem to find his work in the cities that we visit.  Big, steel sculptures that create a sense of disorientation in space.

AND, we found ourselves another christmas market.  This was actually our first one of the whole season, and we loved it.  Currywurst, Glugvine, and hearty german beer.

Both Brian and I agreed that Berlin is a city we would love to move to someday.  There is a lot of culture, history, and beauty there, and we love the people and the city itself.  I've been scheming to get back there before we move home, so we'll see if I can make it happen.  Time is getting short!

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