Crossing Borders

It has occurred to me that crossing borders in Europe is a lot like crossing state lines in America (read: I am not achieving my goal of accumulating more stamps in my passport). Last week I got on a bus, looked up, and all of a sudden the signs were in Portuguese. That’s it. No immigration, no customs, no police, no passports, no money changing. Kind of like traveling from Virginia to Ohio… I did have a wonderful time in Lisbon visiting Leslie. I left Wed. afternoon and arrived Wed. night after a 7-hour bus ride (it takes longer than it looks on the map because you can’t go straight over). Thursday I hung out in her first-grade classroom at the Christian international school she teaches at (her students are really cute), and in the evening we took the metro to downtown Lisbon with a couple other teachers. After enjoying a good meal at the Hard Rock Café, we walked around the center. Lisbon is a very modern city with tall buildings (hence the Hard Rock), but the center is more traditional, featuring a castle set up on a hill overlooking the city and many beautiful Renaissance-style buildings and arches.

Because Friday was Portugal’s independence day (poor Spain, but they don’t want it anyway), there was no school so we took off to the beach. Lisbon is on the Atlantic coast right where a river meets the sea, so there are lots of great beaches. It was beautiful hot sunny weather so we left after a few hours to prevent frying. I should take this moment to clarify… evidently there is a rumor going around that I frequent beaches all the time, but let the record show that every other time I have visited a beach since February, it has either been mostly cloudy or raining. I do actually study here too; I just can’t help that I’m getting a good tan as well. Anyway, we spent the afternoon watching a movie with a teacher who had just had a baby (and who makes amazing fudge sauce for ice-cream). On Saturday we took a day trip to Sintra, a cute town in the mountains that has old Arab castles and walls snaking around the mountain. We climbed up around the towers and in the ruins of some rooms. We ate our lunch by some cisterns that were used to store water in case of siege. After walking around the town, we went back to Lisbon in time to eat dinner at the school director’s house and go to another small town to see an orchestra concert one of the girls played in. They played bullfighting music, both Spanish and Portuguese. The music sounds about the same, but evidently the bullfights are different… in Portugal they don’t kill the bull, they just hold onto it so it stops. It was a very Portuguese experience… people kept looking at us, and we didn’t know what was going on in the end when everyone started shouting things and clapping during one song and a 3-year old about attacked us.
I left on Sunday, but on the way to the bus station Leslie and I walked around the water Vasco da Gama area near the water, the site of the expo a few years ago and right by the longest bridge in Europe that crosses the water to connect several roads to Lisbon. I was really glad I could finally make the trip out there and see Leslie’s life there, especially since we’re theoretically so close by. Well, I love you all! Seriously, leave me comments and let me know what’s going on! Besos!