Lisbon Trip. 14th - 18th September 2015 [LONG POST]
08:10Hello! As some of you know, Hanis, Amy and I (Sami) went to Lisbon a couple of weeks back.
*Pre warning, lots of photos coming up! Click photos to enlarge them.
We stayed at a lovely apartment/hotel called Hello! Lisbon Santa Apolonia. Where we stayed was very close to the city centre, around 10-15 minute walk. There are many branches of Hello! Lisbon dotted around the city. It's somewhat like a hotel as you are in a building with many others who are also staying in the hotel, however each room is furnished just like a modern apartment, complimented with a small kitchen and living area, and locked with a unique pin code to gain access into the hotel itself and the same code to your accommodation, which expires by the end of your stay.
As you can see from above, the apartment/hotel had a very modern and clean feel, and the hotel was nice enough to give us a welcoming basket filled with fruits and two bottles of water. The living area had a high ceiling which was split into half for a small balcony to accommodate two beds, and another private room for another two beds(in this case, we got a double, instead of a twin).
Let me stop rambling about how wonderful this accommodation was and let's move on. The first night upon arriving, we went to a shopping centre called Centro Colombo, which opened till 12am. The food shown below was deeeelicious!
Second day, we intended to go to the Flea Market, as it was only on Tuesdays and Saturdays, but we woke up a little late so we missed it, instead we thought we'd explore the city centre.
The city centre was, of course filled with shops and lots of restaurants. For lunch(I think), we thought we'd settle for one of the restaurants near the entrance of the city centre. The food there was meh, but the service was quite poor. We waited nearly an hour for our food(it did not help we were also starving!) and the waiter had the cheek to call us back to tell us "something was missing, his tip". Pfft! If the service was better, maybe we would have! But, from the goodness of Hanis's heart, she tipped him.
Later that night, we went on a city bus tour and rode around Lisbon. It was the last ride, so the tickets were significantly cheaper, from it's original price of €19 to €12 for an hour and a half! Bargain!
Third day, and we decided to take a Segway tour around the city! It was super fun. It took us about 20 minutes or so to familiarise ourselves with using the segway, and we were ready to go and view the beautiful sights and learn about the history of the old town, Alfama.
We actually don't have any sensible pictures of us on the segway, so these will do haha. It was raining midway when we were on the tour, so our tour guide gave us these yellow plastic overcoats, but by the time we put them on, it stopped raining! But we decided to keep wearing it, because thats when we became the YELLOW BANANA SQUAAADDD.
Later that evening, we decided to take a tuktuk tour, which is like a mini open truck. And we didn't really know the names of the locations on the different tours we could choose from, so we ended up taking a tour that went by all the locations the other tours took us, but with this tour, the tour guide was nice enough to let us get out of the tuktuk and let us take loads of breath taking photos! Such as the ones below.
We then ended the lovely tour with a meal in Praca de King Jose I, with the BEST chicken crepe we have ever tasted. Trust me when I say it was SO GOOD.
On the fourth day, we decided to go to the south of Portugal and visit Costa da Caparica, Almada. Luckily for us, the weather was very warm, with the highs of 25 degrees Celsius, in comparison to the other days with only highs of up to 22-23 degrees Celsius.
It was so clean with real sand meeting with the blue sea (very different to the UK), and surprisingly empty! There was barely anyone on the beach, perhaps six groups of people or less, which is quite rare in the UK with the degrees hitting 25 C, but one of the tour guides said from the other day that these kind of temperatures are seen as "bad summer" temperatures, which of course us Britons would quite surely cherish with our -1 degree weather!
So that brings me to end this very long post (sorry!) to a close. I hope you enjoyed the read and the pictures. Hopefully in the future we will visit Lisbon again. Stay tuned for our next posts! Tchau!
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