Tu Sonrisa es Mi Sonrisa.: Day Eighty-Three

Got home too late.. and had to get up too early. After breakfast at nine we again piled onto our beloved bus and rode out to the little town of Sintra, which is about half an hour outside of the city. Sintra is a little community on the top of a hill that overlooks Lisbon and is probably only in existence because of the castle that is there. Which we visited. After we got off our bus in Sintra, we were then coerced into getting onto the city bus to ride up to the top of a mountain.. on the most windey road I've ever experienced, which was amplified by the fact that I had to ride standing up the whole time, and its never been my forte to balance well on moving busses.. SO up we went to the top of this mountain where we finally reached the Castle... well kind of.. we still had to hike up another small mountain to get to it since the bus couldn't run up there.

It was fantastic! kind of a mixture of a whole bunch of different styles and colors, not quite how you would imagine a normal castle.. One of the very first things our guide says as we're all admiring the giant intricate building is "don't get too excited, this is just the 'summer home'." ...oh yeah, I have a summer home just like this one back home.. what?! One of the different and interesting things about this castle in particular is that instead of wandering through it and trying to figure out what each room is actually supposed to be, this one is furnished so when you walk through you can actually see what it might have looked like.

After we hiked back down the hill, rode the bus back down the cliff, and got some lunch, we were off to part two of the day. We were traveling with two interest groups this weekend mine and another one, so for the second part we split up and dropped the other interest group off in some random park along the way.. but we continued on to the 1998 Expo. Unlike the Sevilla expo which is just a cluster of random buildings and semi-cool bridges, this expo included an aquarium, a tram like thing that took us over the water, and an OMSI like museum. TOTALLY FUN! so we spend the whole afternoon just re-living our youth.. riding the tram and playing with all the science experiments and looking at fish.

Finally we went back to the hotel where my friends and I decided to order chinese food and watch Dirty Dancing Havana Nights before another night of exploring the city. Chinese food was definitely a success, after which we all got ready and headed out for the night once more. This time we went to the bar area of the city but ended up catching a cab to the beach to a club.. one of my friends bribed our way in through the doorman and we were good to go!