Our adventures in Portugal n Spain
This summer, Nishant & I took a 17 day holiday in Portugal in Spain. We spent 5 days in Portugal and the rest in Spain. We had a fabulous time & now that we are back I am going to experiment with writing a post for every day of the trip. So here is the first one...
Day 1 # LISBON
On our way "into" Lisboa
Just purchased a "micro-SIM" at the Lisboa airport
The nice thing about the Lisboa airport is that the minute you step out of the baggage claim area, you see the Vodaphone airport store. Being the phone geek that I am, I headed over to the store and purchased a pre-paid SIM with data plan. The plan cost me around 20 Euros for 30 minutes of talk time and unlimited messaging. The first 50MB of data was free and then I was charged per usage. Although expensive, it worked out just great especially since neither of us spoke no Portuguese. An additional bonus was Google maps (although the Google maps walking directions in Portugal are still in beta, they worked out pretty well for us)
Exploring the area around our apartment
The above picture gives a sense of the narrow lanes of Lisboa. Lisboa is notorious for some of the worst traffic in Europe. Nishant and I were glad about not driving here. The lanes are super narrow and only someone with good knowledge of the alleys and lanes here should drive around. Also note the orange rooftops in the picture. We saw this sea of orange consistently in all of Portugal.
Bairro Alto
The Bairro Alto area in Lisboa is full of bars, clubs and restaurants. You find the young, the old, tourists & locals. We spent the night at Grapes & Bites, a wine bar in the area. The lead vocalist was a charming energetic guy who ensured that the crowd was enjoying every beat. I kept thinking to myself.."this is a great start to the vacation"



