Weekend in Portugal

June 07, 2018

While in Barcelona, I only have class Tuesday-Thursday, so we get a long weekend to travel and take advantage of the surrounding area. Last weekend I went to Lisbon, Portugal with three girls in my class. In Lisbon, the first day we walked around near our apartment and to the river and bought a bus tour for the next few days. On the second day, we took a train to Sintra and did the hop on hop off bus in Sintra. While Sintra is a beautiful place, if you ever go, do NOT do the hop on hop off bus if you actually want to get off and walk around. Most of the people on the bus stayed in the bus at stops, which came every 30 minutes, so there was never room to get back on the bus. We had to wait for 5 buses which was over 2 hours including walking a couple kilometers because we thought the next stop would have more room. It is a beautiful place to go but the bus system through hop on hop off is terrible.

The next two days we had the yellow bus hop on hop off including a boat ride and ability to ride the trams in Lisbon. While this bus system was better, it was still slow and unreliable. We also used the aero bus to get to the airport because it was supposed to come every 20 minutes. We waited for about an hour until the bus came. At that point, we were about to get an Uber which would probably have been smart because the bus ride took almost an hour and we had to run through the airport to catch our flight. Even though we had some issues with bus tours, it was great weekend exploring a beautiful country.