We arrived after having been 3 days in Coimbra at the Lisboa train station (26.08.07) which was build for the Expo 1998. We already saw pictures of that train station while looking thru some architecture book in Porto – and later on I also found another building of the same architect in Barcelona.
The Youth hostel we stayed at was quite cheap and not so far away from the train station, almost within that Expo area. To the riverside it was only a few minutes to walk. The apartment houses which were build near to the shore there somehow reminded me of the houses being built in Arabianranta, only that those where slightly higher and the streets looked ‘normal’, not like in Arabia where you have strange LED illumination at some corners …
All of us had some interesting but exhausting weeks before, so sometimes we must have all looked quite tired.
On the Expo area was a shopping mall next to the train station, similar to that one in Coimbra, at least roughly, also providing the possibility to sit outside and eat something.
Since Portugal is becoming the new presidency of the council of the European Union there were a lot of flags and maybe some building looking additionally secured.
The next days we walked around the old town of Lisboa. Rita showed us a lot of different places and we had sometimes a hard time keeping up with her. She wasn’t as most of us already visiting other towns before, so maybe some of us where already a bit fed up and sometimes not too keen on deciding whether to go into some church or not when just having seen that there is a church. But problems were somehow solved fast.
From this elevator from one town of the old city to another one could take a look at the city center. In the end we havn’t had the time to visit the hill and the castle on the other side, but from here the town map of the inner old town looked a bit more normal. When I first looked at it, it was somehow strange, all those little streets there, very close to each other, parallel and perpendicular in the middle and then just more or less chaotic towards the hills.
Banks of the river near to the youth hostel.
Andreu and Jasmin ‘playing music’, like in Coimbra. Quite nice to have such stuff on the street …
Traditional little cakes from Lisboa …. already in Coimbra Rita showed them to us, saying that we shouldn’t buy them there but in Lisboa, since they are by far better there. We went to a café south of the old city where they almost only sold those and everybody had first to wait in a line before getting a table. Even though the place was quite big with a lot of different rooms.
Nice sidewalks everywhere, also in Coimbra and sometimes in Porto. As long as there is no water or even ice on them they are quite nice 
5 feet:
always those stupid tourists who have to climb somewhere were nobody else was going …
As Gernot said, this looks like a fake. But it’s not.
Before we left back towards Porto and then Girona/Barcelona, we met one evening a friend of Rita with her boyfriend and went to a nice indian restaurant. The food was nice, even the ‘medium spicy’ version was really not that spicy. After that we went to some little bars in the old town, quite interesting athmosphere, everybody outside on the street, drinking beer and talking. But the number of times we were offered different sorts of drugs was also amazing, the weirdest thing related to this we saw was a man hitting a hydrant with some metal stick to draw attention to himself, so that people go there and buy something. Really weird.
Back in Porto we met Marianne again who kindly drove us back to the airport, but before that we went to eat some nice toast with bacon, cheese and fries. And Beer. When I saw the receipt, I told everybody what to pay, assuming that ’3x beer 3€’ means that one beer costs 3€, which would’ve been quite ok price for Finland. Of course it was 1€/beer …
From Porto Andreu, Jasmin, Gernot and I flew back to Girona. Gernot and Jasmin had to wait there for their connecting flights until the morning, Andreu and I went back by bus to Barcelona.