I made it back to Lisbon for the second time. This time I stayed for five days. The first thing I did was go to the DHL office to see if I could get my replacement debit card. There had been a delivery attempt at the hostel's building that was refused. The first time I called DHL, I asked the person I talked to if I could pick up ther package at their office, and they said that was impossible, because the sender did not allow for that possibility. Frustrated, I tried to explain that that there was never anyone at the delivery location, but I hit a brick wall with the idiot I was talking to. I wanted to say, "Isn't it your job to make sure people get their packages?" But, luckily, my Skype call got cut off, so I called back and talked to a second person who told me that it would be no problem to pick up my package at their office in Lisbon. I don't know why some people want to use the rules to interfere with you, and some people try to use the rules to help you.
So, armed with these two contradictory pieces of information, I took a metro to the DHL office immediately after checking into the hostel, not knowing what kind of person I would have to deal with at the DHL office, and not completely certain that I would get my replacement debit card. But, luckily, my debit card was there for me. I then set out to find an ATM, and couldn't find one for a while. But I remembered I had seen one at Sete Rios train station, so I took the metro there. I had been getting seriously low on cash, and most places outside of Lisbon did not take credit cards, so I had been really conserving my money, and was down to my last few euros. I could have done some other stuff to get money if I had needed to, but it didn't come to that.
I spent the remaining time in the day wandering around Lisbon, and I treated myself to dinner in a restaurant since now I had money. I had pre-reserved a return trip to Coimbra on the train for the next day, so I got up really early to make that journey. It was a pretty long train trip, and was pushing it for a day trip. But I enjoyed my visit to Coimbra, though I was a bit burned out by the end of the day.
After returning to Lisbon late at night, the next day I spent all day unexpectedly backing up the SD card on my phone, as I found it was almost full. It took me all day and waking up several times throughout the night to back up all the data. But I was glad I had a spare day available to do it. I didn't even leave to get food, since I was tethered with my phone to my laptop, backing up the data to both a hard drive and Dropbox. At least it only took a day; when I had done a similar thing in Hanoi, it had taken me three weeks of constant connection to the Internet with my laptop to back up my SD card.
So now my backup had been accomplished, and I had a way to get money. I decided to take a day trip to Sintra, which is a beautiful medieval town bordering forested mountains filled with fairytale castles and whatnot. On the train to Sintra, there was a guy playing accordion, accompanied by a guy playing the tambourine. Why do accordion players always play "Besame Mucho"? I wonder.
I looked up some sites to see, found about nine places that were good candidates to visit, and figured I'd get to about seven of them during the day. Ha, ha. The was no way I would get to that many places, especially since I spent half the day just wandering around. Sintra is not like most other Portuguese towns where everything is in a very compact place; all the sites are very far apart, scattered across forested mountains.
When I first got to Sintra, one of the first things I saw was a regional bus that went to [Cabo], which is the westernmost point in Portugal and in Continental Europe. My first impulse was to jump on that bus, but then I thought that I could do that later in the day. I didn't get the chance again, because by the time I returned from sightseeing, it was too late to head out in that direction, because I wouldn't have had time to catch the last bus back. Oh, well.
I actually only had time to see two sites of the several I had picked out, which were Castelo dos Mouros, and Palacio da Pena. Both of them were phenomenal places. Castelo dos Mouros was right at the top of the mountain facing Sintra. There were some incredibly heavy winds there, with gusts that I would describe as hurricane-strength, on the way up to the main tower. I was blown over onto a huge pile of rocks on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire by winds that strong, and ended up covered with blood, so I tend to be a leetle bit careful with strong winds on craggy mountain tops. Especially, as was the case here, where there are precipitous drops on both sides of the rocky stairs.
Probably one would have to spend at least three days in Sintra to get a good visit of the attractions and surroundings. It's not really the kind of place that lends itself to a day trip, but in one day, I did manage to get a sense of the way the place feels. Some towns are optimal for day trips, some are not.
On my last day in Lisbon, I visited the Belém area, which is by the waterfront, and is a nice place to visit, though kind of touristy. I tried to get into the Jerónimos Monastery, but the line was really long, so I went into the attached church, which had no line, hoping that the line for the monastery would die down. When I got out of the church, the line was much, much longer, so I abandoned the plan to visit the monastery and just wandered around Belém.
I left the next day on a flight to Barcelona. I would have liked to have planned to see more of Spain, but the fact that the Schengen zone only gives me 90 days out of 180 days to stay there makes it so I can't wander as much as I would like. Maybe the next time I visit Europe I'll be able to see more of Spain.
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