October 29 – 31: Lisbon, Portugal
About 2 weeks after I travelled to Prague, it was time for me to make way for Lisbon. Ihe was already supposed to travel to Doha for the WISE Summit to present a project that I was working via the WISE Learners Program. Since Qatar Foundaton was already covering my travel to and from Qatar, I figured why not make some pitstops along the way. The first was Lisbon.
If there is any country I want to go back to, that my dear reader, is Portugal. The 3 days I spent there was magical and warm. The first day I went to the Belem tower and walked around the city. I walked up the statue called Padraos des Doscobrimentos. That night, I took part in the pub-crawl that was hosted by my hostel which was pretty fun.
The next day, I visited another city closeby – Sintra. Unfortunately, I arrived late there (I boarded the wrong bus, or rather the small yellow trams there which are pretty fun actually) around 4pm, and most of the places were closing up by 5-6 pm. However, there was a sketchy guy who came up to me and offered to drive me up to the Palace of Pena for 10 Euros. The palace was an hour long walk, and half an hour by bus which was coming in 20 minutes. Since I had only about half an hour to go, and the guy promised me to take there in time, I asked myself why not and boarded the tiny yellow car.
So I got there 10 minutes b efore the ticket counter closed just to find out that The Palace of Pena has a microclimate which makes it foggy sometimes, and to the worst (or best) of my luck, it was the same day I was there. Although I could not see from the top of the valley the palace was in, the foggy ambiance was pretty unique and the museum was really nice to explore.
The next day, I made my way to Doha, Qatar.