Finally Here!!

Wow after three long flights and two long layovers (and some airport problems) we finally made it to Lisbon. We pretty much just jumped out and onto the first city bus we saw and cruised around downtown Lisboa. It instantly felt very similar to Brasil and it was great speaking in Portuguese again. The accent here is a lot different and so sometimes people will not understand me. I have been working to convert my accent so that this doesnt happen but weºll see after today. So we jumped on a train and head out to the beach town Cascais. Danny is responsible for showing those pics so donºt let him forget. We spent the night walking around the small beach town. It was pretty chill, pretty freaking awesome. Today we are off to downtown Lisbon and then out to the coast at Sintra later in the day. Have fun!

Lisbon

We made it to Lisbon and even found each other in the airport! amazing. we got to the hostel, which is in cascais, a small beach town outside of lisbon. will post pictures soon (facebook probably). the weather is great, the people are nice (and tan...) and life is good. were going out on the town tonight (me and james, because scott is dead tired and passed out from jet lag). tomorrow we will be in the lisbon center after a morning on the gorgeous beach. stay tuned; more to come!

-danny

Pre-Travel Day (Scott)

Holy cow the time has finally come. It's 10:20 at night and I am still not packed! I have two huge assignments that have to be finished by the time I leave tomorrow so I suspect its going to be a long night. Last night we spent several hours hashing out the final details so we now have a solid itinerary for the next two and a half weeks. Everyone should know that we can be reached at the following international mobile +447924463806. We get free voice mail so anyone who wants to drop a message just call. Danny James and I all take off from Salt Lake on different planes tomorrow. James and I will meet up in Paris for the last leg of the trip to Bela Lisboa but Danny will end up sitting in the Lisbon airport for a couple of hours before we get there. The plan is to head straight to the beach! So see ya'll later!

Leaving Tuesday

So I leave Tuesday morning from Salt Lake City airport at 6:40 am, for DC then from there to London and eventually to Lisbon. Scott and James are arriving sometime in the afternoon of the 11th, several hours after me. This is the beginning of an epic trip! Suggestions are welcomed...keep reading for updates! Love you all

- Danny

Ideas for Barcelona

Ok guys. So we had previously mentioned that we will spend very little time in Madrid in order to spend more time up in Barcelona. Well after some research, I have some ideas of things that might be fun, thanks to a handy travel guide I read in Borders.

So we will have two days... From what I understand the majority of the popular sites can be seen in one long day by foot because they are all centralized in the city. So assuming we arrive sometime in the morning we could just hang around and check out the following sites the first day/afternoon:

1. El templo de la sagrada familia: So this is picturesque Barcelona. Pretty much what you see on all of the post cards and a definite must for us. Apparently there are tours, admission is €8.




2. La Pedrera: This is en route to the centre of the city. This building was built around 1900 out of pure limestone. It was built by some spanish artisan named Antoni Gaudi. The building looks really interesting and would definitely call for some cool pictures out front. It's way expensive to go inside so we should probably just pass by.




3. Plaça Reial: European city square freaking awesome

4. Catedral de Barçelona: Also a must.


5. Museu de Picasso: I personally would be very interested in this. Let me know what you guys think. So they have over 2500 paintings and sculpture on display by Pablo Picasso, the world's largest Picasso display. Admission is €4 for students. I bet we could spend hours in here if we wanted.

Ok so so far we have had a pretty full day for something like €12!

Other options that we could consider are

6. Parc de la Ciutadella: Huge city park includes a zoo, two scientific museums and the Catalan parlament building among other cool sounding things.

7. Barcelona city aquarium: to add as another option.

8. (This one is mainly for me) Camp Nou stadium FC Barcelona!!! We could take the tour of the stadium. There probably won't be any games...shame... but this stadium is huge and it would be cool to stop by the gift shop. Camp Nou is right next to the main train station so this could be easy if we had the time.

So in my opinion we could find tons to do and we probably won't even get close to accomplishing all that we wanted to on that first day.

I kind of feel like leaving the second day more open so we can relax a little more (Please share your opinions). In my search through the travel stuff, I really only found two things that interested me outside of downtown Barcelona. We could potentially do one of these things during the morning/afternoon of the second day.

1. Mont Tibidabo: This is a small mountain the overlooks the entire city of Barcelona. It used to be a retreat for the rich folk back in the day hundreds of years ago. They have an amusement park up there but the thing that really caught my attention was a five mile bike trail that circles around and apparently gives amazing views of the entire city. If the weather was right this could be one of the more memorable experiences of the trip. They offer bike rentals at the trail head for relatively cheap... the book said something like €5 per hour or €15 for 24 hours. I personally would like to do some active things away from the cities. The prospect of the city views is very appealing though.

2. Barceloneta waterfront: Again, we could do this on bikes, or just walk (few miles). Here we see the Mediterranean coastline within the city. Maybe we could just beach it up if we weren't sick of that already from Portugal. This would definitely be the option if we were too tired to take a mountainous five mile bike ride!



So those are some ideas I found for Barcelona. Tell me what you think and help me if I left anything out that you want to see!

Amazing details to follow in the coming days

We're bloggin' the eurotrip!