After finding the apartment I still had two nights at the hostel before move-in day. I felt relaxed. I felt [mildly] social. So I took a day tour of Sintra and Cascais.
I probably could have negotiated my way around the cities myself but after the tour, I confirmed that there is no way I could have found my way to the two castles on my own. I likely would have walked around the mini-city-center for hours trying to figure out why it was give UNESCO heritage site status (sorry, but seriously, why?). The day tour gave us an appropriate ten minutes in the historical center to walk up one street and down the other, take a couple of pictures, and get going again.
The magical parts of Sintra were the Palacio Nacional da Pena and the Quinta da Regaleria. Not the castles themselves, but the gardens surrounding them.
I slept the half hour out to Sintra (blame very random salsa dancing incident from the night before) and was only mildly awakened as the guide told us we were headed to the "Penis Palace". What? He said it some 10 times as he described its history. When we exit the van we get our tickets and map. Oh, Pena's Palace. They don't have that awesome Spanish "n" that softens the a sound, so it's just an N. With a Portuguese accent in English Pena's Palace and Penis Palace sound the same. While I was glad we weren't going to some sort of palace made of penises, I was at first disappointed that the guide just dropped us off at the first place without any intention of walking through with us and giving us history lessons. Plus I was tired and frankly, there was a hill to get to the castle I wasn't particularly motivated to climb. Within minutes, though, I was all about this place.
Magical fantasy gardens. I ran into almost no one the entire time, except for a really nice Turkish guy that came on our tour, spoke only some English, and became my semi-silent tour buddy for the day (which awesomely included a lot of pointing and taking turns following each other's inclinations). The garden was full of huge trees imported from all around the world. Sequoias and redwoods and ginko boloba trees. There were small structures here and there and of course the main castle, an eclectic mix of old things with a bunch of small rooms with two chairs and a table each.
The Quinta da Regaleria gardens were almost as beautiful and clearly more fun. There were underground caves that led from one place to the other, an inverted tower spiraling 30 meters down and lots of towers peppered around the territory. Turkish guy and I did a lot of pointing.
We had a traditional lunch, which was terrible, and headed to the most western point in Europe and a quick stop at the beach in Cascais. Here the Turkish guy and I got a kebab and giggled about how it was the best food either of us have had in Portugal so far. We must not be pointing randomly to the correct dishes on menus.
The tour book encourages a lot of other things in the area so I'm sure all be back. But for now, Sintra=check.
No comments:
Post a Comment