Nate Buchanan and Kara land in Lisbon and spend their first day fighting jetlag, eating pastéis de nata and grilled sardines in Alfama, and skipping the paid tourist sites to eat local instead. They pick up anti-parasitic medicine at a pharmacy and plan to meet friends the next day.
Chapters
This is one of those mornings, or maybe afternoons where I'm embarrassed to say what time it is. We are going out to find coffee, but let's just say we should probably be going to get lunch instead.
We're a little behind on sleep.
We only got three hours the night before, and we definitely caught up last night. It feels absolutely amazing today. It's Monday, which we've been told is some kind of holiday. Not like every Monday, but this Monday. So a ton of stuff is closed now to find coffee.
Trying my first pastel. De nada, which is the pastry that Portugal is supposed to be famous for. Some kind of avatar.
I love sweet breakfast food, so I'm.
So excited about this.
That's good.
That place was so European. I don't even like pastries, but they're just so pretty and Europey.
Since we booked last minute, we had to, like, book a place that was pretty far outside of the center of the town. And I was a little mad about it, but it's turned out to be super cool because there's just a bunch of, like, little quiet streets with local restaurants where there's no tourists. So it's given us a unique perspective here in Lisbon.
Yeah, it's been fun. And they laugh when we try to speak Portuguese, which is fun.
Three Portuguese words that we've learned so far.
Now we are heading to another place to eat because my pastry and coffee is not gonna hold me over for lunch. Something about, like, a cod fish fried. I don't know. It's supposed to be, like a local snack. It's about 30 minutes away, so we're gonna use our walk from here to the next restaurant to explore the city.
There's imedicine. You can never be too careful.
Since we've been eating questionable food in Africa for the past two months, we thought it'd be a good idea to run in the pharmacy and grab some medicine that might kill any parasites inside of our body. Turned into a fun experience. Trying to explain to the lady who didn't speak very good English that we needed medicine for possible worms.
Mate literally translated worm in his phone into Portuguese.
And she got us exactly what we needed.
Look at all this packaging for this.
One pill. Just precautionary. She's kind of sick. I'm not, but I'd just rather not have anything living inside of me that doesn't belong there. There's so many old buildings getting redone here, and I love that. I'm sure the easiest way to do this would just be to demolish the whole thing. But instead they're keeping the really cool outside of the building and then just rebuilding it all on the ins.
On our way to find food, we stumbled upon a gigantic statue of a lot of different people.
Praca Marques do combo.
According to TripAdvisor, he was the prime.
Minister after the big earthquake that apparently destroyed the city in 1755.
We're gonna have to figure out how to do this history stuff for the vlog. Since we're gonna be in Europe for a long time, we have a problem appreciating history as much as we should, as well as art.
I think this is really cool.
We just don't want the vlog to get boring with a bunch of history facts. But I feel like it needs to be included in order to appreciate Europe. And we haven't figured out that balance yet.
It doesn't even exist anymore.
It's completely empty. Blog post I read about the restaurant with fish cake. Things must not have been up to date.
It's gone.
Must not have been that good either. At least the walk here was nice.
30 minutes later.
Time to find somewhere else.
After further investigation, there are multiple restaurants with similar names, and I may or may not have put the wrong one in Google Maps. The other one's only a half mile away. More excuses to explore the city.
It's downhill so far.
Kayla.
Your first appearance on the vlog.
Hey, what's up?
Yay.
She's saying that they're at the airport on their way to visit.
They're coming.
Made it to, like, the center of town. This is a totally different city than the part of town that we're staying in. So many tourists. So many. More like little patio restaurants outside, which I'm sure are very expensive and touristy. Very pretty, though. See why this is the popular place to be?
Yeah, it's a really cold town.
She pulled some room temperature fish out from behind the glass counter, which is not exactly what I was expecting.
It's okay.
Having a good taste. Everything being room temperature, it's, like, a little weird.
Did you say what you got?
I got the codfish sandwich.
We've moved to a much more picturesque location.
Normally against coming to restaurants to have, like, seats outside in the middle of a square because normally they're way overpriced. I just got a fish sandwich in a coat for €4.
Crazy.
No more plans for the rest of the afternoon. We want to go to this castle that sits on top of the highest point in Lisbon for sunset, which is in like, three hours. What?
We tried to do last night but didn't make it there.
Yeah, that. So we're just going to walk around and kill some time.
Those are real grapes.
So for the past hour or so we've been wandering around the Alfama neighborhood, which from what I understand is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Lisbon.
Used to be a fishing town in kind of the rougher parts, but now it's like a super popular tourist area. But we really like it because it's still very authentic even though there's tourists everywhere.
Like laundry.
Yeah. People just have their laundry hanging out. They're just sitting on their porches doing.
Daily life things hanging out their little balconies.
None of the signs are in English even though it's a tourist area. Like everything is in Portuguese, which is great. I'm not complaining. I think it's awesome.
It's really nice. Just wander down the cobble streets for hours. Which is what we've been doing. I want one of these.
If you watch some of our past vlogs, you probably know that we're not ones who for standing in long lines and buying tickets to go into historical places. The castle is like $10 a person to get into. We're going to try to find somewhere else to watch the sunset. I'm sure it would have been nice. It's just not as much our thing. See what we're missing out on.
Doesn't look that.
Around the castle.
We have come to our dinner spot.
What are you thinking?
I'm thinking we decided to spend our money on local food instead of going to the castle. I'm leaning toward the gasp. Bacho and the grilled sardines for you. Thank you.
Don't know how to eat a sardine. No one ever taught me to eat the bones.
Ate the bones. So I'm going to do the same.
Are you sure?
Ate the little ones. Her grilled sardines were the thing. Eating.
Tastes like a lot of vinegar. Yum.
Get my bread in it.
That's what it tastes like. Vinegar and fish. All right.
Thank you.
Gazpacho.
Little update on my tummy after breakfast this morning, I was not feeling great. I was regretting eating. I didn't feel great all day long. And then right before dinner, I was feeling okay again. So I decided to eat again. Had some gazpacho and some bread and I feel okay.
This is the first meal she's eaten in like four days where she hasn't felt miserable afterwards.
So far so good.
The sardines really grew on me too. It's been a fun day in Lisbon. We are heading back to. To our weird apartment hostel thing.
But we get to check out in the morning and go meet Kayla and Barrett.
And not only are we excited about them coming, but really excited about getting the new camera. I'm sure you've been really annoyed by the spot that's, like, somewhere up here. Oh, now we're not even in focus. Hopefully, we'll do a better job at that, too.
They'll be here tomorrow with the new camera, so hopefully the vlog quality increases.
Parasite worm or parasite medicine.
I feel like Europe is just gonna be all me walking behind you down pretty street. Shots.
Favorite bathroom sign I've ever seen.
Oh.
I think it's. It's a real thing.
Kara. It's actually a real bathroom.
