Where is Marcela when you need her?

Portugal. day 2. I was informed today that portuguese is the hardest romance language to learn. go team. i was also informed that most people in portugal speak english because they start teaching them at like age 5. why didn't angola get the message? let the record show that my kids will be bilingual even if they don't want to be. so. help. me.

today we got a tour of Lisbon; you know what the most fabulous part of this tour was? it was what is referred to as a "panoramic tour" AKA YOU GET TO STAY ON THE BUS THE WHOLE TIME AND THEY JUST DRIVE YOU AROUND. mmmmmmm yes; air conditioning ftw!

Lisbon is a really pretty city with nice architecture and more pretty views and these views included the water!!! ahhh, yay atlantic ocean :) :)

The first time we got out of the bus we went into a church. I've noticed that most of the Spanish cathedrals we tour have all their carvings in stone, well in portugal they had everything in gold. it was pretty glitzy. and pretty

We saw a lot more impressive buildings and monuments...i mean to be fair i can't even remember most of american history so i am bound to forget all the stuff that portugal deems worthy of erecting a statue for. But its all very pleasant to look at and I enjoy all our tours even though i have no clue why stuff i'm looking at is important.
This is where parliament is though!

Then they drove us right up to the water!
The Tagus river flows right through Lisbon and into the atlantic so they drove us right up next to it!

And there is a monument that points to the south...Lisbon is a port city it made perfect sense to me to have a giant monument pointing south:

Then i had the bright idea that we should pose as the people in the monument. the girls loved it:

then we decided to spell out portugal with our bodies: seemed like a fun idea to me; naturally however i got stuck with the most awkward letter EVER. G. really? g? come on! i tried really hard though :) we are precious!

its lowercase btw....

okay so HILARIOUS story time.
at this particular monument we decided to take a group photo; and by decided i mean all of our professors were like "GET TOGETHER!! NOW" and so we all complied. so we are taking this group photo and lingering nearby is an asian man....he is just like on the outskirts of our group creepily looking at us; then he starts to take a photo of our group....like we are all here posed for our photo and he just decides he wants a picture of all too. then some other asian walks by and sees him taking a picture of us and is literally like "omgsh i want to be IN the picture" so he runs up and  gets in our picture pretty soon like no joke about 30 asian people are coming OUT OF THE FREAKING WOODWORK and start taking pictures with our group. i kid you not people; these people were not even together they were just all asian and all wanted a picture with some american kids. like they had never seen americans before. so we literally spent like 20 minutes as near celebrities to the asians just snapped a picture with like each of us individually and they kept doing the peace sign...it was the weirdest most hilarious moment in my life. i felt like a goober not getting a picture with them too but yeah. i, emily daniel, everyday american girl am a celebrity to some random asian group of people. and i can't even get more specific than asia because NONE of the people spoke english.
good times.

Then we toured another cathedral!! I will never get tired of cathedrals with arches. idk how i'm going to incorporate arches into my house if i ever have the wonderful privilege to build my own house but they will be there for sure because i love them. sharn get greg on this :) hehehe

So then every afternoon in portugal was a free afternoon. So we got this freaking fantastic deal for lunch at a place called Jeronymo. I got a sandwich and drink and little expresso shot all for 5 euro. and i tried out the "famous" portugal pastry. the buzzword from the tour guide today was FAMOUS PASTRY haha.

Like i said, every afternoon is free, which is great is you actually know what you want to do in this place. I am seriously regretting not buying some sort of guide book for all these countries. And i mean i could buy a guidebook now to be fair but it would all be in portuguese/spanish so how would i know what stuff i actually wanted to visit? So anyway we just wandered around the city some and then we went to this portuguese mall. yeah i spent an afternoon just walking around the mall like a middle school mall rat. and just walking around going into like no stores because yet again i found myself with eli, steven and brynnan.....i really need new shopping buddies hehehe :) i just enjoy my company so much though that i deal with their constant terrible shopping strategies. seriously though i didn't even mall rat around the mall when i was in middle school!! but we heard there was a roller coaster in this mall so we had to check it out. duh.

So we wandered around the mall and found this roller coaster. well you could call it a roller coaster if you never spent a summer with a fiesta texas season pass, but i would call this more of a thrill ride hehe. It was 3 euro for 3 rides around the tracks but i think this guy was digging me and brynnan and we were the only people the ride so he let us go 5 times!! :) hehehehehhe

yeah and so we kept our hands up the whole time and were yelling in this tiny little mall area to make it even more fun. i think the guy wold have let us go around more times but our plan of yelling and keeping our hands i'm pretty sure backfired because everyone watching must have thought we were having a boatload of fun and then some people got in line hahaha.

so that was my fabulous day 2 in portugal :)

stayed tuned for tomorrow: "do i look like i do drugs?"

it should be good :) heheh

i love you all! :)

-Emily