We said goodbye to Paris and hello to Portugal on yet another long and arduous day of travel. The whole 'being in another country' thing is fun, but the 'going through airports and figuring out metro systems' thing could be better. It is an adventure though and that is what travel's supposed to be about so I guess it's all part of the experience! We had the Paris metro system down pat by the day or departure so we weren't worried about that at all as we got up and began getting ready for our day of travel. Our flight on Easyjet from Paris to Lisbon was the only one so far that hasn't allowed one carry-on bag and a smaller handheld bag, instead limiting us at just one carry-on. This wasn't a huge issue for us as we'd actually planned for more of these flights to be One Bag Only, but our two backpacks got stuffed to the brim as we shoveled everything in as best we could! Checkout time was at 11:00am and we were packed up and ready by that time but we putzed around and ended up leaving just as the housekeeper showed up. She was very friendly and helped us put the key back where it belonged and let us take a double check of the flat before we headed out towards the metro.
As we walked it occured to us that despite being in the Moulin Rouge area we never actually saw the Moulin Rouge. It just never occured us, being so busy hopping on metros all over the place to everywhere! We also did not do any of the things our friend Alex recommended to us. This friend Alex spent around 6 months in France and did not get to Paris at alll. I didn't even think that was legal. He instead stayed in some weird outside-ish part of France that I believe had something to do with the invention of modern cement or whatever so everything's grey and the sun never shines. Alex reported he saw sunlight only once leaving the city perimiter, it's like a cursed land or something. He's a French major so he had to study abroad and he picked there because he thought it would be less touristy, and it was but there was a reason for that apperently. Anyway, he recommended we do the safari (which sounds like a joke, but it's not) and see a few other things that we definitely didn't do given we forgot everything he said except the safari cause that was funny. Advice we did take from him was to get a 5-day metro pass. We bought ours at the Tourist Information booth the day we arrived for 72 euro, as I said before, but we only knew about it because Alex told us, so I suppose his advice to us was not completely wasted! It's funny I should mention Alex here for the first time when I've been telling tales of him to everyone throughout this trip. People keep asking Jess and i if we speak French and we tell them we took French class with Alex (aka Birdman) for 4 years and while Jess and I learned nothing he did this thing where he said "I'm gonna learn French" and then he did. We asked his his secret once during our fourth year and he kindly told us "I pay attention in class" which is fair. The boy had the patience of a saint with the two of us as we sandwiched our seats around his so we could ask him questions and casually cheat and he always let us and we passed the class knowing how to count to 10 in French and say Bonjour and that was pretty much it. He is, like I said, currently a French major because he actually did put effort in. It's weird how that works...
Anyway, we did get to see a great many things on this trip despite skipping the Moulin Rouge and safari and everything else Alex may or may not have mentioned so we are still pleased with how we spent our time on the trip! We discussed our many achievements in Paris as we boarded the Metro 4 Montrouge to Garde de Nord where we cause the RER B all the way to Charles de Gaulle terminal 2. We arrived at the airport around 12:30am, giving us a whole 5 hours before our flight took off. Classic. We got through security with 2 hitches: Jess's shoes had metal on them and she forgot to take them off along with her money belt and Jess sent her backpack through the machine without removing her laptop first. So she and her backpack got pulled to the side, but I claimed the backpack so the person could search it while Jess was getting scanned with the wand thing and some weird foot scanner. The line for security was wicked short though as they separate you by terminal (we were 2 of 3) and then by letters (ours was D our of I dunno how many) and then by gate numbers (we were 54 so we were in the 50-60 group). All this info was listed on our ticket and the gate number screens everywhere so it was super efficient and way better than at Orlando Airport where you kinda sorta get separated into 3 groups of like a zillion airlines and you wait for 30 minutes on a good day.
That being handled we had still basically 4 and a half hours to wait, but really more like just 4 because boarding happens 30-40 minutes before the plane takes off and you get in like 10-20 minutes and that's not hanging around time, that's waiting in line time, which is categorized differently mentally. Jess and I poked into some of the stores in the airport and looked around before settling down on one of the seats facing the walkway so we could people watch. My iPod, however, had died, so we wanted to find a seat next to some charges. We found one, but two girls jacked it before we could grab it because I was busy reorganizing my bag after getting my tablet out. Eventually Jess found us some seats and held them so I had time to re-pack my bag before moving over to join her. There we sat for several hours, playing on our phones and tablets, listening to our iPods, and chit-chatting until an announcement played saying the flight had too much carry-on luggage and were asking for volounteers to have their luggage put in the hold. Jess and I then joined the line of people forming because we were already gonna be hurrying to make our 9:00pm check-in time and didn't have time to wait for our backpacks if they got put in the hold. We didn't have to have ours put in the hold though, and we got to walk up the staircase was onto the plane because we were in the back, so that was cool!
The plane ride was 2 hours, but on a technicality only 1 hour because we traveled back in time. Portugal is 1 hour behind France so we left at 5:30pm, flew 2 hours, then landed at 6:30pm. Crazy right! From there we had to go down the stairs of the plane and get into bus-things that would take us to the terminal. That was fine, but on the way down the steps I dropped my backpack cause I was carrying it in my arms and some of my papers flew under the wings of the plane and the guys working had to go grab them for me and that was kind of embarrassing but there it is. On the tram we waited for it to leave which took a while cause 3 women were just taking their time getting off the plane or something, then we got stuck in traffic of some kind at the terminal for about 7 minutes only to find out the entrance was literally 20 more feet from where we'd been stuck which was wild. By then it was about 7:20m and we had to find the metro. Tourist information wasn't as helpful there as we couldn't buy a pass and they guy seemed confused himself about how to get where we were going, but we found our way to the metro and bought a ticket of some kind cause I'm still not sure what we bought. The guy manning the ticket things said it was right and we trusted him and went with it! The got us through to the correct metro, Aerporto vm to Sao Sebastiao. It was then Jess realized she never screenshotted the check-in directions or the walking directions from our final stop to the AirBnB. We're so bad with this whole 'looking up walking directions' thing, think we're Magelian or something. As we switched metros to take the Sao Sebastiao Az towards Reboleira to Jardim Zoologico Jess got some wifi and was able to look up the directions withing the 6 minutes we had before our metro arrived!
Once we got to Jardim Zoologico we had to get to the Sete Rios railway station, which was in the same building as the metro just like the metro was in the same building as the airport so it wasnt hard to find. We got a little confused there about whether our passes worked for the train, but there wasn't anywhere to tap before you boarded so we assumed we were set and them promptly got confused about which train to board and on what side. Our directions said to take the Roma-Areeiro - Setubal towards Coina to get to Corroios, but none of the trains we called that. We walked up and down basically all the staircases on every side of the tracks before making a gut choice to go with the train that wasn't called Roma-Areeiro but did go towards Setubal and Coina. We turned out to be right and gladly boarded the correct train to our destination! We arrived at Carroios around 8:20pm where we suddenly found our our cards weren't letting us out of the exit gates. A very nice attendant came to help us and we worked out through light English and Portuguese that Jess and I had the right card but were supposed to use them to get loaded for the train at Lisbon. He took us over to one of the electronic ticket stands to have us buy the ticket, but because our cards are Zapping (whatever that means) we had loaded them in advance with money for the train (which musta been what that initial attendant had tried to explain to us at the airport) so we just had the money applied to the train ticket and tapped in and out of the station so it acknowledged that we'd ridden the train and we were all set! It was wild, but we made it work and everyone was happy!
From here things should have been smooth sailing. It was 8:40pm and we had 20 minutes to get to our AirBnB on time. The walk was supposed to be only 12 minutes so we thought we were set. We were wrong. We took a hard right instead of a soft left apparently at one of the turns and walked the wrong way for 20 minutes. We figured it out once Jess got her Google Maps up, which even without wifi was able to track where we were and what direction we were moving, and began the long trek back. We hoofed it, but still arrived at 9:15pm where we somehow figured out which door we were supposed to ring the bell of and a lovely woman, I assume the housekeeper the AirBnB owner told us about, let us in and showed us around. She was so sweet and friendly and told us how to work everything and was lovely to be greeted by after the day we'd had. As soon as she left us we connected to the wifi, told everyone we had arrived at our place, and ate the Nutella sandwiches I had brought from Paris because I knew we wouldn't have time that night to go shopping for food. Then we got real comfy-cozy because we knew we got to sleep in and do whatever we wanted the next day!
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