I must have said ‘We gotta go back to Lisbon’ a hundred times this last week. I wanted to go back to blogging about my past travels and there was one city that I hadn’t covered yet: Lisbon. I am looking at my photos and I see this gorgeous city that I visited six years ago, but which I forgot to document. It was one of my first few trips and at that time, I apparently did not feel the need to document my travels. So I got a lot of photos and some stories, though maybe not as detailed as usual.

I remember the Saramago museum, I remember a homeless man stealing a melon from our picnick (stay tuned, this is a great story) and I remember how fun the Fado museum was after drinking just a little bit too much sangria…

Lisbon is another one of those cities I instantly fell in love with. The nice people, the gorgeous buildings, the colors and of course the adorable little trams. Looking back at these pictures, there’s only one thought in my head: I have to go back.

I visited the city in my first year at the university. All year I had been looking forward to the trip our study association would plan. It didn’t matter much what city they chose to visit, since I hadn’t been anywhere yet. I am glad they picked Lisbon though, just look at these pictures and you’ll understand why.

I discovered Sangria on this trip. Wine mixed with fresh fruits, absolutely delicous. We were resting for a bit and ordered a pitcher of Sangria. It was so yummy and I fear I drank a little too much. After, we visited the Museu do Fado, a museum dedicated to the history of the Portugese traditional music. I know I had a lot of fun at the museum, though that maybe had a little more to do with the sangria than with the actual museum…

We also visited a fashion museum, Mude, which was free of charge, but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as the Fado museum…

One of our student’s associations traditions was having a picnick together. So we sat down at the Praça do Comércio with our food and drinks, enjoying good food, good wine and good talks. I already mentioned in one of the Budapest posts that interacting with homeless people would become another tradition that went hand in hand with the picknicking. This started in Lisbon with what’s probably the weirdest travel story I’ve got to share.

Imagine this. A group of maybe 15 students, 13 girls, two boys, sitting casually on blankets, eating and drinking. Some of us were smoking. First, a lady comes up to us and starts talking, in Portugese, to one of the girls who is smoking. We don’t understand her, of course, and she doesn’t understand us. Eventually she leaves, but then another woman comes up to us and the entire thing repeats itself. When she left, we laughed a bit and continued our conversations.

Then, a man that appeared to be a homeless guy, walks towards us. He is saying something, we don’t understand, but he does not go away. He just stands there, but eventually, he leaves. Or so we thought. He comes running back, right into our picnick, grabs a melon from our blankets, and runs off. We are perplexed, and we stare at this dude, afraid to do anything. But he is still in sight. He didn’t go far. We thought maybe, he was hungry. Which would made a lot more sense than what actually happened. The guy puts the melon on the ground, takes a few steps back and stares at it, as we stare at him and the melon. This continued for about ten minutes (I’m not even kidding!) until eventually one of the guys in our group stands up, walks over to the man, looks at him with a what the heck, dude expression, grabs the melon, and walks back to us.

I’m not sure if we actually ate the melon later or not, but we were all perplexed and confused. It would have made sense if he ate the thing, be he just stared at it like he had never seen a melon before…

We laughed it off, talked about how this would make a great story, and continued our picnick. By this time, it had gotten dark and we were in for another surprise. That evening, there was a light show called La Primavera projected onto the buildings around us. We saw children making drawings that came to life. It was really wonderful. Check out my Instagram stories for a little video.