Zack and Kat Make a Trip...: "Is that Vasco da Gama?": Our time in Portugal by Kat

Our first long awaited blog post from the road! As most of you know we started our trip in Lisbon where we spent 2 days and then headed to Porto. There were a few kinks in the road (Kat getting a migraine on the plane, the hostel screwing up our reservation which meant both sleeping in one tiny single bed, missing the only train of the day and getting terribly lost on a public transit bus.) Despite that little collection of travelling mishaps we had a really good time. Turns out we know very little about Portugal and at nearly every memorial site or statue we would assume it was Vasco da Gama (the only notable Portuguese explorer we could recall.)

In Lisbon we stayed in a the Belem neighourhood, a really laid back area with some of the best tourist attractions in the country, including the Torre de Belem (built in the early 16th century as a defense system and a "look-out" for maritime explorations of the time.) Here is a picture.

Here is another pretty cool monument to the explorers - one can only assume that is Vasco de Gama at the front and a bunch of Kings bringing him gold and money to support his journey behind him.

We learned a lot about contemporary Portuguese politics (way more "our thing" than history) from a book store employee we struck up a conversation with. He talked to us for about an hour about the current economic crisis, harm reduction approaches in addictions, challenges that young people are having, why the Portuguese still love Salazar, etc. Here are a few of my favourite facts about Portugal that I learned from him:

20% of Portuguese people over 50 have diabetes.
People still really like Salazar and books about him (especially trash about his private life) fly off the shelf. He recently just won a "best Portugeuse person ever" competition on television (remember, he was a dictator).
Harm reduction (mainly in the form of safe injection sites) is very successful.
It's impossible to fire someone who works for the government, it's only possible to demote them.
Most Portuguese goods are exported, especially olives and wine, then they are re-imported for sale in Portugal.
Just like us in Canada, the left wing parties aren't up for a merge.
Unemployment is up from 7 to 15 % since 2008...yikes.

On to Porto which turned out to be a beauty of a city and we stayed in the sweetest family run hostel. Porto is divided by the Douro river. In Porto we did some pretty touristy things - boat cruise down the river and did some Port sampling (a sample feels like a lot of this thick syrupy wine).