Well, it was better than staying here, being bored
Well, yeah, so I'm back from Lisbon. I would have posted sooner but several things got in the way, among them two tests I had to study for, constant thunderstorms, a power failure last night, meetings with people and a school project that I should be working on with someone else but that I basically do alone because that woman is a total wuss and totally unable to write a simple Word doc.
It has some good points and some bad ones. Let's start with the good points - the food! It's great and really cheap, compared to other European countries. They have many restaurants that serve great fish and also fechoada (sorry, I have no idea how to spell it), Brazillian-style beef with black beans and rice. And the coffee is very, very good! The public transport system is great, particularly the metro. Some stations are famous for their azulejo-art (I made a picture which you can see here, so you can see what I mean XD). Another good thing is that there was a channel on TV ('Panda TV' *lol*) that showed anime all day. So, every evening I before I went to bed I watched Kaleido Star, Clamp Campus Detectives and Captain Harlock in that order. And now I want to download the new Harlock episodes *SIGH*.
However, I just didn't, well, not not like it but I don't think I'll return anytime soon. Because Lisbon is also boring ^^;; At least to me. I'm not really that much interested in 18th to early 20th century buildings and churches. I like the really ancient stuff, Roman, Greek, Phoenician, whatever. But even the real medieval buildings are rare due to the big earthquakes of of 1731 and 1755. And the people are calm but seem to never show some temperament. I can't explain it. And the music ><;; Fado is just like emo - I want to smash things when I hear it. What I can't seem to understand either is that every woman older than 14 has high heels, while EVERY pavement in Lisbon is cobbled. No wonder that almost every female being above 60 had crutches. On the other hand, I'm not tall but even to me it looked like 90% of the Portugese woman are 5 ft. Seriously. Which also means that the clothes in the big shopping malls have ridiculous sizes. I wonder where the normal, not-anorectic girls go for shopping, particularly if they are from Africa or Brazil because most of them are taller than me O_o. Oh, and Usi, this country is NOT for you: They seem not to have any sort of laws against smoking. The only place I saw no one smoking was in the metro.
What really irked be, though, was that these people seem to have a pathological hatred of the Spanish language. See, Portugese and Spanish are so closely related that even I can read a normal Portugese newspaper without problems. But everyone refuses to speak Spanish and pretend that they don't understand a word. Interesting however, that, as soon as I tell them we're from Germany or, *gasp* Latin America, their Spanish suddenly improves by 110%. Funny, ne? -_-;; Idiots. I heard it's similar in the Netherlands where everyone understands and a lot of people speak German but refuse to do so because they hate the Germans but love their TV stations. At least, in Holland everyone speaks English. Not so in Portugal x_X.
Instead of making a loooong entry again, I uploaded about 30 pictures and wrote descriptions for them. Unfortunately, they are not in any sort of order that makes sense (I forgot that they were automatically put in alphabetic order when I uploaded them to the scrapbook). Start here and click on 'next picture', etc. As I said, it wasn't that exciting anyway. But, hey, definitely better than staying at home ^^.
And now I'll resume my work on the glossary of our engineering translation project. This was actually the task of the other girl but as I said, she simply seems unable to search for some basic translations and since I actually want a decent mark on this, I'll rather do this myself. Grrr!
It has some good points and some bad ones. Let's start with the good points - the food! It's great and really cheap, compared to other European countries. They have many restaurants that serve great fish and also fechoada (sorry, I have no idea how to spell it), Brazillian-style beef with black beans and rice. And the coffee is very, very good! The public transport system is great, particularly the metro. Some stations are famous for their azulejo-art (I made a picture which you can see here, so you can see what I mean XD). Another good thing is that there was a channel on TV ('Panda TV' *lol*) that showed anime all day. So, every evening I before I went to bed I watched Kaleido Star, Clamp Campus Detectives and Captain Harlock in that order. And now I want to download the new Harlock episodes *SIGH*.
However, I just didn't, well, not not like it but I don't think I'll return anytime soon. Because Lisbon is also boring ^^;; At least to me. I'm not really that much interested in 18th to early 20th century buildings and churches. I like the really ancient stuff, Roman, Greek, Phoenician, whatever. But even the real medieval buildings are rare due to the big earthquakes of of 1731 and 1755. And the people are calm but seem to never show some temperament. I can't explain it. And the music ><;; Fado is just like emo - I want to smash things when I hear it. What I can't seem to understand either is that every woman older than 14 has high heels, while EVERY pavement in Lisbon is cobbled. No wonder that almost every female being above 60 had crutches. On the other hand, I'm not tall but even to me it looked like 90% of the Portugese woman are 5 ft. Seriously. Which also means that the clothes in the big shopping malls have ridiculous sizes. I wonder where the normal, not-anorectic girls go for shopping, particularly if they are from Africa or Brazil because most of them are taller than me O_o. Oh, and Usi, this country is NOT for you: They seem not to have any sort of laws against smoking. The only place I saw no one smoking was in the metro.
What really irked be, though, was that these people seem to have a pathological hatred of the Spanish language. See, Portugese and Spanish are so closely related that even I can read a normal Portugese newspaper without problems. But everyone refuses to speak Spanish and pretend that they don't understand a word. Interesting however, that, as soon as I tell them we're from Germany or, *gasp* Latin America, their Spanish suddenly improves by 110%. Funny, ne? -_-;; Idiots. I heard it's similar in the Netherlands where everyone understands and a lot of people speak German but refuse to do so because they hate the Germans but love their TV stations. At least, in Holland everyone speaks English. Not so in Portugal x_X.
Instead of making a loooong entry again, I uploaded about 30 pictures and wrote descriptions for them. Unfortunately, they are not in any sort of order that makes sense (I forgot that they were automatically put in alphabetic order when I uploaded them to the scrapbook). Start here and click on 'next picture', etc. As I said, it wasn't that exciting anyway. But, hey, definitely better than staying at home ^^.
And now I'll resume my work on the glossary of our engineering translation project. This was actually the task of the other girl but as I said, she simply seems unable to search for some basic translations and since I actually want a decent mark on this, I'll rather do this myself. Grrr!