07 January 2013

portugal: lisbon again

the next morning i took a bus back to lisbon for the last couple days of my trip...it was easy to get to and easy to find my hostel, and i was able to check in straightaway...i relaxed for a couple hours, to get over the travel and early morning i'd had...
i finally figured out how to get to a church i'd wanted to see, but ended up balking at the entrance fee, so i only looked at the outside...well, i visited the church itself, but didn't pay the entrance fee for the monastery/museum part of the sight...
lunch was the house special at a nearby cafe...codfish and rice...pretty good:) (but lacking in vegetables, as usual)
for the rest of the day i walked toward belem again just because i could, and the weather was nice...i love to walk...at some point i turned around, then shopped for a while, just to kill time...i remember trying on four dresses in one shop and hoping the mirror was a bad mirror, as i felt like my legs looked quite large...i'm not normally one for shopping anywho...
the next morning i woke up early, but was really really slow about getting out the door...i walked to the parque dos nacoes area of town, as the description in the guidebook sounded nice...i don't know if it was the weather or the season, but i was disappointed...the gardens were hardly worth mentioning...there was a big mall, which was great for people watching, but otherwise nothing worth mentioning...
as i got back to the city centre i visited several souvenir shops in search of the cheapest postcards...when you buy them in the quantity i do, a small difference in price can make a large difference! i bought so many at one shop that the owner gave me a free keychain...how awesome is that?
the next morning i was up early, waiting for the shuttle i thought i had arranged to take me to the airport...the scheduled time came and went, and no shuttle arrived...ugh...i walked a bit to a fancier hotel, and grabbed a cab to the airport...it cost me more than twice as much as the shuttle would've cost, but at least i made my flight...
that was only the first mishap of the day...i'm pretty sure my phone fell out of my pocket in the cab, as i later realized i had no idea where it was, and i knew it had been in my pocket that morning...i had two flights that day, both of which went smoothly; the connection was in rome...
my bag must've decided it wanted to visit rome, as it did not make the last leg of the trip back to kyiv...i was not the only person who started the day in lisbon, then connected in rome, and finished in kyiv, and i was not the only one who did not get their bag back...i'm glad their were others in my same predicament, it was easy for all of us to get mad at the airlines together...i'm also glad i lived at my final destination for the day, as i had other clothes and personal belongings to wear/use...a couple days later my bag was delivered to my flat:)...that was almost more convenient than me getting it home from the airport myself:)
the frustrating part of dealing with lost luggage at the kyiv airport is watching the way a queue does not work...there was a queue, but locals kept jumping queue and interrupting people being served...the people working in the office would talk to the interrupters and stop working on paperwork with whoeva was sitting in front of them...it took me over an hour to deal with just my claim, even though my actual time of talking/filling out the form was less than ten minutes...argh...i hate the way so many locals think they are more important than others and feel it's okay to interrupt...

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