El Banco!!!

I am actually now back in Spain. Portugal flew by so quickly that I never had time to sit down and write about it. Cascais was a great town. The hostel I stayed at was about 20mins outside of town, tucked away in a small village on the side of the mountain with a great view of the Atlantic ocean. It had once been a house that was recently converted into a hostel. This was probably the nicest place I`ve stayed at; 2 kitchens, 4 huge bedrooms, laundry room, bar-b-q pit, outside shower with an amazing view, plasma tv´s, patios overlooking the ocean and moutains... and I only had to share this with one other traveler. George, the manager of the hostel, was incredibly nice and made me feel right at home (which is kind of hard when your thousands of miles from your real home). It was a nice break from the constant begging and smell of urine that was everywhere in Lisbon.
George, Bill (a fellow traveler from Canada), and I spent the afternoon sitting around talking on the back porch... the sun doesn´t really set until about 10:30 which can really throw you off if you`re not used to it! Later, Bill and I ventured out to find and ATM and to show you how removed from everything we were the directions to the town with the ATM went something like this: follow the cobble stone road along the creak til you see a dirt road on your right, follow the dirt road up around the hill and you´ll come into a small town with a bank. Well, we never made it to the bank and aftter and intense conversation with a local guard about where the "el banco" is, we gave up and went back to the house. Thankfully there was a small "grocery store" (it´s a single room with a couple shelves of food) near by, so we got pasta and sauce and made some spagetti and spent the rest of the night sitting around watching movies.
We took the bus into town the next day to get beach towels and swimsuit. I love the layed back feel in Cascais, everyone walks around in swimsuits and beachwear. Our bus trip back to the house was pretty interesting when the bus driver wouldn´t sell us a ticket. He kept talking to us in Portuguese, we gave up and waited for another bus. The next driver tried to do the same thing but we assured him that we were on the right bus and we knew where we were going.
I spent the next day and half relaxling around the house, watching movies, snacking on Frosted Flakes, and walking the beach (unfortunately it was too windy to surf)... it was a great 3 days!!!
I knew I was back in Lisbon when I got off the train was immediately hit with the small of urine. As I sat in the train station waiting for my train to Lagos, the constant begging began again, one guy even called my several vulgar names in English and Portuguese when I refused to give him anything. I will definitely not miss this when I leave!