What I Ate Wednesday 35 – A Day of Eats from Lisbon, Portugal

We made it!!! S and I touched down in Lisbon, Portugal on Sunday morning, and with no sleep, we’ve been busy exploring the streets and sites! The weather has been beautiful, the food has been DELICIOUS, and we’ve been having SO much fun. As much as I’d like to give you a play-by-play of our first few days in this gorgeous country, I want to maximize our time here, in the moment, and just give you a run down of the eats…

We woke up nice and early (for vacation after all) at 7:30am so we could get to Sintra before the day became a real scorcher! We’re staying at a great boutique hotel in the Alfama area of Lisbon that’s on top of a hill (if you’ve been here before…surprise, surprise!) and have breakfast everyday at the hotel (that I document on snapchat–> @chelseyamer). Just how gorgeous is this view…I’ll move here now!

Clearly we needed to try a little bit of everything! 

…a bunch of fruit, including the “national melon,” the Portuguese cheese (no one could give me another name!), delicious whole grain bread with jam (because when on vacation, we eat the bread and jam!), and a few bites of scrambled eggs.

[Tweet “Find out what an almost #dietitian eats when traveling…A day of energizing EATS from #Lisbon, Portugal!”]

We walked hiked to the train station, and given our tourist status, didn’t realize our Lisbon cards were actually tickets so we waited on a long line and then found out we had tickets the entire time! Needless to say, we missed our first train (so much for waking up early!), so grabbed some water at the Starbucks at the train station and enjoyed a gorgeous view of the Castelo Sao Jorge (that we had visited the previous day)! [You can see it fuzzy under the light at the top of the photo…]

We got on the next train and 40 minutes later arrived in Sintra — “a favorite summer retreat for Portuguese kings,” according to our guide book!

After taking the bus up the mountain to get to the Palacio da Pena, we hiked about 10 minutes to the actual palace and woahhhh….never seen anything like it…

We toured the Palacio for about 2 hours, with our audio sets in hand…I am MOST definitely a tourist when I travel…

Backpack, check! Audio headset, check! Straw hat and sunglasses, check, check!

No worries, we stayed hydrated with plenty of water along the way!

We decided to hike down the mountain to visit the Moorish Castle and another palace on our way down, but somewhere along the way we took a wrong turn and missed the Moorish castle, and found our way back to the center of town an hour later. But our detour was a win because we had some gorgeous views on the way down…

It was definitely time for some lunch after walking around the cute center of Sintra…I wound up with a Nicoise salad and stole a few of S’s chips (not pictured) for added crunch and the salt…

We walked back to the train and got back to Lisbon proper by 4:30pm and walked back to our hotel. We were HOT and exhausted and I definitely needed a snack before nap time as I knew we were having a late dinner with friends! We had picked up some apples at a market in Sintra so I munched on an apple with some edamame that I brought from home (I alllwayyysss travel with snacks for this exact reason!).