Taking a trip abroad is always nervousing but yet very exciting, no matter where you are going. My friend Linnéa and I, have been saving money for a couple of years to be able to take a vacation and visit a new country. Deciding which country to visit was very tricky and knowing what kind of city would fit best for our plans of exploring a new culture.
There were a lot of options and after a lot of deciding we ended up booking a trip to Portugal. We hadn’t heard a lot of things about the country or the people but we thought it would be fun to visit Lisbon as it isn’t the first option for tourists to visit.
As for the people who follow me on my Instagram know what a hassle it was for us to even leave Sweden because of cancelled flights, rebooking and accidentally mistakes. We ended up getting to Lisbon two days after what we originally planned.
The first night we spent in Lisbon we only went out for dinner and got a bit familiar with our surroundings. This post will be about our first day in Portugal and visiting Oceanário de Lisboa and the harbor beside it.
To be honest, I really dislike going to zoo or aquariums because I hate seeing how bad the conditions are for the animals in there. We ended up deciding to go there anyway since we thought it would be interesting to see how everything would be since Oceanário de Lisboa is the biggest aquarium in Europe. The aquarium was big with different levels with exhibitions and animals to see. Yet it felt like there wasn't that much to see. It was a bit sad to see the animals in that limited space they had.
One of the very few things that I liked about the Oceanario was the fact that they had a lot of information about recycling, what we are doing to destroy the enviroment and the life in the sea. They also gave information about how to decrease the littering we do and be better to help the enviroment. The information was presented for adults but also in a way for children to understand. Other than that, there wasn't that much to it. As I've been at several aquariums when I was younger, I don't think there was much more to this than I've already seen. But that's my opinion.
Consider we already were by the aquarium, we decided to walk around the harbor to see the surroudings. It was lovely to walk around there and it wasn’t crowded with tourists.
By the harbor there are also a cable railway which you could take to see a glimpse of how things looks from above. We wanted to take the opportunity to take at least one way with it to experience the cable railway and to see things from another perspective. It was a bit scary because it would be a bit windy and even the most smallest movement would make the carrige start wobble.
This photograph of me is taken by Linnéa on the dock to the aquarium. The wooden planks that we were walking on were very wobbling and it was a bit scary walking on them, specially if someone would step on the other end of the same plank as you and the weigh of the other person would make the plank move upwards. 😅
During our walk we also found some kind of garden with beautiful flowers and trees. As both Linnéa and I are time optimists, walking around the harbor probably took much longer than needed. We stopped by almost anything that we saw which took our interest enough for us to take photos or take the time to look at it. 
As we wanted to do the most out of our trip, we had more in plans to do that day. We wanted to go to the vantage-points in town to see the city from a different view. But those pictures will be coming in their own blog post. That was it for this post. I hope you enjoyed reading a bit of a story about our first day in Portugal. More photographs and stories to come.
Until next time, ingat!
/Lizel
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